SIF: My reviews of Bonfire, Ello Echo, Home After War and Ayahuasca!

In today’s recap of my favorite experiences of Sandbox Immersive Festival, I will talk you about Baobab Studios‘s latest creation Bonfire, the cute Ello Echo, the harsh Home After War and the trippy Ayahuasca! If you are into immersive storytelling, I’m sure you will love these experiences…

Bonfire

Bonfire is a funny story by Baobab Studios. Baobab Studios is well-known in the VR ecosystem since it is the studio behind amazing VR experiences like “Invasion!”, “Crow: The Legend” and many others. Every creation of its has always been very interesting and Bonfire is no exception to this rule.

In Bonfire, you are a space scout that is visiting a planet to see if it is suitable for the life of human beings. We are in the future and people will have to evacuate from Earth, so they are looking for another planet in the outer space where to move.

Your spaceship has some problems, so you crash on this planet. During the crash, your robo-assistant Debbie loses a wheel, but she’s still functional. It’s night, so you light a bonfire in the forest and you two start staying there, while an alien approaches you. It’s all very dark, so at the beginning it may seem scary, but in the end you discover that it is a very cute creature that just wants to have fun and to eat.

After some funny moments with Debbie and Pork Bun (this is the name you give the alien), you will have to decide (SPOILER ALERT!) if you want the humankind to occupy this planet, killing all the existing creatures (including Pork Bun) or telling the HQ that this planet is not suitable, so mankind will have to look for another planet (if there will be one). The decision that you will take will change the final. Personally, I have decided to save Pork Bun… he was too cute!!

There have been mainly four reasons why I really loved Bonfire.

The first one is the high production quality. Graphical assets are great, animations are great, the story is great, the voices are great (e.g. Debbie has been dubbed by popular actress Ali Wong). Everything is great.

The second one is the sense of “community” it fostered in me. I was sitting on a chair in real life and I was sitting next to the fire in VR. Around me, there was my robot Debbie and my new alien friend Pork Bun. Being there, eating with them, talking with them, playing with them around the virtual heat of the fire was really like an intimate experience. Especially because I loved them all: Debbie was nice with me and Pork Bun was overly cute, like a dog puppy. It was for me like being around a fire on the beach with some friends. This helped me a lot in creating a sense of commonality with the virtual characters, I really felt a bond with them.

The third one has been the amazing interactions. The experience features some interactions, that of course, make you feel more part of the story since you become an agent, not only a viewer of what happens. I loved the interactions because they were well inserted into the story, they were coherent and didn’t feel artificial.

They felt incredibly natural: at a certain point, the cute alien wanted to play fetch with me, so I started throwing him some cylinders similar to marshmallows. He ran and gave them back to me, and I had fun playing with him and this also increased my bond with him. But the best moment has happened when I faked launching one (as I sometimes do with dogs) and the alien reacted exactly like a real-life dog, looking in the direction I was pretending to throw it and then acting confused. I was amazed by it. When at a certain point, a big alien approached me and ate Debbie, my instinctive reaction has been the one of defending her, so I did what I would have done in real life, getting a big piece of wood from the bonfire and throwing it against the alien. And it worked! All these interactions, that were so similar to real life, increased a lot the sense of presence in me.

The fourth and last reason for which I loved this experience is the positive atmosphere. Bonfire is very relaxing, it is funny, it is lovely. Even if there are themes like mankind extinction, defending yourself from evil aliens and such, everything is always treated with irony and fun. There’s never tension, so it is good to be watched both by kids and adults to have some minutes of fun.

In my opinion, Bonfire is the best experience created by Baobab Studios until now. I sincerely advise you to watch it.

Ello Echo

Ello Echo is one of the cutest VR experiences I have tried at Sandbox Festival.

It is the story of a cute creature that lives on a little asteroid traveling in the outer space. Of course, he feels alone, so he tries to contact some other creatures in all possible ways: with his voice, with some messages in a bottle and with some big lights saying “Ello” to everyone that could see them. He never succeeds in his efforts, so he feels very lonely and sad. His struggle to find new friends take him to put even his life at risk, and then… well, I won’t tell you how it ends.

The story reminded me a lot of Oculus Studio’s Henry. The similarities are many, especially the common theme of the lonely and sad creature looking for friends. So, I won’t tell you that the story is original, but it is enjoyable nonetheless.

Ello Echo is a realtime rendered experience and it features cartoon graphics that are quite cute to watch. Everything seems made of play dough. He is very little and lovely as well… and this is why you will have a cuteness overload while watching it.

There are also some interactions to be performed: I don’t think that they are fundamental for the story (it could have been the same even with no interactions), but I appreciated the fact that they tried to do them in an original way. For instance, at a certain point, you have to wake the creature by screaming with your voice and this is something that is quite original in a VR experience (even if a bit embarassing to be performed in an exhibition…)

Ello Echo has not been my favorite experience at SIF, but for sure I loved spending my time in that.

Home After War

If Ello Echo was all about cuteness, Home After War was all about sadness. It is an experience that narrates you the problem of the “booby-traps” that have become common in war zones.

Home After War narrates the story of Ahmaied, an Iraqi man that has escaped from this home when ISIS has conquered Fallujah. When his city gets freed, he returns his home, to discover that his and all other people’s houses have been filled by “booby-traps”. These are rudimentary explosive traps made with all possible materials that the IS has put in all the houses of people that have gone away from the country.

This means that when Ahmaied returns to his house, he doesn’t know what it is safe to be touched. These traps can be everywhere: in the kitchen, under the beds, in the kids’ toys… and can kill him or his family members in whatever moment of their daily life. Ahmaied can finally return to his house with his family, but his home is not a safe place anymore. And then, at a certain point, his sons go to another house to do a job, and they die because of one of these traps. Ahmaied dies inside because of this, and at the end of the experience, tells you his hopes for a world without war.

From a technical standpoint, Home After War features some interesting features. All the house of Ahmaied has been reconstructed with photogrammetry and so you can really feel as being there. You can move inside it… it is not just a set of 360 photo. Sometimes there are also 360 videos to show some typical moments of the life of an Iraqi family. Ahmaied has been recorded in a video file and he stays there, in front of you, narrating these sad moments of his life. For technical reasons, he can only be a 2D silhouette in front of you, and this breaks a bit the immersion, but apart from that, you have the sensation of being hosted in his house, of being really there, with him narrating you what is like living there. It is a bit like flying to Fallujah and see how it is living in a war zone.

For most of the experience, I wondered why this experience was in VR: this story could have been simply told with a 2D video and would have been interesting the same. Then, towards the end, I could see and hear the explosion of the booby-trap that has killed the sons of Ahmaied. A scent emitter also made me feel the smell of this explosion. After a flash, all the visuals became darker, and the Iraqi man started to cry in front of me. In that moment, I understood why this experience was in VR. This moment wouldn’t have been so powerful on a 2D screen. VR makes you feel how it is being a victim of one of this evil IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices).

Apart from the technical features, Home After War is astonishing for the efforts its creators put in realizing it. They flew to Fallujah, with all the logistic difficulties to go there. They listened to the stories that no one was interested in telling, because no one usually go there. They had to select one of these many sad and interesting stories. They had to record it, in a place that is still destroyed by the recent war. All just to tell us about this problem of the rudimentary explosive traps in war zones. Really kudos to them. It is an experience that deserves to be praised just for this.

Ayahuasca

Ayahuasca is a trippy VR experience. The experience has the same name of a drug, the Ayahuasca, that is used by some Amazon tribes as a traditional spiritual medicine.

I had to experience Ayahuasca while sit down on the floor. At the beginning of the VR experience, I saw a shaman in front of me singing some ceremonial chants, then my visuals started becoming distorted and then I started seeing a lot of hallucinations. I saw snakes, parts of the bodies, birds, fractals, skeletons and a lot of other weird stuff. It lasted like 20 minutes and it has been a trip inside the hallucinations that this drug causes in people trying it. After that, I saw again the shaman of the beginning and the adventure ended.

The visuals were well made and were quite creepy. I liked also the transitions between the various hallucinations… so maybe at a certain point you see skeletons, and various animations concerning them, then slowly these turns into snakes and so you start hallucinating about snakes. It is really like being into a disturbing dream. A guy that actually tried the Ayahuasca told me that the VR experience was very close to the effect that you have in real life.

The problem for me was that these virtual hallucinations were not associated with an altered state of mind, and the experience was not able to induce it via some kind of hypnotic techniques. This means that I watched 20 minutes of weird stuff without being drunk, high, hypnotized or whatever, so I found no sense in them. For this reason, I found Ayahuasca quite boring. Maybe the volunteers at SIF should have given us some bottles of beer before watching it to improve the experience. 😀

And that’s it! Have you tried these experiences? What is your opinion on them? Let me know here in the comments or on my social media channels!

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(Header Image by Baobab Studios)