by Great PC Gaming Moments are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.
I’ve played a lot of different VR games since 2016, and I’ve played them on a lot of different gear. I tried Sony’s PlayStation VR headset, two different models of HTC Vive, Valve’s Index, and two versions of the Quest. Games I’ve played include Minecraft (my very first time in VR), No Man’s Sky, Doom, Fallout 4 and Skyrim, plus fishing games, kayaking games, battle royales, a whole bunch of MMOs VR and a stealth game I was so bad at I ended up owing the Australian government $200m.
I’ve even played with training software designed for soccer players where the sensors are attached to your feet instead of your hands and you kick a virtual ball. Strangely, it was one of the best experiences of the group.
I’m one of the lucky ones: Virtual reality never makes me nauseous, whether I’m barrel-rolling through space or jumping out of a plane in a battle royale. On the other hand, I’ve been a bit unlucky in that I’ve never really been able to get lost in VR. No matter how good it looks or plays, no matter the sights or sounds, I’ve never really been able to let my brain be fooled. I’m always aware that I’m playing a game, wearing headphones, holding controllers, and hanging out in the corner of my room.
VR can be fun, but it’s never been more compelling to me. I never felt transported. My brain never gave up and said “This is reality.”
Except once.
It happened in the last game I expected – Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (opens in a new tab). Is not it? One would think that in order to forget the real world and embrace a virtual world, this virtual world would have to be photorealistic. It should be so visually compelling that your brain would accept it. Surely it couldn’t be a game where you stand in a garage while cartoon characters swear at you. But oddly enough, it was.
In Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality, you just hang around Rick’s garage and play with stuff. Solve puzzles, perform experiments, throw objects, break anything you can, and occasionally go through portals. But most of the time you’re just in a cartoon garage trying to stop Rick from yelling at you and figuring out what all the fuss is about.
But at some point, after about 40 minutes of opening drawers, pouring drinks, putting things in the washing machine, fixing things and breaking other things, I had to bend down to read a note that was about level with the ground. To steady myself, I reached out with my right hand to lean against the counter, but of course the counter wasn’t there. I was in a virtual garage, not a real one. And instead of the counter, there was an empty space, so instead of steadying myself, I fell forward, stumbled a few steps, and collided with the extremely real closet door in my bedroom.
It hurt and I felt like an idiot, but it was the first time in a VR game where my brain accepted virtual reality as reality. I think a lot of the reason has nothing to do with how photorealistic a game is, but how interactive it is.
The Rick and Morty game looks cartoonish, sure, but there’s so much to pick up and play, and the items act like you’d expect. If you want to open a bottle and pour out the contents, remove the cap and turn the bottle upside down. There are buttons to push and levers to pull and drawers to open and things everywhere to pick up and use. It doesn’t look like the natural world, but it acts like the natural world (except for all the goofy sci-fi stuff), and I think that was the key to getting my brain to accept that a drawing of a counter was a real counter. As gorgeous as Half-Life: Alyx is, it never tricked my brain like that, but a Rick and Morty cartoon game absolutely did.
