Groundhog Day: Like Father, Like Son review: a nice but frustrating VR game

Yesterday I have been able to try the game “Groundhog Day: Like Father, Like Son” by Tequila Works and Sony Pictures Virtual Reality. I really wanted to try this game, because I have enjoyed a lot the original movie with Bill Murray, but after my test, I have actually come out with mixed impressions.

(WARNING: mild spoilers ahead)

The story

“Groundhog Day: Like Father, Like son” is a game in the universe of the famous movie “Groundhog Day“, with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. In the movie, Phil Connors (that is Bill Murray) is a cynical weatherman that is being sent to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to talk about the festivity for the Groundhog Day. He is not happy about that, and this is not a secret. After he arrives, and has a bad day, he wakes up the day after discovering that he is living the same day again. And this fate continues, until he manages to fix all the bad things happened during the bad day, also thanks to the experience he can get by living the same day again and again (e.g. he can become good in playing piano because he can spend lots of dollars for piano lessons, because in the end, he will re-live the same day, with the same money, the morning after). It was a very nice movie, with some hilarious moments… and a lot of deaths ( Phil Connors tries to die to break the loop, but then he wakes up again the morning after).

The VR game is not a remake of the movie, or well, a bit it is, but it actually it is not. In the game, you are Phil Jr., the son of the main character of the movie, and you follow a similar destiny.

Like your father, you are called to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to participate in a celebration for your now-dead father, for which the city has built a statue. Exactly like your father, you have no willing to go there, but you go anyway because you are a vlogger and want to sell this story to get visibility and also some money. And exactly like your father, you have a day in which lots of bad things happen and lots of people are disappointed, and then you continue living again your day, time after time, until you fix everything.

So, basically, this is how it stands in regard to the movie

I sincerely appreciated the fact they didn’t try to re-make the movie in VR, because I think that I would have spent the whole time making comparisons. This way, I just took it as a different story, with different characters, and I could enjoy it.

Gameplay

“Groundhog Day: Like Father, Like son” makes you live five scenes that go from when you wake up in the morning, to when you finish your evening before going to sleep, of course also living the moment of the celebration for your father.

In every scene, there is a fragment of 5-10 minutes of life, that will revolve around a particular episode (e.g. your niece having a quarrel with her parents). In these contexts, you will interact with people around you and with the objects around you. There are lots of dialogues in this game. During the dialogues, you have the options of choosing how to answer, but most of the time, whatever you choose will have always the same outcome. For instance, during the initial phone call, whatever you say, you will always end up with a nice “f**k you Phil” told by your girlfriend, that will make you start your day in a wonderful way.

The dialogues are nice the first time to discover the story, and for instance to discover that you are an irreverent person and you don’t care that much about the people around you, but just think about your own interests. You hurt all the people around you, and that is for instance something that I haven’t liked about the game, because it was bad impersonating such a person in VR. I didn’t like to offend the people around me. I think the creators thought those sarcastic answers as something funny, but I hardly laughed because of the insults of Phil… maybe for the sentences, or maybe for his tone… I don’t know.

But the worst thing about the dialogues are the dialogues themselves. You have to repeat them EVERYTIME you repeat a scene. And while every game involving a loop is frustrating (P.T. is the same, for instance), if a game involves a loop where there are dialogues you can’t skip, which are every time similar (there are some slight differences that the devs have introduced), it’s incredibly boring. There are some shortcuts appearing later on in the game, but in my opinion, they are not enough. A game lasting for around 5 hours for just 5 scenes is a bit too much for me.

Dialogues don’t happen only in the real world, but also via your tablet. You can summon a tablet in your hand, and have a talk with some people that will call you. These dialogues are important also for the development of the story.

In every scene, there are some objects you can interact with: e.g. during the breakfast scene, you can use all the objects in the kitchen, and so you can cook an egg with bacon, drink the juice in the fridge, and so on. You see what objects are interactive because they become yellow-ish when your hand touches them. Sometimes grabbing them is not easy (e.g. sometimes the system mistook me trying to grab a juice with me trying to close the door of the fridge holding it), but most of the time I had no particular issues. Interactions with objects are fun, also because the system lets you do what you want, and this increases the realism. Interacting with objects you can also discover information, and so you are also incentivized to explore the scenes you are in. Notice that however not all objects are interactive.

You can also interact with your tablet, that can be used to have phone calls, to see what are the objectives that you have reached to make your day perfect and what others have still to be fulfilled, to see the map of the city and to take pictures.

You can also die in this game, exactly as Bill Murray did in the movie, but suicide happens only with some tools, and it is not very funny.

The various interactive objects and the tablet improved a lot the realism for me, I felt more immersed thanks to them. There is a moment where I did the vlog for the event by turning on the tablet and speaking while filming the world around me and it felt a bit like in real life… awesome. Also, the situations that Tequila Works has created are somewhat immersive themselves: thanks to the dialogues, the scenes around you are alive. In the first scene, being with all those people screaming around me, I really felt as a host inside a house where a family is quarreling. I loved that.

Using the dialogues, but mostly using the objects you find in each scene, you can solve the puzzles and so make all the people around you happy. The more you will re-play the scenes, the more you will understand what you have to do. And if you don’t get it, after some iterations the system will give you a huge help, showing you what to do, suggesting you where to teleport and by giving you huge hints (you will hear Phil jr. think and say things like “ah, I could use this object to do this thing” and you will understand what to do). While the hints are great to let the player finish the game, IMHO they are too explicit, and so de facto they solve the enigmas for the player, depriving him from the satisfaction of having won the game alone.

After each scene, whatever the ending, you will see a series of screenshots from the social media account of Phil jr., plus the comments of his followers. Of course, these posts will depend on what has happened, for the good or the bad. This is a very original idea, and I found it pretty cool, also because it is nice to create a bridge between the different scenes. Anyway, I found them another slow thing that can happen between the various re-iterations of the scene.

While you watch them, you are able to repeat the scene, or go on with your day, notwithstanding your success or failure. Re-living a single scene is a nice shortcut for avoiding re-living the whole day every time you make an error.

The more you go on, the more you will repeat the game and make people around you happy, the more you will also become a better person that cares about the people around him. This is a positive touch of the game.

Locomotion + Input

In every room you are in, you can move by using teleportation to fixed locations. It is nice that instead of showing you the classical arc with a circle in the end, Tequila Works has opted for a silhouette of Phil Jr that shows the position where you will teleport to, paired with his exact destination pose (e.g. if you teleport on the sofa, you will find yourself seated, and so you see the silhouette of a seated Phil Jr.). You can’t teleport everywhere, but only in fixed locations. Personally, I was very ok with this locomotion mode: it is completely nausea-free, and it hints you about the locations where you can do things that are useful to make you solve the enigmas. Free locomotion would have let you more freedom, making it harder to understand what you should do.

Since the game is very long and all the interactions always happen close to your teleporting position, some VR magazines advise the player to stay seated, and I can only say that I agree with them.

You can grab objects and interact with them with your main index trigger (I’m talking about the Oculus Touch, of course) and then activate teleport and show the tablet by using the two buttons (X/Y) of the controller. I continuously chose the wrong button, and so summoned the tablet when I wanted to teleport… so I think that this input scheme has not been a great choice (why haven’t they used the thumbstick to teleport like all other games?)

Graphics

Personally, I have enjoyed the graphics of the game. They are cartoon-like and well made. Yes, there are some glitches here and there (like a girl drinking a smoothie from a glass with a cap on!), but generally they were nice. It is not an AAA-style graphic, but I think that it is not necessary for this title. This is a game where you have to enjoy the story and the enigmas, not the realistic graphics. The graphics must be cute and informal, like the original movie, and so it is.

Special mention for all the cute groundhogs drawn here and there in the app, starting from the one in the title of the game. This game is really full of marmots!

Final impressions

“Groundhog Day: Like Father, Like son” is for sure a well-made title, with a cool IP, a nice story, an original loop-based gameplay and cute graphics. It is worth the money for its quality. It also lasts 5 hours, so the game is far from being short.

But honestly, it is not my genre. I have sometimes smiled while playing this title, but I never laughed. I never felt empathy for Phil Jr., I just wanted to remove his body from mine, because we were not a nice fit the one for the other. And I found the game incredibly frustrating: spending more than one hour just for the first scene, re-living the same dialogues again and again was too much for me. There is a limit for frustration, and if you game developer make me pass it, I don’t enjoy playing anymore.

This is why in the beginning I told you that I had mixed feelings: the game has lots of pros, but the few cons that it has made it not enjoyable for me.

But if you are into this kind of enigma-based loop games, I think you can love it. You can find the game for $29.99 on Steam, Oculus Store, PS Store.

(Header image by Tequila Works)