[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.]
Part 2 of our article series looking at Dark Trip from iTales VR will cover the remaining five escape-style rooms in the game. For the general description of the game and its mechanics along with the first three rooms, you can read Part 1 here.
Room #4 Part 2 & Rooms 5, 6, & 7.
In Room #5, the elevator I had previously started after finishing Room #4, but stopped partway through because I was filming while I was at work on my lunch break and had to step away from the game, so when I returned, I just started over the room from the beginning and spliced that onto the footage from the previous room. I tried to play the room naturally performing the same actions in roughly the same order; I had previously only got as far as centering the lights in the middle of the room. The letter puzzle I thought was both clever and pretty easy to figure out. A four-letter word appears above a keyboard with four empty black boxes above them. Maybe I should try and enter this four-letter word here?
The rotating chamber, Room #6. I really enjoyed the first half but became frustrated with the second half when you had to rotate the circles/panels to create the shape on the paper. In this room, I decided to take the pills again for any kind of hint since what I thought was intuitive about the room (the shapes, and what looked like battery packs), but I apparently found a way to make the pentacle and the cross in a way that did not solve the puzzle. So I apologize to anyone watching this with the incessant squeaking and squealing of the metal parts as I spent nearly a third of this entire video trying to find the right configuration.
Room #7 I also really enjoyed for different reasons. First, I love that the ladder is right in front of you when you start but that it's not something you use until the absolute end of the room. After solving all of the puzzles (unless you count finding all of the pictures and unlocking the last door), I had forgotten that I had even picked the ladder up until I started cycling through my inventory debating if I wanted to take the pills again; but we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Second, this room gave me my first (and only?) "Ooooohhhhh shit, that's what this is" moment while preparing through a viewing portal into a room that looked like a gas chamber with a slide-away floor revealing a firey pit underneath. In a house, designed by Nazi scientists. Yeah. There are a lot of implications that come along with this room, thankfully iTales VR wasn't grotesque in its presentation and maybe that wasn't the intended purpose of this room, but that's what it felt like to me.
I do apologize for several of the angles in this room and for instance, at 29:12, you can't see what I'm looking at when solving the red/green button puzzle due to framing on my part. The thing with filming on the Quest 2 is that you have to tell the system which eye you want the filming to originate from, and I set it to the right eye. But even then, not everything I see seems to be captured, especially out of my peripheral.
Eventually, I realize that I have the ladder in my hand, get it attached to the floor, and safely make my way across the burning pit, open the door and exit the stage into a cloud of bright pink haze.
Room #8 & New Game+
Like my videos for Room #4, I've included multiple videos in my attempts to solve the final room but was hampered due to Quest 2 system issues and a bug. The bug happened around the 4:18 mark while trying to figure out what I needed to do and stumbled upon my hands turning green while reaching up towards the macabre headless Barbie chandelier. When I pulled down on this thing one of my hands disappeared. Then my other hand disappeared when I pulled down on it again with the other. While I did try to continue playing without hands, I eventually restarted because I wasn't certain that I would be able to continue since I couldn't see the items cycling in my hand. I then triggered the same bug again (around 9:20) while trying to figure out what to do with the weird worm-eyeball-tube thing.
Something interesting I reacted to that you can't see in the video, was that at 9:35, was that the right eye of the girl in the picture looked like it was either starting to wink or sneer at me and that creeped me out. Which is then why you immediately see me back up to the door, just in case something was going to happen, I didn't want to be right next to the picture.
The next glitch happened around the 14:30 mark when I realized that the game thought that the real-world floor was lower than it was, which meant that I was essentially hovering over higher than I should have been. This meant that being able to place the Rubix cube in the square-shaped hole in the floor was impossible because, with my hand on the real-world floor, it was still too high off of the virtual floor, and too far away for the cube to snap into place. I edited out the parts where I tried to go into the Quest 2 environment settings to get the floor correct, but I ended up having to manually exit out of the game to reset the virtual floor height, which I actually set about a foot lower just to be safe. Then after playing through the room again, I manage to get the cube in the hole, which then opens a crank that pops up from the floor. I didn't really know what to expect to happen as the room around me spun, but I did not expect to show up back in the starting tutorial room.
At this point, I thought I did something wrong. Maybe I turned the crank in the wrong direction? Maybe I was supposed to collect all of the pictures to get the "good ending?" Maybe I was supposed to play through the game without taking any pills? I wasn't sure what to do, so I just played through the game again, although I did find several other bugs/glitches; I didn't film the entire thing. There was the porch that didn't collapse and how I could walk through the virtual porch and the mailbox not opening. And then not being able to progress through the door after cutting the lock. The video then continued as I stepped into the elevator and decided that I would take the pills in each room I hadn't collected all three pictures. This time around, I still wasn't able to find the second picture in Room #7, and then again after completing Room #8, I was taken back to the beginning of the game. I don't know what was going on behind the scenes, but this New Game+ type playthrough definitely had some bugs/glitches going on with the hands, and then if you made it to the end of the video, completely broke something with not being able to pick up the last picture and not being able to exit the room.
On the iTales VR Discord channel, the devs did mention that since the game was still in "early access" the end where you transport back to the starting room was in fact the end. "Once you complete it [Olga's room] the game sends you back to the beginning and give (sic) you more pills so that you can keep searching for the complete set of photos/evidence and unfold the story." This made me feel a bit better that I wasn't missing something or that there were extra steps hidden somewhere in order to achieve the good/true ending of the game. It would've been nice though to have at least some sort of "Game Complete: Play again to find all of the clues" before just dropping you back in the beginning without any kind of notification.
And that was my playthrough for Dark Trip. The puzzles were fun because they weren't overly difficult but were also satisfying. There was some level of difficulty for several of the puzzles to help me feel accomplished, but had it been 1990s point-and-click adventure levels of difficulty, I might not have had as much fun as this game was. The taking drugs mechanic was very cool in how it changed the world/room and would give hints, but I think I would have liked the effects to change over time, or really just be a bit more disturbing. Maybe instead of just pushing a button on a panel, after taking the pills you now had to reach into a bug-infested hole to push the button a la Temple of Doom. Maybe some additional audible hallucinations.
I don't know if I'll leave Dark Trip installed on the Quest 2 (I need that valuable real estate after all), but I will look forward to see how the game changes and updates as it progresses through early access to a fully finished game.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Bleed Me Dry
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