henke on 24/3/2017 at 07:09
Finished Adrift (or ADR1FT) last night. Surprised we didn't have a thread about it. Honestly I'm not sure there's much to talk about, and I think only I and Sulphur played it, but here goes.
Plot
It's a game where you play an astronaut who, in the wake of a catastrophic accident, has to prepare for evac. As you float (slowly) between the different parts of the ruined station you uncover audiologs detailing the events leading up to the incident, as well as learning more about the people on the station. These logs are well-written and voice acted, and the slowly uncovering mystery of what happened is pretty interesting.
Gameplay
The actual gameplay is faily lightweight. It's basically a walking-sim(more like SPACE walking sim. HEH), where the only dangers are getting zapped by exposed wires or running out of O2. Your objectives are basically a series of fetch quests as you go to the various sections of the station to retrieve hexagonal science-doodads needed to activate the escape pod. Tho one piece of mechanical complexity I appreciated was that it actually goes all-out with your flight controls, letting you rotate on all axis(yaw/pitch/roll). In contrast, the upcoming Tacoma seems to have simplified it's zero-G bits to only use the 2 axis used by regular first person games.
VR
I played it with an Oculus Rift, and the experience is pretty amazing. The sensation of floating in open space, un-tethered, between two large sections of the station was often exhilarating and terrifying. It often made me feel like I was in a space-movie, like Gravity or 2001. However, VR experience ain't all good. It's more nausea-inducing than most other VR titles I've played recently. I played it for maybe 1 hour max at a time, and finished it's 4h playtime in 5-6 sittings. Of course the floating around in space doesn't help keep your lunch down(which is realistic), but even worse is the bone-headed inclusion of canned animations that wrestles camera-control away from you whenever you interact with a computer terminal or other interactive element. That stuff looks good on a monitor, but in VR it's a big no-no.
Conclusion
I liked it I guess, even though it often dragged and made me sick. Uncovering the backstory and the sensation of being an astronaut made it worth the trip.
Thirith on 24/3/2017 at 18:52
I've played some of it and definitely enjoyed the sense of being there, but it didn't grab me enough at the time to make me focus on finishing it instead of returning to Elite. I'll come to a point with the latter where I'll take a break and do a couple of other VR games, but that time hasn't come just yet. In any case, always interesting to read your thoughts about a game, so thanks!
Fafhrd on 25/3/2017 at 03:28
I think it was around E3, or maybe Oculus Connect that they were showing this off in VR, and there was one story that came out of a reporter becoming immediately nauseous while playing, and Adam Orth was so perplexed at why she was reacting so strongly that he took the controller from her to play for a bit while she was still in headset, which of course resulted in her tearing the headset off and running away because she was afraid she was going to throw up.
When I read that I was like 'this guy doesn't understand VR, like, AT ALL.'
demagogue on 25/3/2017 at 07:11
That's terrible for him & her both, especially her, but it's a great story.
I know from other experiences that my nausea threshold is low, so VR is probably out, but I'd probably be happy playing it with a normal screen if possible.
Incidently I have the first couple of rooms blocked out for basically the exact same setup, floating in a burning small spacestation, as my demo for a scifi Darkmod level.
henke on 25/3/2017 at 10:14
Quote Posted by Fafhrd
When I read that I was like 'this guy doesn't understand VR, like, AT ALL.'
Yeah. :erg:
Quote Posted by demagogue
I know from other experiences that my nausea threshold is low, so VR is probably out, but I'd probably be happy playing it with a normal screen if possible.
Oh yes, it's perfectly playable in non-VR. Though without VR's sense of scale and immersion it's probably not as great an experience, as much of it
is just about floating slowly from one part of the station to the next. Wait for a sale, or (another) bundle.
Sulphur on 26/3/2017 at 05:40
I played it to the finish a while ago, henke. I wanted to post about in the Games of 2016 thread as a sort of runner-up, but it's got a few issues even though it's fairly memorable.
I interpret it as part stealth commentary on Orth's twitter Xbone debacle. The character you play makes some choices that lead to the state the game opens in because she's more comfortable 'asking for forgiveness' instead of permission. She's also the only one to survive, which means she gets to live with her choices and take the blame when she gets back to Earth. It's fairly well voice-acted and the narrative is decently written, if sparsely doled out.
The things it does well are, of course, the graphics. The views are majestic, and the first person perspective really gives you a sense of being lost and alone while moving through the detritus of the station. I remember an (unnecessary) excursion to a radio antenna being particularly fraught as I realised I was running out of more oxygen than I thought I needed, but once that was dealt with, what I found when I got there was poignant.
The things it doesn't do well are... it's not a particularly good game. Bumping into anything past a certain velocity leads to your suit integrity getting damaged, a metric which is gamey and irritating at the best of times, because it's not particularly easy to manoeuvre in zero-G. You will bump against bulkheads as you pass through them, because Alex must be a particularly large-boned individual.
You've also got a vanishingly small O2 level to start off with, at first because of a leak in the suit which you fix (which ties into your suit integrity level), and then because of limited capacity which you can upgrade as you progress (which begs the question of why everyone wasn't just fitted with larger O2 tanks to begin with). You can also upgrade your jets, which feed off of O2 (of course). Mix all of this with the entire game being a series of very repetitive objectives with zero variation past the (very nicely done) design of the station and the odd electrified bit of scenery to avoid, and you can get bored fairly easily an hour in. The objective markers were terrible too when I played, which may have been patched after launch. At the time, they were frustratingly vague and with a tendency to blip out or reproximate (is that a word that's not just in dentistry? No? Well, make it so!) as you approached them.
As far as VR is concerned, yeah, the game taking control away from you for the camera at a console would be a no-no for headset boffins, but it's a good way to quickly reorient yourself when you're playing on a monitor and approach the console at a stupidly jaunty angle that'd bounce you off the walls.
Having said that, I appreciated my time with it. It's fairly well put-together if not incredibly compelling, and there was enough meat on its bones for a decent meal.
Also: props for Clair de Lune being its opening theme. The Evil Within might have been one of the first to have appropriated it, but the tune makes more sense in space.
