Escape!VR -The Basement (Oculus Rift)

Price at Time Of Review: £9 ($12)
Comfort Rating: Green (No Movement)
Genre: Escape/Puzzle Room
Supported Platforms: Oculus Rift, Rift S
Supported Controllers: Oculus Touch
Best Playing Position: Standing, Roomscale
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG

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Description: EscapeVR: The Basement is an ‘Escape The Room’ genre game which was inspired by real-life escape games and written from the ground up as a room-scale virtual reality experience.

Explore the environment, solve puzzles, discover useful items, investigate clues, and find your way through a total of seven rooms in three areas to -hopefully- escape the basement!

Review: While out on a stag night with friends you start to drink far too much and end up losing consciousness. You wake up in a locked cage and no-one around. You will need to escape by any means necessary if you want to survive. Played over three distinct areas with seven rooms and a total of 130 square meters, you will need to interact with over 200 objects in order to find all the clues and get everything you need to escape. So it’s a good job that there is at least a hint system even if there isn’t any in-game guidance.

Using the Oculus Touch controllers felt very natural and I liked that it made you get down on all fours to get to things or look under things, as well as crawling through vents and other small areas. It all come together to make great use of room-scale VR with no sickness issues thanks to the teleport movement. If you want to finish this game you will need all your thinking power as well as lots of energy to look everywhere.

These sorts of “Escape the room” games work very well in VR and even better with motion controllers. While there is little you would have seen before it looks great and offers a real challenge for the brain. Oh! And makes good use of the motion controllers as well as your own movement like ducking and crawling. I do wish it was a little cheaper than the current asking price (£9 at time of review) so picking it up in a sale would be best if you are not a fan of this sort of game. But if you are a fan of it, do give it a try.