In Death: Unchained review: a cool VR rogue-lite game
It’s a while I haven’t written a gaming review on this blog, so let’s break this long time interval with the review of one of the cool new games for the Oculus Quest: “In Death: Unchained”.
In Death is a famous VR game for PC by Solfar Studios, and the game has been recently ported to Quest by the startup Superbright, for a new title that has been called “In Death: Unchained”.
Let’s see how it is!
In Death: Unchained video review
If you want to admire a video review of this game, where I share my impressions and also 10 minutes of gameplay, you can watch this Youtube video of mine!
Otherwise, go on reading for the usual detailed written review!
Gameplay
In Death: Unchained is a rogue-lite game. Like all the games in this genre, it means that you have to go through procedurally generated levels, fighting until you die. When you die, you start again from scratch. It’s a frustrating kind of gameplay, and as we’ll see, it is made also more frustrating by the unforgiving nature of In Death.
You start in a hall called The Sanctuary where you can see your achievements and your position in the global classifications (that is always lower than you hoped for). There you take your weapon (at the beginning there is only a bow and arrow, but if you play enough, you unlock the crossbow), then you start your adventure going through a door that leads to the “Purgatory”, that is the only level that is unlocked since the beginning. If you finish the “Purgatory” that you are still alive, you enter into the more difficult “Paradise Lost” level, and if you win it, you can enter “The Abyss”. In case you manage to win all those ones, the loop begins again, and you access the more difficult “Purgatory II”, then “Paradise Lost II”, and so on until you die. If you die, next time you have to start from scratch again. The game tracks your progress, and if you manage to win the Purgatory enough times, the game will create shortcuts to The Abyss and Paradise Lost worlds directly into the starting hall (The Sanctuary).
The game is all about going through corridors and halls and fight enemies. The game is set in a medieval underworld, and your enemies are so cursed knights, archers, skeletons, ghosts. Some of them will try to fight you in a close battle (e.g. the knights armed with an axe), while others (like the archers) will try to defeat you from a distance. You have to use your bow or your crossbow to kill them and go through your road until you reach the portal that leads to the final boss of each world. For the first level, the Purgatory, the boss is Anakim the Abominable, and it is a big monster that will hurt you a lot if you are close to him.
The game is a bit repetitive because everything you do is just walking through the corridors and the halls, shooting enemies one after the other. After a while you do it, it starts to become a bit dull and repetitive: there is no exploration of the environment, no plot, no NPC, no strategy you can use, there are no ammo boxes to open, nothing. You just walk forward, press the trigger, and kill. You can just occasionally loot some bonus arrows or a health powerup from the dead enemies, but these are not given you often. And since it is a rogue-lite when you die, you have to re-do everything from scratch, and it seems to you that you live in a big loop like the one of “Groundhog Day”, and you just re-do the same actions again and again, just to end always with the same fate: death.
At the same time, I have to say that the game is variated enough that I kept playing it for 3-4 hours and I still want to play it now. Solfar and Superbright have been very good in implementing the level generation logic so that it gives you a sense of progress in these ways:
- The levels are generative, so they don’t look always the same between two different play sessions. First of all the geometry is different, so the halls and the corridors have different shapes and directions. Then, the enemy number and type gets generated random and also gets calibrated on the ability of the player: the stronger you become, the more difficult the levels become, so you always feel challenged by In Death;
- The more you unlock achievements, the more new bonus arrows are unlocked for the looting. In the beginning, you can only use standard arrows, but then, after you unlock some achievements, you can use freezing ones, inflammable ones, lightning ones, and so on. The more you discover new arrows, the more you want to try them and discover new ways to optimize your play sessions by choosing every time the right arrow type to kill the bunch of enemies you have in front of you;
- At the same time, the more you go on, new enemies get generated. So you start your first play sessions only with archers and some knights, but after some time you start fighting also with ghosts and skeletons. The generated enemies are of types that are increasingly difficult to defeat and this helps in keeping the levels challenging.
In my play sessions until now, there’s always been something new to discover. So I found the game repetitive in the walking&shooting mechanic, but I never found it repetitive on the challenge I had to perform. At a certain point, after I have bought an item from the Reliquary, I have unlocked a new mini-level called the “Pit of Reformation” that I could access through a portal inside the world of the Purgatory. There are five “Pits” inside In Death and they represent very difficult mini levels that feature side challenges if you want to exit the loop of Purgatory-Lost Paradise-Abyss. They’re very useful to add variation to the play sessions as well (you may choose to enter there and have a different challenge from the usual one, or just go on for the standard path).
Being rogue-lite, you can’t save the game and you can’t restore the game from a certain point, with the only exceptions of the towers of the Reliquary. During the game, sometimes you arrive in a long corridor that gives access to a tower. If you enter the tower, you enter the shop of the Reliquary, from which you can buy special types of arrows and health bonuses by using the gold that you are awarded for each enemy that you kill. Notice that the gold is valid only per single session, so it doesn’t accumulate during play sessions, and this means that from the Reliquary you usually can buy just one or two items. If you are in the tower of the Reliquary, you can exit the application and save your progress so that the next time you open the game, you can re-start from that point. But notice that it is just a temporary save point: once you load the match and you die, you have to restart from scratch again.
The game is very challenging, and a bit too unforgiving. When you shoot the enemies, you have to really hit their bodies, and the arrow can pass even at 1cm from the head of the enemy without hurting him, and this is a problem considering how it is difficult to have a good aim with bow and arrow in VR. You have only 6 health points, with sometimes a +1 left from the enemies here and there (maybe 2-3 times during a whole match). If you are not careful, when you go on through the levels, it is easy to die if you have to face a big horde of enemies that include archers, ghosts, and knights. The big boss, Anakim, is very difficult to kill, and personally I have not been able to defeat it even once. He’s big, he’s surrounded by foes of every possible kind, and you still have just a little bow to kill him. And if you fail in slaying him, you have to spend 30 minutes to go through all the Purgatory again just to go back to him. This is frustrating.
The Pit Of Reformation side quest is very hard, and the skeleton enemies there, together with the ghosts, teleport wherever they want, and maybe they start killing you from your back, so before you even realize who is hitting you, maybe you have only 1hp left. On one side, this makes me feel very challenged, and makes me want to play the game again, while on the other side I find it frustrating, because I haven’t understood yet how could I win.
As for the combat mechanics, you have the bow or the crossbow, that can hold various arrow types and then you can also trigger a shield. The bow can shoot infinite standard arrows, while the other special arrows are offered only in limited quantities: you buy them from the Reliquary or you loot them from dead enemies (they become pretty abundant while you make progress in the game, though, because you would die in no time using only the standard arrows when the game enemies become too much). While you choose the arrow to load, the game enters in bullet time (slow motion), and you can use this trick to take some moments to think about how to defeat the current wave of enemies. When you trigger the shield, you can defend yourself from the enemies’ arrows or melee attacks, but at the same time you can’t load and shoot arrows. So either you attack or you defend.
As for if it is better the bow or the crossbow… well, bow and arrow are cool, and the shooting movement is always the coolest to be performed in VR, but aiming and shooting is more difficult, also because the tracking of the Oculus Quest sometimes misinterprets the position of your right hand that is pulling the arrow, resulting in a bad aim. This is because the Quest doesn’t track well your hand when it is on the side of your headset. Crossbow is easier to handle (it is like using a pistol), so in the end, it was my favorite weapon. In any case, in the first iterations of the game, you have to understand how to aim at enemies, and it takes a while to master, but after a while, you get used to shooting arrows and you will be also able sometimes to perform a headshot from a long distance! After many hours into the game, though, I’m still not as good as I would like to in shooting and I prefer to kill enemies at a short-medium distance.
I forgot to say that when you start your game there is a long tutorial that explains you all the basic mechanics of the game (shooting, teleporting, etc…), that is very well made and makes you practice with the game controls. What I haven’t liked is that after the tutorial, there is nothing explaining to you the more advanced things of the game. For instance, I thought that the towers of the Reliquary were just places where to save and exit, and I hadn’t understood that I could buy items; it would have also very difficult for me to understand how to kill ghosts alone (you have to shoot them at the heart), and I had to read it in the game guide that Superbright provided me. Probably some more in-game tooltips would have been better to explain to the player what he/she should do.
Graphics
The game has a very beautiful underworld setting that reminds the Middle Ages. The places you walk on are like stone bridges of castles (what I called before “the corridors”) and small sanctuaries with colored mirrors and evocative statues of angels and demons (what I called before “the halls”). The graphics put the player directly in a setting that looks damned, a bit scary, but also artistic, that seems taken directly from a medieval book. I personally liked it a lot, it put me immediately in the mood of the game.
The original In Death had beautiful graphics and you may ask me how they hold well on Quest. I think that Superbright has made a great optimization job. The graphics are simplified from the PC version (there are a lot fewer details), but if you haven’t looked at the PC version before, you just think that they are nice. The quality is very good to be a game running on a mobile device.
What I have found a bit disappointing was:
- There are visible LOD levels, and I could see the 3D elements changing from their simplified to their more complex version abruptly;
- To reduce the number of rendered stuff, the fog levels are over 9000. You basically walk on bridges that look like immersed in a completely white space, and you can’t see much distant from you. It is like the places you walk on are in the middle of nothing, and this sometimes is a bit weird. Also it is not always easy to spot the very distant enemies because they are immersed in the fog.
Audio
The audio is like the graphics: very well made, and great to put you into the mood of the game since the beginning: when you open the game, you start hearing some medieval religious chant and you immediately feel like a damned soul.
Sound fx are also very useful to help you during the game, for instance to let you understand if you have shot an enemy or killed him.
Locomotion
The game’s main locomotion method is arrow-based locomotion. If you haven’t heard about it before it is because it is very peculiar to this game. You load a teleporting arrow into your bow, you shoot the arrow, and you teleport where it lands. This lets you move freely to wherever you want to go, letting you go also to the roofs (to gain an advantage against some enemies being at lower floors), or through different buildings. The disadvantage is that since aiming is not easy, you can’t be precise, and you don’t always land exactly where you want to be.
You can also dodge attacks throwing something like a mini boomerang with your right hand that lets you make slight movements in all directions so that you can dodge an arrow or a sword. I never understood properly how to use it and as soon as I activated smooth locomotion, I’ve completely forgotten about it.
Going to the game menus, you can activate smooth locomotion. And after you have activated it, you never go back, because apart from moving, it is also very useful to dodge arrows and other attacks of the enemies. It gives you an unfair advantage over not having locomotion, and my advice is to activate it since the first minute into the game. This locomotion method doesn’t remove the teleporting arrows, so you can mix the two methods as you want.
Regarding the movements of the player in general, we all know that the Oculus Quest allows for a completely free movement of the user, and the “unchained” adjective in the name of this game underlines it. But since this is a porting of a PC VR game, that should have been playable also from Rift’s front-facing setups, I found the game a bit static. I almost never exploited room-scale, and most of the time I just stood in a point and shoot. Sometimes I even used the snap-rotation feature offered by the thumbstick to avoid rotating my body, so in the end, the game didn’t exploit the freedom of movement offered by the Quest that much.
Input
The game features various actions that you can perform using your controllers:
- Grab an arrow and shoot it through the bow or crossbow;
- Select the type of arrow that you want to grab;
- Select a teleporting arrow;
- Trigger the “mini-boomerang” to dodge the enemy attacks;
- Make the shield to appear and control it with your left hand;
- Grab the bonuses left by the dead enemies;
- Move with smooth locomotion;
- Perform a snap turn.
I admit that at the beginning I found all these actions pretty confusing, and more often than I wanted, I evocated the shield instead of grabbing a new arrow to be put in the crossbow. All those actions are associated with different buttons of the left or the right controller, and remembering the correct sequence every time is challenging. The more I went on, the more I got used to the control scheme, but in the end, in the frenetic moments of the battles, when 5 enemies were around me trying to slay me, I still made errors about what was the right button to press. I think that the actions should have been a bit simplified.
Comfort
Since the game can be played all with teleportation mechanics, it is suitable for all stomaches out there. I think no one can suffer motion sickness with In Death. Also the smooth locomotion is very slow, makes you move at a constant speed and is absolutely not nausea-inducing.
Anyway I wouldn’t define the game completely “comfortable” for two reasons:
- The Oculus Quest is itself uncomfortable. While this is not the game developers’ fault, it is anyway annoying that every 1-2 hours into the game you have to take a break because the Quest is compressing your skull;
- Performing continuously the bow and arrow movement is very tiresome for the arms. The game is much more comfortable with the crossbow, but anyway expect to sweat a bit while playing this game!
Immersion
The very nice visuals and sounds give In Death a very believable setting, increasing the sense of immersion. The game always feeling new at each iteration, and the difficulty always calibrated on your actual capabilities helps in keeping you in a flow state that gives presence. When I’m inside “In Death”, I lose the sense of time, and I’m really into the game. I think it is a very immersive game.
Final review
In Death: Unchained is a very good porting of In Death to the Oculus Quest. It is a game that is always repetitive, very difficult, and completely frustrating, but this is what most rogue-lite games are. It is typical of this genre, that always forces the player to die and return from the beginning. If the genre is not for you, then In Death is not the game you’re looking for.
But if you like rogue-lite games, I think that for the great variation of enemies it offers, the side quests (the Pits), the generative levels, and the calibration of the difficulty depending on your skills, In Death: Unchained is a game you really should consider buying. It is well-conceived, and it offers a good degree of variation between each game session, a sense of progression through the achievements, and the unlocking of new enemies and weapons that keeps you playing for hours without you even noticing. I got lost in the game while playing it.
I’m not a huge fan of rogue-lite games, but in the end, I had a lot of fun playing In Death, and this is the most important thing in a game. So my advice is to consider buying it. You can find it on the Oculus Store for 29,99€. I hoped for a smaller price (maybe €19.99), but I think that the developers valued the long replayability of the game.
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(Header image by Superbright)
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