Arca’s Path VR
PSVR, Rift, Vive
Within six months, Arca’s Path has gone from the most relaxing thing at E3 to the most stressful VR game we’ve played since The Persistence. Perhaps it was ever thus, and we’d been lulled into a false sense of tranquillity: its benign opening certainly suggests a different kind of game to the one it ends up as. You could call it a momentumbased 3D platformer, or an arthouse Super Monkey Ball. Using your head alone, you guide a not-quite-spherical polyhedron around angular environments. You’ll look left and right to roll in that direction, nod your head to bring it towards you, and lift your chin to move into the screen. The closer your viewing reticle is to the ball, the slower it’ll move; stare straight at it and it’ll come to a complete standstill, even on steep ramps.
It’s a fascinating world, at once alluring yet not exactly welcoming. There are no direct threats – at least not until much later – but the fear of falling is tangible, with VR making those long, barrier-free sections more vertiginous still. But as you bumble about in the early stages, it’s a delight to behold: striking and wonderfully alien, with plants and flowers unfolding like stopmotion origami. You soon realise it’s an elegant solution to pop-up, but it works when you’re taking your time – In theory, this is one of the less physically demanding VR games. But the twitchy movement means you need to keep your head relatively still for long periods of time. After an hour or so we are left with a stiff neck albeit less so when you’re moving at speed and objects suddenly appear from nowhere. But the ambience is ruined by bizarrely jittery sound design, all scratches, bleeps and squawks, with a high-pitched whine as you approach the end of a stage. Your avatar makes a sound like a revving engine: it’s a constant irritant, and yet turning the spot effects off only results in an absence of feedback. The experimental score, meanwhile, is both repetitive and oddly unsettling, surely better suited to some kind of avant-garde horror game.
Occasionally, it gets your heart rate up in a good way: there are moments of nervy navigation down tricky paths, with tilting sections and cracked blocks that collapse if you’re moving too fast. Elsewhere, it feels like a thrilling extreme sports sim, with long slopes and half-pipes to speed down, with precariously positioned crystals (snagging all of these unlocks a time trial mode for the current stage) teasing you towards the edges. But several challenges are disappointingly mundane, including clumsily nudging blocks to clear a path forward, and others are needlessly exacting. Then it leans on time-worn techniques to delay the end; checkpoints are fewer and further between, and there’s a bit of forced stealth to pad out some otherwise relatively easy final stages. For a while, Arca’s Path promises to be a new kind of VR game, but in the end its problems are all too familiar.