Westworld Awakening review: A gripping survival puzzle worth every penny

I have been asking for a VR game set in the Westworld universe basically since I saw the showtime episode of the show. A massive western frontier with a gritty cloak-and-dagger paramilitary underbelly and seemingly random chances for the NPCs to snap and start murdering folk considering of their previous lives? That is an experience far too rich to explore on a second screen from my couch. When I heard Survios and HBO were releasing a Westworld VR experience for arcades, I got mode too excited most that dream coming true.

The bad news is my dream did not come to be in this game. The best news, however, is knowing now that Survios delivered something well beyond my imagination and made it available to everyone with a Steam account.

Such tearing ends

Westworld Enkindling

$thirty

Bottom line: This is a delightfully terrifying trip through the darkest parts of the Westworld experience, but unfortunately you can easily finish the cadre story in a couple of hours.

Pros:

Rich, deeply interactive puzzles
Dripping with Westworld references
Incredibly scary in many areas

Cons:

Some narrative gaffes lessen immersion
Gameplay is not virtually long plenty

Westworld Awakening: The Good

Instead of playing a guest in the incredible Wild West-esque park, your trip into Westworld is through the eyes of one of the characters, specifically a woman named Kate. The game starts with you in the park, reliving variants of the same nightmarish story every bit a classic movie theatre-fashion slasher stalks you through a giant house. Each time y'all die, you wake upwardly in the Delos Narrative Design lab and hear the staff discuss ways to tweak the scene to improve the experience for the guests.

For anyone who enjoys the bear witness, this is both familiar and securely creepy. It doesn't actually matter what you do, or how you lot effort to become around it. You're going to get murdered, and the scene will beginning again with a slightly different twist. It's a great way to experience the globe. Plus, if you take the time to explore the environment each time, yous're rewarded with hidden figurines from the show which unlock achievements.

The existent challenge is not being distracted when y'all see something y'all recognize from the show as the guy with the meat cleaver stalks you down a darkened hallway scattered with bodies.

Y'all eventually progress far enough in the story where things take a very Flavor Two plow, and you're suddenly in the Delos labs surrounded by bodies. The disorientation of your character is fabricated both amend and worse when another character is introduced. You can hear her through an earpiece claiming to be able to aid you if you tin can get to her. She instructs you to pick upward one of the Delos tablets from the prove, and utilise it to navigate the world safely. This is where yous find most of the actual gameplay, every bit you use the tablet to solve puzzles and manipulate other hosts from Sweetwater. There is no combat though, so when something vehement comes your way, your but form of action is to hide.

Like near Survios games, movement happens by combining button grips and swaying your hands by your sides. The motion controllers give a fairly natural motility experience which is uniquely Survios at this signal, but this game has an added mechanic. If you lot place your hand on a surface and move up or downwardly in the existent world, you can hunker and hibernate under tables with ease. This quickly becomes of import, every bit everything from crazed villains and Delos special operatives stalk you through the globe.

The puzzles in Westworld Enkindling ramp up in difficulty as you travel through the world, and rely securely on your ability to react chop-chop when instructed to do so. At its core, this game was built for VR arcade, so the rapid increase in difficulty makes some sense. But at the stop of the day, the existent claiming is keeping from being distracted when you see something you recognize from the show as the guy with the meat cleaver stalks you lot downward a darkened hallway scattered with bodies.

Westworld Awakening: The Bad

I of the actually great things about many Survios VR titles is the way they are designed to be consumed in smaller bites. Information technology makes these titles perfect for quickly sharing with friends at a party or selling 20-minute experiences through 1 of the many VR arcades Survios works with. But Westworld Enkindling is so adept information technology begs for a longer story.

There's no dainty fashion to say this, $30 is a large ask for less than 3 hours of actual gameplay in a home gaming environs.

You won't find i here, unfortunately. My starting time trip through the game was completed in under two and a half hours. I didn't do most equally much exploring as I should have in the early parts. Nonetheless, my second playthrough is already likely to be considerably longer as a event. If you want to consume this story in a single pass, you easily could. It'southward unlikely to matter much to the VR Arcade folks, who are going to exist fashion more focused on how absurd it is to be in this world. For me, at home, information technology was kind of a bummer.

I'm also not super happy with some of the narrative interactions in the game. At i betoken Kate is being instructed to hide from one of the killers, and after a moment or two, the character stops chasing your footsteps and starts looking for you on the other side of the room. But on more than 1 occasion during this section of the game, Kate would utter, "I think he's gone now" when the grapheme in question was non only however in articulate view, simply still actively looking for me on the other side of the room. I don't feel like this impacted gameplay a ton, but it made me second gauge near of the other reaction-based decisions you lot're asked to brand later in the game.

I should besides note Westworld Awakening starts past asking you lot to cull between ane of iii difficulty levels. The easiest and most difficult tiers explicitly claim to make the villains in the game more than or less observant and vehement. I have been playing in the eye difficulty so far, merely even here it's clear; the villain needs to get a full-torso look at y'all earlier deciding to appoint you. This makes peeking effectually corners more fun, but information technology'southward not immediately clear what impact may have been had on the narrative triggers.

Should you buy Westworld Awakening?

In that location's no squeamish way to say this, $30 is a big inquire for less than three hours of actual gameplay in a home gaming surround. Bated from that, Westworld Awakening is ane of the most emotionally engaging VR games I've ever played. Experiencing Westworld through the optics of a host is terrifying, and at several points, I could feel my heart race as I hid under virtual tables while someone passed me past. The combination of Survios' unique VR move mechanic and a wrecked Delos lab full of bodies makes you genuinely feel like you lot're running for your life for a couple of moments, which is genuinely thrilling.

If you lot're a fan of Westworld and you enjoy the scarier things in life, buy this game. Yous won't regret a moment of it.

Such fierce ends

Westworld Enkindling

You're going to become murdered.

Accept a trip through Westworld every bit a host, and journey through the darker parts of this HBO serial. Attempt to solve your own series of puzzles from inside the larger maze we all know and wish nosotros understood.

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