Systems: Oculus Quest 2 / Meta Quest, PlayStation 4, Android, Windows
Release Date: March 9, 2017
Publisher: Tender Claws
Virtual Virtual Reality (VVR) is a fun and subversive first-person adventure-esque-type game that I am reluctant to talk extensively about because exploration and discovery are some of the things that I love about this game. It would be like trying to explain The Stanley Parable in its entirety in a way that does not give anything away about the game or its narrative. I will try though without giving (too much?) away.
In VVR, you are a human who is hired by the fictional company Activitude and brought into a virtual world by an AI to perform jobs and tasks for other AI within another virtual environment. When you start the game, you go through a brief orientation as to what is expected of you in your new job and are introduced to your job supervisor Chaz. Chaz shows you around what is essentially your workstation and presents to you your job board that you fill up with clients and their reviews of your performance as you progress through the game. The board itself has 81 jobs and by the time I finished the game, I was disappointed to find out that I was not actually going to be doing that many. I have not replayed the game to find out how many different jobs there are in the game and if there are ones that you always do or if there are ones that the game picks out randomly for you, or if you can "earn" jobs by over-performing or under-performing with each of your clients.
Each client tasks you with performing a different job, and each job experience feels like its own mini-game that you perform, often while the AI that hired you is talking to you. Be it about their life, the actual job that you are doing, or just going about their AI lives while you perform the job that you were brought on to perform. I do not know how many different jobs were written for the game and if any or all of them are chosen at random or if you do the same jobs in the same order every time you play the game; I guess I could try but I just have not gotten around to it. Some jobs include making toast for a sentient stick of butter, another was cleaning up a greenhouse and planting flowers in a garden for a talking pinwheel, while in another I walked around a model of what looked like the city in Blade Runner while listening to someone talk about their life experiences. It genuinely felt very strange, random, and about half of the time stress-free, more so the further along in the game I got and became more familiar with the mechanics and the way that the story was leaning.
At the end of each job, which at its longest was maybe 15-20 minutes, you return to your work station where your performance is debriefed by Chaz and you are given a rating. I initially cared about my ratings and was upset when one of the clients gave me a two-star rating for a pretty difficult task that I could not fully figure out by the time the job was up, so maybe I did deserve two stars after all. I will say though, that like your grades in junior high, from what I could tell by the end of the game, the ratings have no weight at all on the rest of the game.
Eventually, you figure out why you are employed at Activitude and a lot about the history of the company, but revealing that information here would spoil part of the endgame of the game. Once you do finish the game, there is the ability to go through an in-game menu to reply through sections/chapters of the game you have already played through, and that was when I discovered that there are multiple endings. Kind of. Based on the flowchart for the game, I knew (I think?) where I needed to go and what I needed to do to access the second ending, which I did try but failed again. So I just clicked on the second ending title? From what I was able to find out online, this is the (only?) way to get to the second ending, so you are welcome to interpret that however you want.
I feel fortunate that I came upon and played Virtual Virtual Reality when I did because not even a month ago, Tender Claws released a sequel, aptly titled Virtual Virtual Reality 2 which I know that I will pick up because I really enjoyed this game so much. The voice acting for Chaz was perfect for the moments when you received praise for a job well done and when he was disappointed and confused with your lackluster performances. Moving around in the various spaces was easy enough by click-warping (I don't know the official term) to your desired locations and I found the story more engaging than I was anticipating. I mean, I went into Virtual Virtual Reality expecting to play a light-hearted game about performing silly Warioware-esque tasks for eccentric AI personalities, and while I got that on some level, what I ended up playing was a narrative that is eerily not too far off from where we are with Facebook's attempts at creating a global Metaverse and Elon Musk with whatever he happens to be Tweeting about when he's not shooting custom roadsters at Mars.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Je vis hors de moi et je pars
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