2023-05-02 16:00:00
Now that PlayStation VR2 has seen the light of day, various content has started appearing on it. In projects with big budgets, it’s natural for independent developers to build their own apps, but the quality can vary. Finnish gaming company Jestercraft is launching Seeker My Shadow for PS VR2, which debuted earlier on PC VR. In short, the idea is to solve puzzles in a family-friendly environment.
The story of Seeker My Shadow is a mystery. The book in the menu asks the player to turn the pages with a virtual hand, but when you try to press the supposed activation button, the menu disappears and the game starts without explanation. From an isometric perspective, a small exclusion zone appears in front of the player’s eyes. Different platforms, buildings, accessories and characters are scattered throughout the area. A character who looks like an old sailor tells you the key objectives of the objective, following which it’s up to the player to guess and try to reach the given destination. Mostly, it feels like the game starts in the middle of the story, and a lot of questions arise, like why is there a dog jumping out of an Easter egg, why is that dog purple?
The concepts in Seeker My Shadow are basically pretty neat. Players need to use the purple dog character in the level and the virtual hand outside the level to solve physical puzzles. For example, a dog controlled with a stick can push boxes and trigger pressure plates to open doors and activate mechanisms. Using the virtual hand, the player can rotate the platform by tapping the joystick to view the area from different angles. For example, the player can also press the found button or spin the crank from outside the area to get the changes needed for the dog to move to the specified location in order to complete the level.
Aside from the difficult mechanic of rotating the play area, the game’s controls work smoothly. Unfortunately, the new PS VR2 features are not yet available, which feels like a wasted potential to deepen the gaming experience. The slight ambiguity of the character’s identity and the unknown reason for solving the puzzle make the experience seem superficial and superficial. Even though solving the puzzles is fairly easy, and you make good progress through the game, being a so-called mini-game, all that Seeker My Shadow can offer is quickly revealed and interest starts to wear off pretty quickly.
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The visual aspects of Seeker My Shadow are disturbingly conflicted and systematically incoherent. The simplicity of the play area is pleasingly stylized down to the structure and characters. Pastel colors are used in the level in a controlled manner, save for some weird overreactions using the same color. For example, the player-controlled purple dog looks unfinished, devoid of any detail, and designed using only one color. Moving from one area to another is always done by fading the screen to black, which breaks immersion and is annoying, especially when playing in VR. The book in the feature sheet is copied directly from the Moss game, but it lacks the page-turning mechanic and other cool details (or at least I didn’t find a way to activate them). With no clear direction, the game’s visual potential is drowned out in too many individual elements. But at least the game runs smoothly on PS VR2.
Even the in-game sounds feel more like an annoyance than an atmosphere-enhancing element. Those few sound effects used don’t really hold up, aside from an artificial, repeatable dog bark. The music is decent enough to bring a relaxing and positive mood to the game.
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Seeker My Shadow’s lack of direction and overall focus dilutes the core idea of being fun, turning it into a confusing game that quickly becomes uninteresting. Sure, the game might be fun for a while, but with all the PS VR2 features being ignored, and the same ideas already being used in better ways in other games, there’s no need to spend too much time on this.
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