Note - this game contains a couple scenes that may be triggering to epileptics

Note - as I did not beat the game, this write-up should be taken more as a set of observations than a genuine review

Primarily game solution spoilers discussed; however, I understand those inherently involve story spoilers which I, admittedly, do touch on as well (though, in my defense, I tried to be vague in regards to those)


My love of cyberpunk has taken me from the labs of Majestic 12 to the real-life streets of Kabukichō, yet all affairs have their limits, and I unfortunately found mine in the form of VirtuaVerse. An indie PnC developed by Theta Division, VirtuaVerse seemingly boasts all the right ingredients for cyberpunk success: corpo-dystopias, grim aesthetics, and of course plenty of neon. However, by drowning its story under an avalanche of contrivances, VirtuaVerse squanders any potential it may have had, becoming the kind of forgettable schlock left behind every gaming generation.

PnCs largely come down to their causal puzzles, and on that front VirtuaVerse heavily stumbles. On the title screen, you’ll see the devs pathetically boast about making their game difficult, but hey, credit where credit’s due - they’ve actually accomplished this feat without falling into Moon Logic territory. I played through about half the game before calling it quits, and during that time encountered plenty of bizarre scenarios: scenarios that either derived their solution from talking to/examining every entity, or, worse, triggering some outlandish Rube Goldberg event that made no sense from a practical standpoint. The former tactic was at least defensible under the banner of encouraging interaction with the world at large (even if they failed to make distinguish special objects from the background), but it genuinely blew my mind whenever I encountered the latter given the presence of more realistic alternatives.

For example, one section has you trying to get the attention of this boatman blasting a radio, but rather than have you simply tap him with the broomstick in your inventory (an item that, mind you, literally serves no other purpose in the game), you’re instead supposed to melt an adjacent hut to fall into the water and knock him overboard. Another scene has you prevented from searching this garbage bin for spare parts courtesy of a crazed hobo, and while it would’ve been easy to just knock the guy away or blast him with a fire extinguisher (another item that ends-up serving no purpose throughout), the actual solution involves something so ridiculous, I’m going to postscript it so as not to ruin the flow of this sentence(+). Now you may retort well Red, maybe they didn’t want to turn your character into a pr!ck, to which I respond they either way did that (more on that later).

As with most generalizations, not everything is bad, and I did enjoy the few brainteasers I resolved on my own, but I’ve always judged PnCs by how much I felt impelled to look-up their answers, and the second I found myself consistently doing that with VirtuaVerse, I knew it was time to call it quits. Life is too short for games that wholly frustrate you, even those latent in the genre you love, and while I acknowledge I’m not the smartest gamer, I feel these criticisms will also hold water for PnC veterans.

If that weren’t enough, VirtuaVerse boasts some unergonomic controls that’ll constantly remind of the superior schemes from Daedalic and Wadjet: the inventory and journal are tied to keyboard buttons, you can’t exit out of accidentally-restarted conversations, and dialogue is automatically processed ala Costume Quest (and no, the toggle option in the settings menu doesn’t affect this). That said, VirtuaVerse does offer the ability to rebind your keys, meaning you can do what I did and simply truss them to the WASD pad for easy convenience. But still, I don’t understand why they couldn’t just tie everything to the mouse.

Now, to their credit, the developers did put in place a story mode that reportedly cuts-down on the enigmas in favor of a straightforward “cinematic” experience, but even this abridged version won’t garner much enjoyment due to the lackluster narrative on display. The premise is you’re a loser hacker named Nathan trying to find his girlfriend in an unnamed corporate hellscape, and what you’ll quickly realize is just how much the writers failed at making any of these components engageable in the slightest.

To start with Nathan, I didn’t use the pejorative “loser” for no reason: he is truly pathetic, the kind of sycophantic yes man utterly incapable of standing up for himself whenever he comes across a barrier or rude person. Any coolness derived from his admittedly sweet attire (more on that later) is tossed out the window the second you see him strike up a tune with an adjacent NPC. And look, I get that not every protagonist needs to be a brooding bad@ss ala JC Denton, but given the man’s indulgence in blackhat shenanigans, you’d think he, of all people, would at least warrant a backbone. To add salt to the wounds, the writers took a page out of the Deponia schoolbook of awfulness via throwing-in situations in which you’re forced to ruin an NPC’s life just to progress forward (your hooded hero showing little remorse towards the aftereffects++).

The search for Nate’s girl Jay (and its subsequent developments), on the other hand, is hampered by some of that aforementioned lousy game design: every time he gets even a little close to finding his objective, a deliberately stupid roadblock props up, killing the few ounces of momentum generated in the moment. One of the worst versions of this, for instance, entails Nate actually seeing Jay run into an errant room, only for him to get cockblocked by an usher, even after you present him with the necessary ID. And that really speaks to another qualm I had with a fair amount of the puzzles -- they bask in pointless elongation.

Have you guys ever seen a conundrum presented with a one-stop-shop-fits-all solution, only for the game to throw-in a couple extra steps the second you found said solution? Yeah, VirtuaVerse features that in spades, their presence indicating an ill-concealed attempt at extending the game’s runtime. One of the more annoying instances of this occurs after you successfully close the office door of a man whose dwelling you’re robbing: instead of letting the closure of said door be enough, the game forces you to find the keys to lock it in order to continue forward. And look, that may sound practical on the surface, but when you’re constantly peppered with such quandaries on top of the aforestated problems, it can be degrading to the process.

None of this is even taking into consideration the number of in-game moments blatantly drawn-out for the sake of irritating the player, like how you’re literally forced to listen to a 30 second Dial-Up screech (twice!) just to advance a phone call.

The cyberpunk setting itself arguably had the potential to subvert these dilemmas (as Dex’s did for its cliche tale), yet Theta failed at delivering on any of its unique prospects. Core to the game’s worldbuilding is advertising, with large companies exploiting augmented reality interfaces to spam, well, spam everywhere in bright neon hues. I’ve always said that AR headsets hold greater potential for market dominance than VR ones due to their balance of reduced motion sickness and easy-synchronicity with the real world, and VirtuaVerse remains the first sci-fi game I’ve ever played to actually exemplify such a possibility. Unfortunately, it’s not used for anything other than crazy art assets: you don’t get any interesting histories, no witty observations - only limited backgrounds on the businesses in operation.

Then again, perhaps that superficialness was for the better as the few times the game explores its themes of corporate hegemony, it ends-up devolving into a series of heavyhanded discourses indicative of a high school essay. One scene boasts a prolonged conversation between Nathan and this sketchy dealer wherein the two suck each other off about their mutual hatred of cloud computing; another sees Nathan go off on some tangent about music playlists due to them being arranged by an algorithm over human-built band albums. If these parts had at least contained some degree of nuance, I might’ve been able to tolerate their length; however, not only do they not, they ironically come across as Theta having as much of an agenda as the megacorps they’re lambasting.

Graphically, VirtuaVerse is at least quite beautiful. It takes that early-90s computer gaming aesthetic and pumps it full of dark colors, providing yet another cyberpunk bastion rich in atmosphere: polluted rain falls everywhere, neon luminescence rouses the dilapidated landscapes, and you even get some really creative uses of pixel art, such as barbed motion to indicate swaying lights, wind-swept clothes, and rising smoke from cigarette ends. I praised Nathan’s get-up earlier (the multicolored diodes of his visor being particularly noteworthy), and that attitude extends to the majority of textile work here: it’s working-class chic balanced against individual culture -- the kind of clothing you could actually imagine someone wearing in a downsized area, from the black blazers of conventional streetfolk to the simple shirts and jeans of the distant Nuwakans. Yes, there’ll be gamers who find this retro-style too outdated, or the cyberpunk flare overly-hackneyed, but as I said in my Dex review, I’m a sucker for these kinds of esthetics, and consequently loved what the artisans at Theta did.

Sadly, the sound is nowhere near as good, largely due to some horrendous mixing that both sees the music played at a significantly-higher decibel than the SFX (even after manual adjustments), and outright removed when entering certain buildings (impossible to tell if this was intentional or not). I could’ve tolerated things had the score been to my liking, but given that it primarily goes for, what’s described in-game as synth heavy metal, it ultimately didn’t work for me in light of my admitted averseness to the genre (though I understand this is highly-subjective and that the OST is well-done for an indie release).

Without voice acting, you’ll hear the SFX a lot, and it does its job overall as far as supplementing your actions with appropriate beats. I really appreciated the multiple footstep dins programmed for the different types of terrain Nathan and co. walk on throughout.

In the end, though, the best soundscape wouldn’t have convinced me to keep up with VirtuaVerse. The story is boring, puzzles frustrating, and music too loud. For all the visuals and nightlife ambience, VirtuaVerse falters too much in the other, more important departments.


NOTES
+So you have to do two things: first, get a spiked VR chip via posing as Jay to blackmail a local retailer into selling you the tradeable products for the chip; and second, poisoning the meal of a local sushi critic so that the owner throws out his food, in turn causing the hobo to start pillaging the waste container and providing you an opportunity to slip the VR chip into his stash....yeah, you don’t need me to explain why this is so much more convoluted than simply kicking the dude in the nads.

++Off the top of my head, the above guy is poisoned, another dude gets killed, a third has his shop destroyed, and a whole group has their livelihood ruined (this being the sole instance Nate is kind of regretful over).

-One cool concept in the game was the idea of personal IDs being tied to someone’s entire biometric profile (certainly a believable evolution on SSN!).