The first STALKER game. Near the beginning when I had hardly any ammo.
I saw a pack of feral dogs in the distance and while they didn’t sound friendly I didn’t know whether they would be hostile or how close I could get before they would aggro. Since I had so little ammo I resolved to not take any shots unless they got close.
Well, one of them did start running towards me, but before it got that close it cut off and ran away at a 90° angle. Then another, and another did the same thing. “Maybe they’re not hostile?” I thought to myself, “Do they just run around randomly?”.
Then I realized I was being circled. Which was an extremely unnerving realization. I went from thinking about aggro ranges and AI states to being thrust into a situation that I sometimes have to worry about not falling into in real life.
Back in the day: Rescue On Fractalus, Cholo and Mercenary were all pioneering 3D games that really took me away. Also Ultima V was a masterpiece of immersion.
Now: Beat Saber. One can measure the immersion with a heart rate monitor :D
The awe of immersion in the first VR game I played was unforgettable. I knew that theoretically you could fool your brain into seeing depth using two screens, but that didn’t prepare me to put on the glasses and completely be transported to another place. Nothing has ever borne that sensation for me. I’ve seen grown used to it and rarely play VR anymore, but still see it as the most immersive experience I’ve had.
Hmm…
Mass Effect Trilogy. Kingdom Come Deliverance (can’t wait for KCD2!). Red Dead Redemption 2. Dishonored. Deus Ex. Baldur’s Gate 3. The Witcher 3. Disco Elysium. Dragon Age. Kotor. Bioshock. Cyberpunk2077 Divinity:OS+OS2
I can go on a bit, but anything with a good story gets me. I love being immersed. It helps me escape reality. Same goes for books. I love long series that I can throw myself into.
Elite Dangerous in VR.
World of Warcraft for me. When I first played the game I was ENTHRALLED, and couldn’t stop playing.
Super Mario on a Gameboy, by a pool, when I wasn’t paying attention.
Earthbound—no wait hear me out.
Yeah it’s a 16 bit RPG about a really surreal alien invasion, but the whole world is full of lively NPCs with unique dialogue that often changes depending on where you are in the game. Even though the world of Earthbound is a surreal exaggeration of 1990s America, it’s a really detailed world with every line of dialogue giving glimpses into people’s ordinary (or not so ordinary) lives.
You ever get really engrossed in a book or movie to the point where when you stop reading/watching there’s a brief moment of shock where you suddenly remember your own identity all at once, like waking up from a dream? Earthbound was the first time I experienced that sensation from a video game.
That game changed me.
Subnautica. Literally immersive
That’s virtually immersive. Literally immersive was when I fell into an actual pool while playing Super Mario on a gameboy.
Skyrim with the right mods
VR Skyrim.
Haven’t touched it in years, but there was a mod that converted all player dialogue to voice commands. Meaning that when you were talking to an NPC, you actually spoke the words you wanted to say. That, with the verbal dragon shouts, and gesture activated spell casts… Good times.
King’s Quest
When I was younger I would play X-Wing Alliance on my PC with an actual like pilot joystick controller with all the lights turned off. That game is a Star Wars game where you fly space ships and fight other space ships, but it’s all in first-person, so you see out of the pilot cockpit.
I’m planning to buy this game this weekend. There’s a community mod for it that brings it up to date with enhanced graphics, QoL fixes and VR support - https://www.xwaupgrade.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=13107
Only a couple of quid on GOG right now - https://www.gog.com/en/game/star_wars_xwing_alliance
SOMA. Downright existential horror in all the right ways.
SOMA was fantastic, I played it in peaceful mode
Hellblade 1 and 2 with headphones.
Hearing voices in the character’s head in your own head is quite the experience.
I also think playing Asetto Corsa in a passable sim rig and Microsoft Flight simulator deserves honorable mentions.
Half-Life: Alyx, hands down.
I may have cried a little bit after my first round at it.
I came here with the intent of saying the same thing.
Maybe putting “immersion” and “VR” in the same paragraph is a cheap shot. But Alyx is the first and possibly only VR title that, in my opinion, actually manages to nail all the aspects of real world presence to the extent that it actually does feel at times that you are standing in a genuine place. It’s not just the visual design and fidelity of the world and the models in it, but all the little details and aspects added together that make HL:Alyx feel right, and when you go back to other VR titles afterwards you suddenly realize how they’ve been getting it so wrong all this time. Even other games that have “realistic” rather than cartoony graphics.
It’s things like the scale of the world, which feels genuine. A lot of VR games seem to scale their world slightly too large, and as a result there are lots of familiar objects in them that seem uncannily wrong until you figure out that their scale is off. All the doorframes are just too big, so you don’t feel like you’re getting stuck in them. But you’ve walked through a million doorframes in your life and they feel wrong. And the desk tops are nearly at chest height, so you don’t have to bend over to look at their contents. But you’ve sat at a desk a thousand times in your life so that feels wrong, too. Etc., etc.
Alyx doesn’t do this. Everything is life scale. This means that, yes, you probably will have to get down on your knees or grovel around on the ground to search the lower drawers in that desk or turn over all the boxes on the floor looking for ammo and resin. All the window frames are at realistic, rather than convenient, heights. So you might have to get down very low to avoid incoming fire below that windowsill. Or stand on your tiptoes to reach a top shelf.
Sometimes it’s just as simple as being able to look down and see yourself. Or see Alyx, anyway. So many VR games present you, the player, as just a floating pair of hands. Alyx doesn’t. As a matter of fact, the developers even experimented in the beginning with fully modeling Alyx from the perspective of the player, i.e. giving her not only hands but also arms and elbows. They gave up because the experience was visually disconcerting.
Then there’s things like the gunplay and manipulation of healing syringes and so forth. This is another aspect where a lot of “realistic” games fall down, by trying too hard to mimic real life firearms and tools which inevitably winds up shoehorning the controls onto the available buttons in a way that winds up feeling unnatural. But all the guns in Alyx are Half Life sci-fi guns, so Valve could make them work however they wanted to. So they seem real despite being pure fantasy, and operate in an intuitive manner that matches the controllers very well and feels right. The only thing I don’t like is the squeeze-to-arm grenades. I get it, but I think a ring-pull mechanic would have been a bit more intuitive as well as potentially allowing players to put the pin back in… (Perhaps, if you can’t put away the gun in your main hand in a hurry, an available gesture should have been pulling the ring out with your teeth.)
It’s also packed with incredible setpieces. I can’t list them all, but one that absolutely will stick with you is watching a 1:1 scale freight train careening at high speed with the wheels screaming mere feet away from your face, and crashing into a wall.
And despite being so immersive, Alyx is not an immersive sim. It’s thoroughly linear, and your interactions with most objects do boil down to shooting them, poking them, yanking a lever on them, slotting a key item into them, or throwing stuff at them. And every interactable for the most part only has one way for you to interact with it. Yet even despite this, emergent gameplay… well, emerges. I read a story online (and you probably did, too) about one player who absolutely could not stand leaving grenades and stims and grub jars lying around that they couldn’t use just then thanks to the limited inventory space. So they found a crate and dumped all their extra items in it and carried the crate around with them everywhere, throughout the entire campaign. And the game lets you do this. Even bringing your junk with you across loading zones. It is an incredible benefit to immersion if you can logically think of a thing and then find out that you are able to do that thing, even if it’s not an explicit game mechanic that was explained to you in a tutorial.
It’s unfortunate the barrier to entry to even be able to play this is so high, because it’s a damn shame a lot more people haven’t played it. Sure, you can watch a playthrough on Youtube or whatever but that absolutely does not do it justice. You have to be there.
I will never forget my first play through. At one point I was exploring a pitch black tunnel with my gun and just a narrow beam flashlight to see by. I couldn’t see anything at all outside the beam of the flashlight. Somewhere in the darkness I could hear a head crab approaching but I couldn’t find it with the light. I was shining the flashlight this way and that trying to spot it and hearing it get closer and closer… and then my cat brushed my leg.
I jumped and screamed and scared the hell out of the poor cat. I may in fact have tried to shoot her with the controller. Needless to say, she no longer trusts me when I’m wearing the headset.
My fond memory of that scene was finding the head crab immediately, and smirking as I started killing them. I ran out of ammo, No worries, all I had to do was reach into my backpack and… oh shit, the flashlight is on my wrist!
I played it on a Quest 2, it’s like 300 bucks. With a 10th gen Intel 3070ti laptop I got from a pawn shop for 400.
Very well put!
You really nailed it mentioning the scale of the world. In retrospect, everything did feel “right sized”. And, yes, the freedom you’re allowed for such a linear game was amazing, to say the least.
Man, I wish I had the patience to articulate as well as you did 😅
I probably wouldn’t have bought it, but it came with my Index and Holy shit what an incredible experience. I’ve been playing the Arizona Sunshine remake and it’s been scratching the same itch. The reload mechanics are a ton of fun.
