I’ve tried the indie game “What The Bat?” and I’m ready to tell you why I found it very cool!
What The Bat?
“What The Bat?” is a game that immediately clicked with me since the first time I heard about it. I was reading some articles on Upload VR (as it happens every week) and I came to find a report from Gamescom, where the journalist was talking about the games he tried there. Among other famous VR games, he reported also about a crazy game he found “where you have to do everything using baseball bats”. I watched the trailer, and it was hilarious:
I loved the fun graphics, the irony of the name, and the craziness of the idea, and I was intrigued by the fact that according to the reporter, it was one of the funniest games he had tried at the event. I wanted to play it so bad, so I got in touch with the devs, I asked them for the opportunity to try the game when it was released. They were very kind and accepted, so a few days ago they sent me a key to review the game.
And here you are… with me writing the article after I tried it.
[Before you go on reading… this review contains some spoilers about the gameplay. You have been warned]
Gameplay
What The Bat? is all about doing things with baseball bats. You have baseball bats in place of your hands, exactly in the same pose they would have if you held them in your hands. But you don’t see your hands or anything else, you just see the bats, with which you have to do everything. And with everything, I mean REALLY EVERYTHING: you interact with menus using the bats, you reset the game using the bats, you shoot selfies with the bats, you select levels with the bats, you… you got the idea (with the bats). The UX is all bat-oriented.
The game is composed of levels, and levels are grouped by environments where they happen. For instance, there is the museum environment, and inside it, you have something like 10 levels. The levels of the museum environment are all museum-oriented (you don’t say). In the menu, you see the environments as cute dioramas inside baseball balls, and there are quite a few of them. the beach, the museum, the city, etc… When you win all the levels of an environment, you can take a selfie (of course using bats) and this photo gets saved in that diorama. I always loved the selfie moment.
Inside every level, you have to perform a sequence of small mini tasks (let’s call them “episodes”) using your bats. I guess the exact word to define these tasks is “hypercasual”: you find yourself somewhere, having no clear idea of what is your task, and how to perform it. No one explains it to you, you have to understand it from the environment. Usually, once you do the first levels, you grasp very fast what you should do, and it can always be performed in a very fast and quick way. For instance, you have to use your bats to break an object, or to use the bats to hit a baseball ball that hits something. Most of the time the tasks involve making an object hit a golden trophy (e.g. throw a ball against the golden trophy, or find it and hit it with the baseball bat). Each of these tasks is usually very fast, and you can complete most of them in one minute or less. When you win an episode, you hear a happy sound and some confetti pop in the air.
What is crazy is the sheer amount of different tasks that you have to do in the levels using your bats: you can use them to guide vehicles, shoot selfies, play a pinball, conduct electricity, cast a fire, use a printer, paint, use a vending machine, grow some apples, even wash your teeth… and then of course also hit objects! And all of this happens in all the different environments I described before: a house, the beach, a museum, a street, and so on. It’s insane the number of different interactions and variations that the developers have worked on. Every level is different than the others, and every time you never know what is going to happen: you only know that you can use only your two bats and your brain to solve the situation. Even when you think you know how to do something because you already did it in a previous level, you discover that in the current level it is actually different than before. It is crazy.
Sometimes some interactions have truly surprised me, like when in a level I had to rob a museum and there were some lasers, and when the lasers hit my bat, they cut it in pieces! In another level, I had to solve the tasks underwater. In another one, I tried to hit the ball with the bat, and instead of the ball, it was the bat that started flying away. In many levels, I had to play computer games with a joystick… and move the joystick only using baseball bats! I also loved the attention to detail: in the museum level, there are some paintings that mock the Mona Lisa painting by Leonardo Da Vinci. And in the same level, if you look at some paintings, you may recognize some selfies that you took inside the game!
All the interactions are physics-based, and this gives the game a bit more realism and a bit more craziness. Physics interactions in VR are never perfect, and they make the game a bit unpredictable. I had the impression anyway that for some interactions (like when you have to hit the baseball balls with your bat), the system somewhat helps you by guiding a bit the shot to not make the experience frustrating. The physical interactions mean that the game is a bit like Bonelab: it doesn’t care how you do things: as long as it works, you can do however you want to reach the task.
I personally loved the fast pacing of the game and its inventiveness. Every time I started a new level, I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen. And then when the level started, I did my best to understand as fast as possible what I had to do and how to do it to solve it. And usually, that lasted for maybe a minute. And after I solved it, a new episode immediately started, and I had to win it fast again, and so on. This makes the game also addictive: since the game gives so much satisfaction in winning so many hypercasual levels, every time you want to do “just 5 more minutes for just another level” and then you discover that you played for 1 hour more.
I found everything fun and cool. Only two things slightly disappointed me. One is the fact that sometimes the bats, which adhere to physics rules, stuck themselves in weird positions because they can’t trespass on objects. This is not a big deal, though, and it also fits quite well in the overall craziness of the game. The other one is that the game is hypercasual in everything, and doesn’t even explain to you what to do if you lose a level. When you make an error in a level and you have lost it, you hear a buzzer sound. Then the system doesn’t automatically reset the level for you, you are just stuck there. You have to understand by yourself that you have to press with one bat the button that is on the bottom of the other one. This took me a while, and I was very frustrated when I couldn’t understand it: the first time it happened to me, I thought the game crashed and I rebooted it.
In total, the game lasted for me around 3 hours.
Visuals and Mood
The graphical style is one of the reasons I loved this game: it is cartoonish and fun. It is quite simple and stylized, but at the same time, it is well made. This also helps a lot in keeping a high framerate on Quest. The colors are very simple and bright, and everything seems to come from a show for little children. This gives a sense of happiness to the whole game.
Everything in this game is very cute: in every level, there is your blue elephant friend that has a cubic shape and sometimes contributes also to the action. He has different details depending on the environment: for instance, when he chills, he wears glasses, or when he’s a farmer, he has a stem of wheat in his mouth. Throughout the levels that are animals that are very cute and bizarre at the same time: the seagulls always try to do something nasty like stealing your bread; the sheeps are just cute; the chickens of the farm throw eggs all around them. Of course, there are also cats: in some levels, they cozy on a Roomba, in others they are waiting for food at a bar… and sometimes they even watch TV!
The mood of the game is happy, fun, and crazy. There is always something unexpected and crazy that may happen. I already told you of when I found myself in the museum and the laser rays cut my bats in pieces… but there is another episode in which I had to make a ragdoll of a horse descend from the ceiling to steal the precious golden trophy in a way similar to Mission Impossible movies. There is another bit where there are some anaglyph 3D glasses, and wearing them, you see yourself in another environment… something a la Virtual Virtual Reality.
Audio
The audio is coherent with the visuals: it is always fun. There is some background music in every level, and usually, it starts very slow with the first episodes and then becomes faster and higher with them, and then when you won the whole level, you start hearing the jingle “what the… what the… what the baaaaaaaat” that will stick into your head even after you have finished playing.
Input
In this game you do everything with the bats, there are no buttons involved at all. It is crazy how they managed to do everything usable by two bats… and most of the time these interactions even feel natural!
Considering the fact that most levels can be played seated and that you need no buttons to play, it is also quite good from an accessibility standpoint. Its only problem is that you need to necessarily have two hands to play it.
Immersion
It’s hard to talk about presence and immersion when the game happens in an absurd cartoonish world. Of course, I never felt truly “present” in that world. But the game is so fun that I lost myself in it and in the end, I spent lots of time in it without even noticing. I remember that after a long session, my family was scared to see my forehand all red because of the bad comfort of the Quest Pro fitted on my head for such a long time. So let’s say that it carries with it some sort of presence, but the immersion is very low.
On the immersion side, I would like anyway to underline how the game makes sometimes a great use of haptics: for instance, when you play with electricity and you have to connect two wires with your bats, letting the electricity flow through you, you really feel the vibrations of your controllers in a way that they seem a bit an electrical flow, and that is very cool.
Comfort
The game just uses room scale, so it is comfortable for all users.
Availability and price
You can find the game on Steam and Quest Store for €24.99. Probably the price is slightly higher than I hoped for given its duration, but considering the effort needed to develop all the different scenarios and interactions, it makes sense.
Final impressions
“What The Bat?” is a fun and crazy virtual reality game. Since I’m a bit fun and crazy myself, I loved it a lot. I like hypercasual games, and the fact that they let me play games that are very fast, and so can be played even during a pause in my working sessions. And this game is basically a long collection of hypercasual games that are all different and all set in different environments. I appreciated it being very variated and fast-paced. Every level was a surprise, and in every level my brain was challenged to find what I had to do.
I liked also the happy mood, and the fun and crazy environments and characters I had around me. I loved the attention to detail in some interactions. And then of course I loved the nonsense of having to do everything with a bat… I didn’t know I could use my bats to put bread in a toaster underwater in the sea!
And sorry if I give you a last spoiler, but this game even managed to make a bit interesting and original the final credits sequence!
I’ve become a bit addicted to this game: during the past days, I couldn’t wait to put again on my head my Quest Pro to play the levels that I still had to try! If you like casual games, if you love the craziness, and if you can appreciate a good indie game, this is the game for you 🙂
(Header image by Triband)