Sony Pictures released Jumanji: The VR Adventure on Steam today, but the game’s attracting attention for the wrong reasons.
We haven’t gone hands-on with the game ourselves but, at least on a visual level, Jumanji looks unfinished, as you can see in the below trailer. It’s based on the recent rebooted movie that stars Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Karen Gillan, Jack Black, and Kevin Hart. In the trailer below, blurry versions of those characters navigate an even blurrier environment with the help of the player, who appears like a god above the film’s tropical island setting.
And here’s an especially ugly screenshot of the game. Pay particular attention to how the white cloud of smoke on the right makes it look like the leopard is farting. A nice little touch, that.
These aren’t exactly the kind of production values you’d expect from a top Hollywood studio. As if it didn’t look bad enough already, Twitch Streamer XatomUK managed to capture some gameplay with hilarious results.
Not since Rollercoaster Dreams have I been so entertained.
It might be lacking visually, but Sony plans to bring the game to both the Rift and PSVR in the near future, too. Beyond that, the company partnered with Raw Data developer Survios to push the game to more than 36 countries with VR arcades around the world. On Steam it costs $4.99.
Sony Pictures Virtual Reality has previously published games across all three major VR headsets such as the Spider-Man: Homecoming VR Experience which, while not exactly brilliant, at least looked a lot better than this. It was developed by MPC VR, which worked on other tie-in VR experiences like The Martian VR and the Suicide Squad VR experience. Frankly, we’d expect better of both.
