Belko VR: An Escape Room Experiment

Escape room? Count me in.

You are locked in your office and told to solve a challenge in order to stay alive and not be replaced by someone more competent. You have 15 minutes to solve it and then you are told that there is a stage 2. The decision is yours to make and that also is probably the reason why you might want to replay this once or twice since there are different outcomes.

I couldn't start the game with the controllers showing up but then I decided to run the game right from the place I'd actually play it and then everything was fine. The game expects you to have 360 degrees tracking including tracking on the floor level which is not something I'd expect from a game. Honestly from ANY game.

Graphics could be better but considering the game being very short and actually being an ad for a movie I can understand it. While the quality of the graphics is not high the room is coherently done. It's nothing awesome but it's good enough not to feel distracting and it sets you well in the story.

The controls are something you'd expect so it's fine. The interactions with the environment are ok-ish. You've got plenty of time to toss the place and discover some things you'd probably not expect - an adult magazine, a hiding tarantula and a mouse/rat which are actually nice touches to the room.

The puzzles while not great are still more than just find an item and put it somewhere which is good. Nothing too difficult if your tracking works.

The game tries to put you under pressure with loud ticking that gets faster and you will also hear a coworker going crazy in another office somewhere. He will probably yell at you for being useless at some point. If you will be progressing fast enough you'll be saved of these though. I honestly had enough time to think what I needed to do before he started telling me what to do. (What I got stuck on, he didn't even comment). If you get stuck he'll probably tell you what to do.

In overall I liked the experience and found it better than some other free games I tried so far.

I can recommend this game if

• you have 360 degrees tracking and tracking at floor level
• you are capable of ignoring one serious jerk constantly yelling at you
• you don't mind heads being blown of or have fear of virtual spiders

I'd rate this 5 out of 10 because I think the developers should have thought about what kind of tracking people usually have if they wanted to show this movie advertisement to as many people as possible. The annoying guy is well really annoying and no one wants to be berated like this. The animations of the objects fitting somewhere should have been fast and not slow like this. It gives an impression that something went wrong.

5 points for a good concept, not so great execution and the fun it provides.

Here's a playthrough that includes constant struggle with tracking. Played with Oculus Rift CV1.

S'Tsung (stsungjp @ Twitter)