Are you ready for room scale scares? Paramount and VRWERX are – and they are bringing one of the highest grossing horror franchises of all time along with them. Yes, that’s right Paranormal Activity is coming to the HTC Vive in the form a new VR game.
While the details on what the actual game will be like are scant – we do know that the game has been developed to work with all headsets, but that it will be especially tuned to take advantage of the HTC Vive’s unique full room scale tracking. Additionally we have learned that this will be an actual standalone game, and not simply a tie in experience to help market the films.
Oh, and it is going to be scary – like really, really scary.
Says Russell Naftal, the co-managing partner at VRWERX’s parent company – the Beast Media Group, “our goal is for the Paranormal Activity VR video game to not only be the scariest game you’ve ever played, but the scariest experience you’ve ever had!”
When the Rift first came out as a developer kit one of the first genres that developers tackled was horror. The genre’s visceral nature makes it a perfect fit for VR – scares simply feel much more terrifying in virtual reality because in that flash moment – that moment when something jumps out from a dark corner or your flashlight catches a creepy kid in the shadows – your brain doesn’t rationalize real or not, it just goes on full primal autopilot. It’s such a powerful experience that many in the VR community have opined that we need warning labels on games with jump scares because you could, however unlikely, legitimately scare someone to death.
While we doubt that the Paranormal Activity game will attempt to push the boundary to that level, it is a safe bet that it will be one of the more terrifying experiences in VR given the franchise from which it is originating. Good news is we will have a little bit to mentally prepare ourselves for it – as the game is slated for a 2016 release on all of the major VR headsets.
We will continue to follow the development of Paranormal Activity VR and the rest of the projects that VRWERX has under their sleeves – and those are pretty big sleeves as well. We’re sure there will be more interesting news to come soon.
