Kursk doesn’t sound like your average VR game. Instead of wave shooting or exploration, this upcoming project from developer Jujubee is a sort of interactive documentary that recounts the story of a Russian submarine disaster.
Kursk is due for release later this year as a standard PC title and will be getting VR support as part of planned DLC. In the game, players will be cast as a member of the K-141 Kursk nuclear-powered Russian submarine. In August 2000 the vessel sank, drowning its entire crew in the Barents Sea. The developer describes the game as an ‘adventure-documentary’ experience in which the player is a spy attempting to steal information about the vessel’s Shkval supercavitating torpedoes.
You’ll be able to fully explore the submarine in first-person and even visit Moscow and the garrison town of Vidyayevo. The developer says the experience should last around 10 hours.
“As developers, we realize how much time users spend with our products, but we often fail to remember the responsibility connected to it,” Jujubee CEO Michał Stępień said of the project. “We can make games something more than just exciting entertainment. Games can become a tool not unlike books or films. They can help us develop, educate us, broaden our horizons, and provoke discussions that go far beyond the world of video games.”
Interestingly the press release from the developer notes that the promised VR support will be “dedicated to next-generation” VR devices that support 4K resolution and above. We’ve asked the developer what platforms it’s targetting for now.
We can imagine this being an entirely different kind of VR experience to what we’re used to; cramped, claustrophobic and largely unpleasant, but it’s that promise that has us so interested in the project in the first place.
