First comes the confusion; the sound of a scared young boy phoning the police in panic as his surroundings slowly fade into view. He connects with Ted, a police dispatcher that attempts to stick to procedure as he calms the terrified soul. Then your heart rate picks up along with the caller’s footprints. Something is chasing him and, if you dare look over your shoulder, you’ll see it approaching with mighty, merciless stomps towards its prey.
Dispatch, an episodic VR series written and directed by Edward Roubles and developed by Fire Panda for Here Be Dragons and Oculus Studios, is frighteningly good at building this kind of palpable tension with the snap of a finger. The piece, which consists of four 5 – 10-minute installments (the first three of which launch today), is a perfect example of Dragons’ prowess in the VR moviemaking scene. This isn’t something yet another experiment in VR storytelling but instead a rare example of a VR movie that understands how to fully utilize the medium it’s working with.
Ted is our central character; a weary police dispatcher that’s run down both by prank calls and his department’s inability to quickly respond to actual emergencies. Just as he reaches his wits’ end he becomes entangled in a particularly disturbing domestic case and finds himself pushing the boundaries in or to save lives.
Visually, the piece uses a sort of wire-frame art style as a way of putting us in Ted’s mind, trying to envision the scenes that distressed callers describe to him. In a way, it’s not too dissimilar to the excellent VR tie-in to Notes on Blindness; images bleed into your view based on the sounds you hear around you. Slowly but surely a picture comes together, and it often comes with a dreaded realization that someone is in real danger.
Beyond the intriguing visuals, Dispatch works incredibly well as a VR thriller, unapologetically shoving you into the terror of its most violent scenes with an unflinching viscerality. It makes excellent use of sound and color scheme — threatening objects and characters appear as red models while everything else is green — that makes it at times an uncomfortable assault on the senses. And at the heart of it all is a genuinely interesting character and enough cliffhangers that will leave you begging for the next episode.
Dispatch’s first episode is free on the Oculus Rift and Gear VR, while the second and third episodes are available for $3 together.
