Kill It With Fire VR is out now on Quest 2 and PC VR, offering an absolute nightmare immersive experience for anyone with arachnophobia.
Initially released for flatscreen platforms, this new Kill It With Fire port brings the indie spider-hunting game into VR, which will see you take control of increasingly crazy and powerful weapons of spider destruction in a quest to rid environments of the creepy crawlies.
After playing through some of the Quest release earlier this week, the highlight was just how much the game leans into the nightmare scenario. I’m not someone who is particularly freaked out by spiders – I live in Australia, so seeing them around the house is a fairly common occurrence – but even so, the game did a good job at making my skin crawl.
Spiders will be hiding everywhere – in drawers, behind furniture, under ornaments. Every time you uncover one, a series of unsettling staccato string notes put you on edge and play uncomfortable melodies as you use items or weapons to kill the spider before it runs off. The frantic pace and the off-kilter string melodies work well together, giving me goosebumps even when I felt prepared for sudden spider jump scares.
That said, the eerie ambiance is perhaps better than some of the interactions that surround it. From what I played – a few of the game’s opening levels – I found the interactions to be a bit unreliable and hectic. You can pick up almost any item to hit a spider with, but even whacking a standard rectangle-shaped TV remote against a spider on a flat surface yielded some pretty strange results.
Sometimes spiders will get squashed as expected, but I also had instances where items flew around the room or an object would fling a spider across the environment instead of squashing it. There’s an element of intended imprecision that’s no doubt part of the playful game design, but I still found the interactions to be a little all over the place for my liking. Perhaps things improve as the levels progress – especially as you unlock more of a fire-based arsenal and others weapons that depend less on physicality – but the physics and item interactions felt a little inconsistent to start.
That said, the ambiance created by the build up and eventual discovery of each spider is great. I can’t imagine someone with arachnophobia enjoying the game, which is actually a counter-intuitive compliment. There are settings to turn off or tune down some of those spider effects, such as the unsettling strings, but I’d argue that using them would almost defeat the purpose of playing the game in the first place.
If you’re looking to get properly freaked out by some virtual spider hunting, then Kill It With Fire is available now on Quest 2, Quest Pro and PC VR via Steam, with a PSVR and PSVR 2 release coming later this year.
