Embark on a quirky adventure across Outer Space that boasts a satisfying gameplay loop promising to keep you up for hours.
The Final Frontier is a place many of us dream of seeing someday. As VR games go, Into Black, a new experience debuting on the Meta Quest store, fulfills this premise by letting you loose as an explorer in an alien world, gathering resources and fighting for your life. A brief but idyllic start to protagonist Mitch's day fixing common issues in his ship and analyzing asteroids is promptly interrupted by a black hole that leaves him stranded in unknown territory.
Quest 3 gameplay footage captured by UploadVR
A robot assistant named Jonathan, akin to Codsworth from Fallout 4, sarcastically guides the player through the frantic situations providing some much-needed comic relief in the process. To repair the ship, Mitch must engage in a scavenger hunt to find resources to fix it. Dual-wielding his pickaxe and flashlight doubling as a whip to harvest items, his exploration begins.
The Binary Mill is certainly flaunting its experience as a VR studio in this endeavor, which is appreciated in Into Black’s structure. It includes cosmetics from their previous games, such as the wingsuit-flying Rush, and there's an intuitive UI using only your wrists. Considering how jam-packed each mission is full of secrets, the design choices reflect their veteran status.
Despite its mysterious name, Into Black is quite a vibrant odyssey. Every incursion into the caves is an opportunity to appreciate the flora and fauna on display. Although the stylized graphics are not astounding, they work to the game's benefit. The shiny minerals, towering mushrooms, and magma on the floor all take a page from a fluorescent color palette that, in these dark tunnels, helps to give a sense of direction.
Depending on its five difficulty settings ranging from Story to Insane, hours with friends doing resource missions and shooting critters as a team quickly go by. The more you use your gear, the higher the level it can reach and the more benefits you can unlock; it's always an enticing proposition to launch just one more expedition.
A neat trick Into Black uses to amp up the pressure in an otherwise relaxing resource-gathering quest is the fact that you need to use an extractor at the end of the mission to evacuate safely. The catch of triggering this is that there is a one-minute timer in a zone you need to stay inside of, and it can be easily overrun by various types of huge bugs that do not take trespassers lightly.
With every cave wall chock full of minerals lying around in between enemy encounters, it is easy to get caught up in that one-more-run mindset to get every possible item and upgrade available. The end of each expedition offers a recount of all the deaths, kills, and items mined, tallied for you and your party to see.
A genuine sci-fi adventure coming out the door with engaging gameplay mechanics and a serviceable story that can be enjoyed alone or in co-op is not often seen for VR-only games. Into Black delivers on those fronts while giving an endlessly replayable mission-based journey with constant rewards to keep you coming back.
Into Black is available now on the Meta Quest platform.
