It’s a great time to own a Samsung Gear VR. With over one million active users last month, a robust update coming soon, and tons of great documentaries, videos, games, and more releasing each week, if you’ve got a recent Samsung Galaxy smartphone and don’t own the mobile headset solution from Samsung and Oculus, you’re missing out on a lot.
What’s especially great about the Gear VR is how approachable of a platform it is for existing indie game developers. You’re not forced to build a game that runs on the super-powered hardware that’s required to power the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, and there is less pressure to include room-scale or motion control features. Often times, those mechanics can feel forced or gimmicky. No matter how you look at it, the Gear VR is a platform with a lot of advantages.
Now, Parallel Studio, which is comprised of members of the team that brought us the award-winning Noir-style adventure game, White Night, is back at it again with their latest effort: Dark Days. While many of the experiences on the Gear VR are happy to offer simple, repeatable thrills that do little in the way of providing truly immersive environments, Dark Days aims to do something a bit more sophisticated.
According to a press release provided by Oculus, you can expect the following:
A mix between Twin Peaks and the XFiles, Dark Days is a new fantastic virtual reality adventure coming soon to Samsung Gear VR, powered by Oculus. Discover the mystery of the motel and its surroundings by solving puzzles throughout the game. Observe a rich, immersive setting you can examine in detail, but be careful and clever! An unknown force is roaming around you; a terrifying presence you need to keep away from by all means.
What is going on in this run down motel lost in the middle of Death Valley? What happens to the people in the neighborhood who disappear without a trace?
Slower-paced, narrative adventure games are earning their keep on PC-powered VR platforms with titles like Technolust on the Oculus Rift and The Gallery on the HTC Vive, but it’s a genre that’s missing strong representation on the mobile Gear VR platform. In Dark Days, you’ll take on the role of Jade Lacroix, a young writer tasked to investigate the odd happenings of the area. Gameplay will be similar to “escape-the-room” style adventure games, which should offer an accessible entry point for newcomers and VR-veterans alike.
You can click each thumbnail to enlarge the screenshots below.
No release date is available as of yet, but you can learn more about the game from the screenshot gallery above.
