Wilson’s Heart is Oculus’ most interesting VR misfire yet

When will a VR system finally get an honest-to-goodness adventure? Early adopters and curious onlookers continue to ask this question, wondering when they’ll get their own unique, hours-upon-hours mix of story, puzzles, battles, and thrills.

The closest answer up until now remains the incredible and memorable Resident Evil 7. However, that’s a bit of a cheat, since it launched primarily for normal TV displays with an optional, albeit awesome, VR mode attached. Thus, the hunt’s still on—and the folks at Oculus have been crowing for months about how their upcoming game Wilson’s Heart would do the trick.

I’m not just here to inform you that Oculus’s high-budget, high-production-value attempt missed the mark—especially for those readers who don’t own an Oculus and high-end PC to match. Rather, I’m interested in exploring just how this week’s new game, which once looked quite promising, slammed to Earth with melted wings on its back—and what that says for the current state of VR gaming.

You can Touch, just don’t move

Wilson’s Heart opens with you strapped to a mechanical device in an apparent hospital-slash-torture facility. Your character, a military vet, has no idea how he got here. Your mission is to figure out how to escape this place while figuring out various mysteries along the way (like, for example, why your normal, human heart was replaced with a mechanical, magical contraption).

At first, the systems for getting around and solving puzzles seem solid enough. Use your hands to grab, pull, lift, and move objects near you, or you can stick them into a temporary inventory hold for later use. Like other VR puzzle-solving games, you have to “teleport” to move around large rooms, but Wilson’s Heart specifically guides you. To move, look around whatever room you’re in until you see a ghost version of yourself. At that point, tap a button and you’ll warp to that spot.

You can only move to the exact places that the game developer permits, and these movement options usually change or disappear once you complete an objective. In some ways, this is comparable to a point-and-click game of old, where your view is limited to a single vantage point at any given time (and is littered with objects that you can interact with). Use and combine objects to solve little puzzles, step-by-step.

This results in a few awesome moments. For example, look at a mirror early on and you’ll see giant bolts in your forehead. You can reach up to these and just yank them out. That’s clever, as are a few moments in a painting-related puzzle where you pull your new, mechanical heart out of your chest to unleash super powers.

But the developers at Twisted Pixel fail the first major rule of VR: If your hands can reach a virtual object and you cannot “touch” or interact with it, then the realism is broken. Every spot you warp to is littered with random junk, and, in some cases, the objects you see (bottles, drawers) can all be touched, grabbed, or knocked over. But this is very rare. Instead, you’ll regularly see a bunch of surfaces and objects in front of you, but you can only interact with the glowing ones (and usually, only one thing glows per scene).

This sucks for two reasons: first, because it breaks the realism when your hand just magically goes through object after object; and second, because the puzzles very quickly boil down to “warp to an exact spot, look for flashing thing, manipulate it, repeat.”

Since you can’t freely wander, you’re pretty much always sailing straight toward puzzle solutions. This makes the rare exceptions, when a puzzle is tough, that much more maddening. In one hallway, I warped back and forth between the only nine available warp points over and over and over, trying to figure out what I should do next. Turns out, the thing I needed to do was in a place I had already warped to a few steps earlier in the puzzle chain; at that point, the object was grayed out. This happens a lot: The game doesn’t know how to demonstrate to players, “This thing will be touchable and useful soon but, uh, not yet.”

Tied in knots

This whole system isn’t just bad news for WH‘s puzzle quality. It’s also disorienting.

Oculus Touch, as sold to consumers, is designed for front-facing play. Its two sensor-cameras should be positioned within six feet of each other, as opposed to the Vive’s opposite-corner sensors. This limits your range of motion. Oculus doesn’t really want you spinning around in 360 degrees or walking around the room—hence, why Wilson’s Heart uses an auto-warping system.

But the places you warp are often all the way behind you. If you keep your feet planted, you’ll typically have to crane about 130 degrees in either direction to look for your next logical warping point. The game was designed for a lot of this motion, and it becomes uncomfortable quickly. But if you turn your entire body to look at things, then warp, the game will punish you in terms of perspective. Most of these warp points are set so that you stare directly at the important objects in that tiny vicinity. Meaning, you’ll always wind up turning your body back to the “default” position.

I found myself generally annoyed by and uncomfortable with Twisted Pixel’s solution to the Oculus Touch tracking problem. VR game designers should see this as a wake-up call: If your players must face forward in real life, due to tech restrictions, then make sure your virtual world caters to that. (Superhot VR and Robo Recall are great examples of this in action, and neither of those Oculus Touch games are as sluggish as Wilson’s Heart.)

Bad stories, bad puzzles

Should you simply not mind this control limitation—and your VR comfort mileage may indeed vary—WH‘s issues still pile up. Puzzles rarely deliver “a-ha” moments, mostly because the auto-warping and flashing-item systems combine to do most of the mental work for you.

The game’s creepiness factor hinges on predictable ’60s and ’70s horror-film stuff: jump scares; obvious musical lead-ups before something bad happens; and a few ominous, echo-y voices. Perhaps the designers felt like the game’s black-and-white visual limitation would add to the suspense. But honestly, I mostly felt like this got in the way of me appreciating the game’s giant, elaborate set pieces. These are some of the best things in the game—and ironically, they’re the hardest to appreciate. The general darkness of the scenery, in particular, makes distinguishing far-off details a challenge. (Need I remind you that players cannot just walk or zoom toward something to examine it more closely?)

That looks… nothing like Rosario Dawson.

Wilson’s Heart doesn’t just want you to pick up and place objects; you’re also expected to twist, pull, and rotate stuff. The game also wants you to pull off other one-time-only moves like cracking a door open with a crowbar. On a few occasions, trying to decipher the exact motion needed can be aggravating, especially when some of these require that you use two hands without any clear sign as to why.

Worse is when you have to throw objects, because a natural throw motion usually requires putting your hand behind your head or arm—and thus momentarily blocking the Oculus sensor from seeing your hand. In one instance, I kept dropping a freaking grenade at my feet. Once I figured out the tracking issue, I started “throwing” things by flicking them forward, like I was a member of the X-Men releasing a laser from my chest. This fake throwing always felt silly, not powerful.

It only gets worse. Every fight in Wilson’s Heart (a mix of fisticuffs, blocking, and the aforementioned throwing) takes forever. Fights require that you repeat the same couple of long wave patterns (typically boring ones) as many as six times. Twisted Pixel’s awful game Comic Jumper had similarly unsatisfying bosses, and the company clearly didn’t learn from it.

Also, WH has newspapers and fully illustrated comic books scattered around, and these are beautiful… but they’re impossible to read in VR. Oculus’s resolution is just not good enough for making out tiny comic-book lettering. I’ve never felt dumber than bonking my controller into my headset while trying to make out a sentence in a virtual comic book (which, thanks to the black-and-white scheme, is also usually not lit well enough).

Bad writing, bizarre casting

And then there’s the dialogue and story. This stuff is tedious on its own, with flat horror-movie archetypes taking forever to move the plot forward, all while revealing nothing interesting about themselves. But Wilson’s Heart is also surprisingly inconsistent. In one incredulous moment, a character confesses that he sometimes turns into a werewolf. Your own character starts mocking this confession, calling it “crazy.” This, uh, happens shortly after you’ve pummeled a half-man, half-bug with a frying pan, and after you were chased around this hospital by a murderous teddy bear come to life, and after you realized you have a mechanical heart that you can rip out of your own chest and shoot lasers out of.

But, whoa, turning into a werewolf? Coo-coo, buddy!

The plot, and its unsatisfying conclusions, all add up to something I’d much rather tap a button to skip… but you can’t do that. You have to stand still and face forward through quite a few ponderous, five-minute-long conversations, while wearing a VR headset and holding controllers, until the game thinks you’ve heard enough to move on.

Perfectly fine actors are wasted along the way, including Peter “Robocop” Weller as your own voice and Rosario Dawson as one of your main compatriots. By the way: Why did Twisted Pixel decide to render Dawson’s character as a white woman? Rosario Dawson (as you may have seen in dozens of film and TV roles, including every single Netflix Marvel series) is black, and this 1940s video game renders other characters as black. It’s not like we wouldn’t notice. Flabbergasting stuff.

At least it’s interesting? In an academic sense?

The designers make the most of the limited palette in some of the more gruesome scenes, at least.

Credit: Oculus Studios

The whole package is impressively underwhelming. Clearly, Oculus and Twisted Pixel poured time and money and time into Wilson’s Heart. But its mission of “accessible VR adventuring” seems more like an advertising bullet point than something that the game would ever actually pull off.

WH also makes me appreciate and respect the work by other top-notch VR developers in the “object-puzzle” and adventuring genres, particularly Call of the Starseed and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality. Those games have a few issues, mind you, but they make the most of VR’s limits, all while respecting—and feeding—the wild desire of players to just go buck-nuts inside of new, high-quality VR rigs. But then again, those examples were built for “room-scale” systems, where players can spin, turn, walk, and even kneel whenever they please.

Twisted Pixel will probably never learn from WH‘s mistakes. Comic Jumper, The Gunstringer, and Lococycle were riddled with the same kinds of pacing and repetition issues that Wilson’s Heart suffers from. Sorry, dudes. I loved some of your older games (especially ‘Splosion Man), but this was your shot at redemption, and you blew it.