Two days ago I have had the pleasure of experiencing Finding Pandora X, the creative work that has won the “Best VR Immersive User Experience” at the Venice Film Festival this year. It has been a very interesting experience, but unluckily I haven’t been allowed to shoot photos and videos (exactly like in theater), so in this review, I will try to use my words to make you imagine how it has been for me being there.
Finding Pandora X
Finding Pandora X is an immersive interactive theater experience designed and developed by Double Eye Studios, and sponsored by HP. In it, the user takes part in a journey to find the new Pandora. For sure you know the myth of Pandora, and here it is revisited in a different way: the “current Pandora” has died and the new one can’t be found, and with her, the box of Hope is missing. Because the hope is vanishing, also the gods of Olympus are disappearing and the two remaining ones are Zeus and Hera, who are now starting disappearing too. Pandora must absolutely be found to solve this situation, and the gods will be helped in this quest by the Greek Chorus guided by Cory, a group of mortal people inside which there is you, the viewer. Will you be able to help Zeus bring Hope back to the world?
Gameplay
Finding Pandora X is developed inside VRChat, a social VR ecosystem I know very well because together with VRrOOm I have hosted many events inside there (like the concert of Jean-Michel Jarre). Thanks to the features offered by VRChat, Finding Pandora can mix social interactions with interactivity with the world around you and so make you feel more immersed inside it. It is very good in exploiting all the features offered by VRChat so that to offer the best show possible.
The experience starts with you outside the Olympus, and you get greeted there by Hermes, that will teach you the basics of the experience, so how to wear your avatar (every user must wear the same avatar, that is the one of the members of the chorus), how to move, how to change the settings of VRChat, etc… I always appreciate it when there are people greeting me inside a new experience, and telling me how to use it… it makes it much easier all the process later on. It was a bit funny for me when Hermes congratulated me on being able to do basic tasks in VRChat (I’ve worked on it for one year!), but I understand that it is the right way to work with people that may be new to the social VR environment. It was also a great idea to have some tables inside this first hall because in the last minutes that we all were getting bored waiting for the show to start, Hermes and the other hosts let us sit down and have a friendly chat together. It was a nice moment that we spent all together.
After the gates opened, Cory started telling us why we should look for Pandora and then she guided us during the whole quest. I will try to not spoil much, so I will just tell you some things that happened during the experience. During the journey, we moved through different places all inspired by Greek Mithology, and in these environments basically we had to:
- Perform simple tasks (e.g. breaking something, looking for something). This was very good to increase the sense of immersion because interactivity always increases the sense of presence inside an experience. Just watching a show in VR may be nice, but if you can also do something, it becomes immediately more interesting. A big plus of this feature is that some tasks had to be performed in groups. This is amazing because it exploits completely the sense of a social VR environment: it makes you connect with other people and do something together. This can create bonds between people that have never met before, like I felt after I completed The Collider with a random Chinese girl;
- Listen to some characters talking. There were some moments that were really theatrical: for instance, there was a moment when Zeus and Hera started talking with each other, and we were there for minutes just watching them talking. In these moments it was to me like when I am in a theater and I watch the actors playing on stage… just without a stage between me and them. I found these moments a bit boring sometimes, but this is just a matter of personal taste (I’m more a Robo-Recall-guy): the acting was absolutely good, and also the dialogues were full of funny moments. The acting was a high-quality one;
- Speaking with the characters. This is an interactive experience, as the tagline for Finding Pandora X says, and it is interactive also in the dialogues. Multiple times people are asked to speak with the characters to provide ideas, give suggestions, solve riddles, etc... The good side is that you can decide how you want to enjoy the experience: no one will ever force you to talk, so if you want, you can just follow the group and enjoy the show, while the more extroverted people speak with the actors. The actors are very skilled in improvisational theater, so they are very good in answering whatever the users may say, and are always ready to say a good joke about what they are saying and doing.
You go through different environments helping Zeus and Hera in finding Pandora and you live amazing adventures with them and with the other users. As I said, this experience exploits VRChat at its fullest, and I loved how the actors continuously changed the avatar to reflect something happening to them (even if the loading times clearly showed the trick they were using). For instance, Zeus at a certain point became very big and he was scary!
After all the journey, the experience ends, but you can still enjoy a nice cocktail party with the actors, and hang there in a cocktail bar on Mount Olympus drinking, dancing, talking, and also flying (yes, you read it well!). It is a nice moment to have fun after the experience and also get to know better the amazing actors and the nice people you have enjoyed the experience with. The total time of the whole experience is more or less one hour, but if we consider the time spent before and after it, I can safely say that it is one hour and a half.
My impressions of the show
I have to say that in the first minutes I was not very fond of Fiding Pandora X. The first problem that I’ve noticed when I entered its world was the graphical quality. From an experience that has won an important award at the Venice Film Festival, I expected a bit more: the graphical elements look a bit indie, a bit rough, and not refined as I imagined. The graphical style is also a bit trippy, with very bright colors, that is absolutely not in line with the classical lines and colors of Ancient Greece. This is by design, as they are re-interpreting this ancient myth in a modern way, but it is not in line with my tastes.
UPDATE: Speaking with Lara Bucaray after the article has been published, she told me that this world is Quest-compatible, and I can confirm that making a VRChat world that is compatible with Quest and has beautiful graphics is incredibly hard. So now I understand better why this experience has not top-notch graphics, it is understandable.
Then I think that the first part of the experience is a bit slow, with long theatrical moments that you just watch without doing much. I was not amazed, and for sure the fact that I was very tired after a long day at work hasn’t helped my enjoyment. I could see some of the people around me be very active and try to interact with the actors, but I was not in the mood at all, and as an interactive experience, if you’re not willing to interact, Finding Pandora loses a lot of value.
But I have to say that over time, I’ve appreciated it always more. The experience strongly invites you to interact, because there are so many tasks to perform that in the end, it’s hard that you completely avoid doing something. The actors also try in a way or another to involve everyone in the situations of the game, and it suffices 1-2 very passionate people in the audience to make everyone become more enthusiastic about the whole experience. The experience really invites you to collaborate with the actors and the other members of the group, and unless you’re really grumpy, in the end, you feel more involved inside it.
The actors are very good, and the whole experience is amusing. My favorite character was Zeus, that was a crazy god, cocky and funny. I followed him in his Quests and he was so good that whatever happened in the world, he always found something hilarious to say. Once we were trying to solve a riddle, and I tried to hit a statue with a hammer to try to solve it (Yes, I’ve played Monkey Island too many times…) and he said “Oh, so this is how you solve the problems… if something is not working, slamming everything with a hammer is always a good solution!” and of course I laughed. Everyone was laughing with him, and I found him to be very talented in acting as this crazy character and being able to follow the character whatever the people around him could say. Kudos to him for this, he was one of the reasons why I liked the experience.
The times were perfect: I always felt guided by the main actors, and I never felt lost. They were very good also at guiding people in following some tricky VRChat procedures (e.g. entering a portal). I never had the impression that I had to finish a task too fast: people left me the time to explore the environments before we actually found a solution, so I could enjoy the space and the people around me.
The more I was there, the more I started enjoying this crazy colored world, with some surprise events happening here and there, lots of ironic moments, and a long quest I was curious to know how it could end. And while I can’t reveal to you the end (but I can tell you that it is in line with the hope you’re looking for), I can say that I also enjoyed the final party, that was the perfect ending for a show during which I had to interact with strangers all the time. Everyone liked the final party… it was a good opportunity to socialize and make funny photos and videos! Even if I had a bad day, Finding Pandora X made it a bit brighter for me.
In the end, I think that it is an experience worth living: if you like theater, you will love Finding Pandora X, because it is like being immersed in the world of a theatrical piece. Maybe its only defect is having a graphical quality that is not top-notch, but for all the rest is an enjoyable experience, that lets you live a fantastic journey, and have fun in the process. I think that the award at Venice is well deserved. If you can find it in some virtual festivals, please enjoy it!
(PS Special thanks to Lara Bucaray and Kiira Benzing that have let me try it in a special session!)
(Header image by Double Eye Studios)