VEV: Viva Ex Vivo‎ (VR Edition) (PSVR)

System: PSVR 1
Price at Time Of Review: £3.99
Comfort Rating: Yellow (Mild Movement)
Genre: Interactive Experience
Input: DualShock Controller
Best Playing Position: Sitting, Standing
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: 15+

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Description: VEV: Viva Ex Vivo‎ is a unique, pick-up and play ‘experience’ game with exploration and survival elements. Players take control of a ‘Virtual Eukaryote Visualizer,’ a single-celled artificial life-form which allows them to explore four distinct microscopic environments: freshwater, soil, blood, and cerebrospinal fluid. Players are tasked with managing their VEV’s energy consumption as they traverse each sample in search of organic particles to collect and consume in order to stay alive. Players must navigate each microscopic realm mindful of the unique menagerie of competing and sometimes hostile microorganisms populate each micro-ecosystem and in turn may threaten their VEV’s existence.

Review: The basic gist of the game is to stay alive for 40 minutes within a certain environment. There are 4 environments to choose from: Water, Soil, Blood and the tasty sounding cerebrospinal fluid. Not all of these are inside a human obviously. Each innerworld is a beautiful place with its own enemies and hazards. There are more worlds that this, but I won’t spoil those you need to unlock. You start each world with 100 units of energy, then to stay alive you must keep this number as high as you can by finding and collecting the energy particles all over the place, all the while avoiding whatever else is around including energy zapping things.

Once again we are looking at a game that has had the VR viewpoint bolted onto the side of it. While it does work better than others to make it feel immersive, it is still the same problem of a game not made for VR being quite nauseating to play. Yes, it is an interesting experience that is something not seen before (or at least no in many other games before it). Once again it is a good game when played on a 2D screen, but one that is best given a miss in VR.