Dead Secret is still one of the best VR games out there on the Gear VR. It’s been out on the Samsung and Oculus branded mobile VR headset for almost a year at this point and it remains as one of the most fully-developed and immersive experiences on the device. When developer Robot Invader ported the experience over to the Oculus Rift, the upgraded visuals and positional tracking alone were enough reason to revisit the now VR classic.
Today, Robot Invader is expanding the game’s audience once again by officially adding HTC Vive support on Steam. Across all three VR versions — and the desktop version as well — Dead Secret is a point-and-click adventure game with murder mystery investigation elements. You don’t move around the environment using a keyboard or gamepad and you won’t be able to freely explore rooms.
Instead, you use your gaze to interact with objects and find clues to figure out what happened in the mysterious murder of Harris Bullard. By bringing the experience over to the HTC Vive, Robot Invader has added Vive motion controller support. You won’t see your hands tracked and interacting with objects like in Job Simulator though, but can instead point at things and control the cursor with the controller.
Motion controller support is a good addition, as it decouples the cursor from your head movement, enabling you to more freely look around without having to carefully aim your face when you want to inspect an object. In this way, it feels similar to using a traditional mouse interface.
What HTC Vive players may be disappointed to learn, however, is that this new version of the game does not include roomscale support — it’s an either sitting or standing experience only. What that means is you are more than welcome to stand up while playing, as is customary when using the Vive, but you’re not required. If you move around your room, the game will not animate your character model to follow your head movement.
A developer from Robot Invader took to Steam to explain the decision in detail:
To understand why we made this decision, it’s important to know a little bit about the design of Dead Secret. Dead Secret predates the Vive by several years. The first version of it running in VR was shown at Oculus Connect in 2014, and by then it had already been in development for a year. By the time Vive was announced the game design was well baked. Dead Secret shipped for VR long before Vive even came out, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that we spent years on the locomotion and interaction design for this game.
Dead Secret does not support free movement on any platform, VR or otherwise. It’s part of the game design. Whether you play with a wand or a controller or whatever, the movement system never behaves like a first-person shooter. You look in the direction you want to go, click a button, and move there. It’s a scheme designed specifically for VR (vection is reduced by moving only at linear velocity, etc), but it’s also key to making the tension of the game feel correct.
The reasoning makes sense from a development perspective and not every Vive game supports roomscale, regardless of genre. Part of the apprehension is due to the evolution of adventure games — the likes of The Gallery and Obduction all provide free movement and they’re based in the same general genre — but there is room for different control schemes. Just because some games offer roomscale doesn’t mean every game should or needs to.
Dead Secret is, still, one of the best stories told in VR. Another recent example of a similar game is the wonderful Dark Days, which is out now on Gear VR with a similar movement system. If you’re a fan of suspenseful, intellectually-stimulating thrillers, then Dead Secret is right up your alley. Just don’t go in expecting roomscale movement support.
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Dead Secret is available on Steam with support for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and non-VR desktop play. You can also play it on the Gear VR.
