The mixed reality video is the best way to get an idea of how the game works, I think. Obviously, that’s not what you’d be saying if you were playing the game, but it’s important to have a sense of the space that would be around you because – and this deserves capitalisation – I FEEL LIKE I SPENT TWENTY MINUTES STANDING IN THAT ABSTRACT WORLD STROKING A CAT AND BUILDING CRONENBERGIAN VEHICLES THAT TWITCHED AND SCURRIED AND WRITHED.
If it’s fair to say that some of the games in the launch lineup don’t seem to integrate or benefit from VR in a particularly impressive or valid way, it’s important to counter that with the fact that Fantastic Contraption took about five minutes to make me a believer. Using the Touch controls, I was kneeling, stretching, reaching and even jumping at one point as I assembled devices to try and solve each level’s particular puzzle.
The sense of presence and tactility were astonishing. Not in a way that made me feel dislocated but in a way that makes my memory of the play session seem to take place on a small platform hovering in a void rather than in a small cubicle in a vast hall in central San Francisco. The platform and the blue sky is what I remember. That’s just how it was.
And the most amazing thing of all is that I would never sit down to play Fantastic Contraption if it wasn’t a VR game. The hardware made a game accessible and enjoyable when it would otherwise have been so far out of my wheelhouse that I’d have rather spent my time shooting more hoops.
I have a very poor sense of spatial awareness when it comes to manipulating objects on a screen in the way that this sort of game requires, but that wasn’t an issue here. Sure, my contraptions were hardly fantastic, but being able to walk around them, find a better angle to understand how everything was holding together, and simply to reach out and touch each element – that made the task far more intuitive and, more importantly, made failure into a delightful experiment.
