London-based production studio Unit9 announced a new VR game, Storm, which is built with the Unreal engine and described as a cross between mobile puzzler The Room and classic icy horror film The Thing.
Here’s the game for Oculus Rift in a nutshell:
Players find themselves battling a brutal snowstorm. They have five minutes to find shelter or they’ll freeze to death. The challenge is to find and combine several items lying around in the blinding landscape to save themselves. As players look around for ways to get warm, their bodies gets colder, their limbs freeze up and their movements get slower, while the storm intensifies.
There’s a download of an early version of the game available on the Storm website or through Oculus Share. It is described as “a moderately comfortable VR experience” on the Oculus website. You can use your keyboard or an Xbox controller to move around. The game is described as “the first chapter in a series of games that will explore extremes in nature.”
“We wanted to make something that doesn’t live clearly in either the film world or the games world,” said Storm Director, Anrick Bregman in a prepared statement. “You can walk around this environment for five minutes and just enjoy the craziness of the weather – something you never hope to enjoy in real life – but because it’s in VR it’s safe.”
Unit9 is a production studio which often creates digital marketing for a variety of brands across multiple platforms. It recently built a 360 video called “Elevate” for Lexus, for example. Here’s a show reel of some of Unit9’s other work in VR:
VR apps like this one make it seem like an array of fans set up in the perimeter of a VR space could be both a relatively inexpensive and useful addition to a VR setup. We’ll download the game and likely report back with a hands-on.
