Game EXP: "Dark Trip" Part 1 (MQ2)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Dark Trip through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Dark Trip
Release Date: February 13, 2025
Systems: Meta Quest 2 & 3
Publisher: iTales VR
Developer: iTales VR
Time Spent: 2 Hours 34 Minutes

[Trigger Warning: While the game doesn't include specific Nazi imagery such as the co-opted swastika, there are textual references to any specific members of the Nazi party and some imagery that when combined with Nazi references could be disturbing to some audiences.]

At it's core, Dark Trip is a collection of escape rooms interconnected by an overarching story that is not particularly necessary to either follow or understand in order to progress.  And in all honesty, I wasn't paying as much attention to the storyline as I probably should have in order to have appreciated the entire story.  Throughout the game, you can pull up a journal that gives a brief synopsis for the room that you're in, but since that book would be towards the end of items that you would cycle through to use within the room, I would often times forget that it was even there until I came upon it by accident.  So the deeper story of something to do with Nazis taking women as children because they believed them to be a superior medium for supernatural purposes and research-related bullshittery that Nazis are known for resulting in one particular woman who had exceptional powers was all I was able to gather.

I have a playlist with an entire playthrough, or at least, most of a playthrough as I wasn't able to finish-finish the game, because in this game, you need to find all the things in order to unlock the true end of the game, and I have found most of the things before the game started glitching out on me.  But more on that when we get there.

So let's break things down as we go through each of the videos because that's going to be the easiest way for me to have some semblance of a coherent commentary about what I played.

#1: Rooms 1, 2, & 3

We start in the opening room, which is the very definition of a tutorial room, despite being very familiar with escape rooms, I did appreciate it since some in-game mechanics may not have been intuitive to me, plus not everyone is versed in escape room logic, so it was nice to have this room nonetheless.  Another thing that I discovered which I'll get to in video #4, is that there will be instances where specific number or letter codes need to be entered to progress, but with each playthrough the code changes.  So in this first video, I need to enter 5629 into the combination lock, but on another playthrough, that code will change.  It might be a little thing, but I think it's great forethought by iTales VR to have some amount of randomization to make replays and walkthroughs/playthroughs not be entirely full of puzzle-solving spoilers.  I also really liked the drug/hallucinogenic mechanic in that it wasn't something entirely bizarre or nausea-inducing and it could just as easily have been a sanity mechanic akin to Eternal Darkness but to a lesser degree.  It's also worth noting that you start out with only five capsules and there are a total of eight rooms and you have to use one capsule in the tutorial room, so there are going to be at least three rooms that you don't use capsules in; this will come into play in video #4 as well.

In the second room, outside the house, it was a great feeling to be outside, which is often not commonplace in escape rooms, but a bit anxiety-driven at the same time because it's not a normal place to be for escape rooms.  Then once I took the drug and the outhouse changed into a statue was a bit unnerving.  Even more so when I turned and saw a body lying on the ground and a headless statue sitting on the park bench.  I genuinely expected an Evil Dead moment when reaching for the picture that was placed on the corpse's back.

The third room, inside the mansion, was fun and well-designed and I liked how you started in darkness with a box of matches illuminated.  This implied to me that I would have to use a lit match to explore the room, something that would have terrified and thrilled me, while also hoping that the developers weren't going to limit me to only the matches that were on the table.  Thankfully after you light the lantern, the entire room is illuminated to see all the steps of the different puzzles you need to solve.

Room #4: Part 1

I decided to include this video even though everything in it is covered in the next video.  Why I'm including it because it contains a bug that the developers have since told me has been patched out but was unique at least to me.  When I started the game in the previous video, I was standing in my kitchen so I selected "Stationary" instead of a "Roomscale" environment, which tells the game that you don't plan on physically moving about the virtual environment.  In this video for Room #4, I selected "Roomscale."  Apparently, this caused something to happen behind the scenes and made all of the button pads under each painting function the way that you see in this video, which made solving the puzzles for paintings #1 and #3 impossible.  Not knowing this at the time, I was very distressed and frustrated.  I probably played three additional times for about another 45 minutes total trying to figure out how to solve this room.  I eventually messaged the developers for a solution, which they gave me in picture form and that was when I realized that their button pads were different than mine.  I recorded another video to send to them, and after that, I tried again to use their solutions, but this time I chose "Stationary" because I was in our kitchen.  For whatever reason, this cleared the problem, the button pads were as you will see in the next video on Friday and I was able to proceed.

Yes, I apologize that I am again splitting this article up into two as I did with Mr. Goofer.  Attaching four videos along with written commentary always seems like a doable feat until you actually get to the writing part and then the entire article just feels too long.  I mean, I wouldn't want to sit down and read something that long outside of a physical newspaper or periodical.  So on Friday, February 21st, we'll cover the final two videos and the last five rooms in Dark Trip, plus some additional video footage of a second playthrough for reasons hinted at up at the top.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
We'll Never Kneel Again