What is Tentacular?
Tentacular is a VR game released by Devolver Digital where you are a giant tentacle kaiju monster. Raised alongside the humans the story begins on your 16th birthday. You become an official citizen of the island of La Kalma and have to do adult things like getting applying for jobs. Hopefully, you will be to prove to yourself that you can be an outstanding adult.
Why is Tentacular engaging?
First of all the premise and aesthetics is quite silly, childish, and playful which is something look for when I am taking a break from studying. This is what initially hooked me into the game.
The game’s main loop is puzzles/minigames are heavily physics-based. Mini-games include things like projectile motion and angry birds style that happen when buildings and ships get thrown around. This is fun for me to watch because of the randomness that happens when two physical objects interact. While fun to watch, physics also makes you feel more immersed in this world. It feels like objects have a sense of weight when you can interact with them. Additionally, the tentacles wiggle which makes you feel like a tentacle monster.
In this game, there is some freedom to do what you want. Unlike what it seems at first glance, you are supposed to be the gentle giant in the town, but you as a player have a choice to wreak havoc and destroy things you aren’t supposed to. The game doesn’t feel too restrictive and at the end, you have this sandbox mode where you can do what you want.
Specific features I liked / What can be improved?
This game has a fair bit of dialogue. I liked how we initiate interactions with characters by tapping the top of their head with our tentacle. It makes it feels more immersive despite the cartoonish graphics because we feel like we are getting a direct response to our actions (vs pointing in their general direction and then tapping a button. This was also possible because the tentacles extend from your controller past your actual hands, there was no need to “teleport” the object towards your in-game hands/tentacles.
I also like how a speech bubble appears that seems to be attached to the person talking. The sentences are also purposefully made extremely short with big clear text, usually under 6-8 words at any given time to ensure readability. Additionally, you can tap them again to speed up/ mute their text in case you get bored like me.
One downside to this system was that you have to be looking at the bubble to understand what the NPC is saying since there was no true voice acting. The “voice acting” was random gibberish sounds like the Wii characters. There are parts of the game where someone is talking to you while you have to look somewhere else to complete the current timed task. This can be frustrating if you are someone who doesn’t want to miss dialogues.
One interesting thing I got when reading an interview with the developer was that having giant monsters’ main characters were tricky [1] . If the monster was too big, it would translate to you as the monster mostly looking down at the floor which will be annoying for your neck muscles. They had chosen the tentacle monster because the partial submerging into the water made it more comfortable to play as the city is at chest level. This height is also adjustable in the settings.
What is Wanderer VR?
Wanderer is a time-traveling puzzle Adventure in a post-apocalyptic world you find yourself at your grandfather’s apartment. You find a talking time-traveling watch that will guide you throughout history to prevent the collapse of society. The game mostly features escape room-like puzzles with the occasional action sequences sprinkled in. To progress, you would have to transport items between periods to solve many puzzles
Why is Wanderer VR engaging?
Initially clicked on this game because it looked realistic from the youtube thumbnail. The background in some scenes in the post-apocalyptic settings is relatively high fidelity which adds to the immersion. As someone who hasn’t owned VR yet, it looks like it would be very immersive.
As this is a puzzle game, I liked that most reviews say that the challenge level is appropriate. The puzzles themselves look interesting because you have a limited inventory. There are more items than you can hold onto in every location, so when you time travel between periods, you have to plan for what to take with you. In addition, you have to make mental notes of what you could use for future problems. This is an upgrade from the real-life escape rooms that I have experienced.
The game is also heavily physicalized. You can move all the items that you can put in your inventory. And also they are random items around the game that you can grab and throw. If you throw books at windows they will shatter and break. This helps with the immersion of us feeling like we are really in that world vs in most flat-screen games that I play, where I have the general assumption that most things in the environment can be grabbed unless they are outlined green/overlayed with yellow/ has a [Press E to interact] message.
There is no HUD in this game, all the UI is found glued onto your smart time traveling watch. This helps to make a more immersive experience by minimizing distractions.
This game also has a great sound design. The spatial design of sound helps to add to the immersion because you can hear the directions most sounds come from and leaning over to NPCs can make the voice lines louder.
One feature I liked is that it has a menu for “comfort settings” where you can adjust things that would make you motion sick in VR. For example, Smooth-turn off and teleport moving. There is also distance grabbing which means you don’t have to touch an object to grab it, making it a more convenient experience even though it is not 100% realistic.
What can be improved?
When distance grabbing is turned on, players sometimes accidentally grab random faraway objects when the hands close around the index controller. This could be improved by maybe having needed to press the trigger button to initiate a grab.
The character/NPC animations could also be improved. Given the fidelity of the environment design, it betrayed expectations when the quality of the NPCs did not match.
References
[1]I. SESSION, “Interview with Firepunchd: Info on Tentacular for PSVR2!!,” YouTube. Jan. 13, 2023. Accessed: Jan. 19, 2023. [YouTube Video]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLilqqCEx5g