ALICE VR

ALICE VR is first-person adventure game for PC set in science-fiction world, developed for virtual reality goggles. Its prototype has been created for VR Jam contest, organized by Oculus and Unity companies. After it reached last round of finals and received a lot of positive feedback, it has been decided to make it into full-scale game. The developers are Carbon Studio, established by former employees of The Farm 51, who previously worked on graphics in mobile productions, and architectural visualizations.

Plot

Though the story of ALICE VR takes a lot from Lewis Carroll’s famous novel Alice in Wonderland, it takes us into science-fiction world. Our character has been forced to land on an unknown planet to refill ship’s supplies of graphene. This simple task gets complicated when we learn that all of the planet’s inhabitants have disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Now we need to solve various riddles and uncover the secret of the lost locals, and in turn shape their future.

Mechanics

We see the world from the first person perspective, the gameplay mainly focuses on exploration and solving puzzles. We visit many visually varied locations, such as the interiors of a futuristic ship, or an oriental city of alien civilization. Due to planet’s changing gravity, we can also walk on walls and ceilings, which is an interesting feature. Puzzles that await us are inspired by Alice in Wonderland, requiring shrinking or enlarging ourselves to reach otherwise unattainable places. The game is nonlinear and offers many alternative paths that will lead us to one of a couple of endings. This means we can’t experience in a single playthrough everything that ALICE VR has to offer, it’s required to finish the game more than once to fill up all the blank spots in the plot.

Technical aspects

ALICE VR for PC has been created using the advanced Unreal Engine 4 – a basic tool for those developing virtual reality games. While the title has been developed for Oculus Rift and Oculus Touch controller (support for other devices was added in later updates), ALICE VR can be played in a traditional way – though obviously that will rob us from majority of the experience.

Last updated on March 25, 2016