Tag Archives: Vacation Simulator

Blog: Virtually Real – 01/15/20

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For the past few weeks I’ve had ample access to an HTC Vive, showing it off to family and friends alike, but mostly just messing around with various physics playgrounds and breaking things.  Aside from the setup, the sweating, and occasionally knocking things over, it’s been pretty great.  There are a handful of games that I’ve been playing, some old and some new, that I thought I’d highlight.

VACATION SIMULATOR

Recently a new feature was launched on this site called Gut Check wherein I talk about the opening hour or so of a game and go over my impressions of them.  I decided to start out with Vacation Simulator, a game I ultimately ended up enjoying a lot.  Now, you can read my initial take on it here, but not much has changed from that.

I still find some of the design decisions questionable, but I’m still having fun with it and its charming atmosphere.  There’s just something fun about picking things up and throwing them around in VR.  I will say that after playing it some more, I find that a lot of the objectives are pretty rigid and don’t allow for much in the way of creativity.  It feels more like a puzzle game than its predecessor Job Simulator, but it’s still a fun VR experience nonetheless.

I EXPECT YOU TO DIE

Speaking of throwing things around and solving puzzles, I Expect You to Die is a really cool puzzle game that puts you in the shoes of a secret agent trying to escape from various traps and accomplish missions.

The first case you’re assigned on is to escape a car that’s in the back of a cargo plane that’s filling up with noxious gas.  In what’s basically a tutorial, I had to do things like disarm a bomb and dodge laser beams along with less exciting things like burn notes to find the secret note hidden underneath.

It’s a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously and let’s you mess around with everything you can reach.  My only complaint is how much it relies on trial and error, making you replay the entire level in the hopes of making it to where you died and hopefully figuring out the solution.  It just feels a little tedious sometimes, but it’s still a lot of fun.

BLADE AND SORCERY

So I’ve basically been playing Blade and Sorcery every time I put on the headset.  You play as some sort of fighter in a suit of armor, and go to different levels and take on different combat challenges.  Sometimes it’s one on one fights, sometimes you’re vastly outnumbered, but no matter what, it always feels good to swing a sword in VR and this is no exception.

For as fun as the core loop of just sword fighting fools is, I found the overall game to be pretty thin at the moment, not really offering anything in terms of progression or diversity in objectives, but it is in early access to be fair.

I also found that sometimes the movement controls just don’t work which might be a game problem or my specific VR kit problem, I can’t be sure.  But I really would like to see more sorcery from a game that has sorcery in the title.  As of now, you can only really zap people with lighting which stuns them and will kill them if sustained long enough.

But the real highlight of Blade and Sorcery isn’t what’s in the game, but what you can mod into the game.  Full disclosure, I got this game because I saw there was a mod that turned it into a Star Wars experience.  So whenever I want to hop into some action, I grab a light saber, a blaster, and mow down an endless horde of Sith and Jedi alike.  And that’s all made better when you install the infinite magic mod which allows you to have infinite slow motion.  It let’s me feel like the baddest of asses and I’m 100% onboard with whatever they add into the core game.

I really enjoy VR, but it just doesn’t have enough quality content available to move headsets.  Along with that, we’re still a few iterations away from getting a powerful, wireless headset that wont set your head on fire and somehow has a decent battery.  Till then, just find a friend with VR and experience it through them.

Gut Check – Vacation Simulator

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Welcome to the first installment of Gut Check, a feature about first impressions in video games.  To read some backstory on why and how Gut Check came into existence, check out this post.  But without further ado, let’s take a look at the follow up to Job Simulator, the aptly titled, Vacation Simulator.

For context, Job Simulator was and still is one of the best virtual reality games around because of how nonsensical, nonlinear, yet focused gameplay.  In Job Simulator you were basically in a museum, hundreds of years into the future, learning about the jobs that humans did before they all died.  Things like office work, car repair and others were all available for you to play with, but never was it an actual simulation of how these careers actually were.

Instead you were hurling around coffee cups, shoving bananas in tailpipes and doing all sorts of goofy things that these robots thought humans did.  It was also a great way to introduce people to VR and get them acquainted with the controls and possibilities.

With all of that said, Vacation Simulator seems to be a more blown out version of its predecessor in just about every way, for better and worse.

The best parts of both Job and Vacation Simulator are the wild interactions that you can have while in a somewhat familiar setting.  Maybe you’ve never worked in a convenience store, but we all have an understanding of what that looks like.  Similarly, Vacation Simulator takes you to a beach, a campsite, and a snowy peak where you can interact with anything that isn’t nailed down and silly interactions with the other vacationers.

Where Vacation Simulator loses me a bit is in the scope of the thing.  What made Job Simulator so fun and approachable was that you didn’t need to worry about what was going on from level to level, or even mission to mission.  It was all self contained in a way that made it accessible.  Vacation Simulator however, opted to go with a more interconnected world where completing tasks involves you going to different places.  It’s not a bad idea, but it leads to a clashing of ideologies that makes the game seem like it’s at odds with itself.

For instance, in the beach level there was a grill where I could cook up orders for people and deliver it to them.  All of the ingredients for a cookout were right there, and the customers who wanted the food were on the beach.  But as the missions got more intricate and introduced more ways for me to mess up an order, I was also tasked with delivering food to different locations as well as gathering ingredients from those locales too.  In this particular instance it bums me out because someone on the beach wanted a s’more, but I had to go collect marshmallows from the forest map and bring them back to cook up the order.  And since you have limited inventory space, you might find yourself screwing up said order and having to trudge back to the other map.

It just feels a little like (ironically) busy work was introduced into the game to make it seem like a more robust experience.  Now, none of this is ever so off-putting that it made me not want to play more.  Vacation Simulator manages to introduce plenty of new and interesting interactions and missions into the world that keep it interesting.  But I feel that the multi-level objectives end up feeling more like work than just goofing around.

That all being said, Vacation Simulator is a great time for anyone who enjoyed its predecessor and its brand of silly humor.  It’s still a charming and fun virtual reality game that ultimately takes two steps forward and one step back.  The biggest disappointment in my eyes is the fact that this game won’t be the first thing I put new VR players in.  Job Simulator is still the game I get people to try out who are curious about VR, because of how straightforward it is.  Vacation Simulator layers on a bit too many elements to make it approachable to first time users for my tastes, but it’s still one hell of a good time.  I’ll continue to play this one for sure.