VR Gaming

50 Days Of PS VR #39: Loading Human

, & Jamie Feltham

4 September 2016

39 days to go! We’re counting down to the release of PlayStation VR on October 13th by highlighting one game a day for the anticipated headset. Today we’re looking at one of the first PS VR titles to even be announced; Untold Games’ Loading Human.

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I’ve been working in VR for over two and a half years now and one of the first games I covered for the tech was Untold Games’ Loading Human. It speaks volumes about the developer’s passion that all these months on and this is still one of the most ambitious-sounding narrative games on the horizon for PlayStation VR.

Loading Human is an episodic series, the first installment of which passed a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign some time ago. It’s a sci-fi story in which you play as a son, Prometheus, preparing for a great journey to save his father. Prometheus lives in the shadow of his father, a great inventor that is growing old. He tasks his son with finding a powerful energy source far from Earth to power a machine that will de-age him (yes, really). As far as we know, the first episode will be about preparing for that great challenge.

This isn’t just a story about a father-son relationship, though. Prometheus is also in love with a girl named Alice, and their bond will often pull him in other directions.

We’re excited to see where Loading Human‘s story goes, though we’re just as interested in its gameplay. This is another title in which you’ll use two PlayStation Move controllers practically as a pair of hands. You’ll explore environments, picking up objects in a realistic way, picking them up with position-tracked controls. That might not seem particularly new in a post-Vive world but you have to remember Loading Human was in development long before we’d even heard of Valve’s headset.

Actually moving with the Moves can be awkward, so Untold Games is developing some intuitive controls to work around them. Pulling a controller over your shoulder and pressing the trigger, for example, will allow you to quickly turn around.

The game will put you in some intense situations, too. The trailer above shows you rescuing Alice from a fire, while other interactions suggest the game will explore romance in a way that no other VR game has just yet. It’s going to be a tough challenge to pull those moments off without getting players to descend into fits of laughter, but it’s a fascinating area to explore all the same.

Loading Human‘s first episode will be getting a box release, but we don’t know what the future holds for the franchise. Hopefully the length of time it’s taken for VR headsets to actually come out will have given the team a headstart for future installments.