Sandbox VR’s Squid Game Review

A few days ago I was in San Mateo (California) to try the Squid Game experience at Sandbox VR. I was very curious about it and I came out with a good impression. Do you want to know more? Well, then keep reading…

(Warning: as usual when I review a game, there may be mild spoilers in the text of this review. The gameplay videos instead contain important spoilers of the experience. There’s no story in this game, so spoilers are not going to impact your enjoyment of the game anyway)

The Sandbox VR venue

I chose the location of San Mateo (Silicon Valley, California) because it was the Sandbox VR location that was closer to my BnB. The venue is inside a shopping mall, but I did not know where exactly in the shopping mall to find it, so I started wandering around looking for it but with no luck. Finally I found a totem with the map of the shopping center, and after I looked at it for 5 minutes straight trying to decipher it, I notice that the Sandbox VR place was literally in front of me. Stupid me! (By the way, it is at the upper floor of the shopping center, if anyone else can’t find it…)

I entered the place and I found it very elegant. It’s a very modern venue, and I liked the design of it (you know that as an Italian I’m very picky about design, so if I’m making compliments about it, it means it’s good). The stewards welcomed me and let me write on a computer my personal data and agree on some waiver that in legal terms said that if I died, I died.

There was almost no one around, not only inside Sandbox VR but in the whole commercial center. It was a Thursday morning: I guess most of the players are coming during the evenings and the weekends.

Onboarding

The employees were all very kind, and after a few minutes, they let me go to a corridor to prepare for the match. First of all, they made me watch a little video about safety, which basically said “Do not go outside of the Guardian and do not jump on other people” with some fancy animations. After that, they let me choose an avatar and a team name: I picked “The Strangers” because I did not know my other team-mate: since I was alone, the other player was Christian, one of the stewards of the venue, who played with me to let me review the experience.

Then we started wearing all the devices. I had to put on a haptic TactSuit (from bHaptics) on my chest, a modified Vive Focus 3 on my head, and some optical tracking sensors (maybe Optitrack, but I’m not sure) on my ankle and wrist. The team helped me prepare for the match: I think the onboarding experience went great.

The start of the game

We were only two people playing, so we went playing in a small room. I’ve been told that the game supports up to 6 players, but if the group is large, then it should be played in a large room to avoid people from tripping on the others. The game started, and we found ourselves inside a virtual venue inspired by the series of Squid Game. The first thing we saw was another safety video: even if I found all those safety things very boring, I think it’s great they are doing that. I’m a VR veteran, so I know what I should be careful about, but most people should get used to concepts like the Guardian, so kudos to Sandbox VR for spending so much time stressing on safety.

I used these initial minutes to check how the system was working. The setup was comfortable, but I had a little problem with the headset: the Focus 3 was probably held in a fresh place, so the lenses start fogging up a bit when I wore it, ruining a bit the visuals in the first minutes of the experience. I could see my avatar and the one of the other player very clearly, with our full body. It was cool that we had the avatars we chose before, and we looked like characters of Squid Game. The full body tracking was decent, but not perfect: on my body, I noticed that there was a little tracking lag. What I lacked the most was the use of my fingers: there were no gloves or hand tracking of any kind, so I could not move my fingers. This is a pity because sometimes interacting with the other guy I would have liked to do the OK sign or a bro fist gesture, but I could not. A nice addition was the use of the microphone: I could speak, and the other player could hear my voice inside the speakers of the headset, and viceversa: it’s a nice touch to make the experience more multiplayer, fostering the interactions among the people there.

Gameplay

After the initial introduction, we found ourselves in the real venue of the game: a place where all the players playing the Squid Game were. Me and the other guy were real people, while the other players were all NPCs, added there to make the environment more realistic.

The setting was nice, and made me feel even more inside the Squid Game story. But at the same time, I was a bit disappointed by the graphical quality. You know, I’ve been in the VR field for a long time, and I’ve been able to play wonderful games like Half-Life: Alyx or amazing demos like Google’s Welcome To Lightfields. If at home I can have this fidelity, I expect that if I go out of home, I have much more than this, to give me a reason to go to a shopping mall instead of playing at home. Instead the graphical level was simply ok, it was nothing special. Don’t misunderstand me: all assets were fine, but they were not super-polished and there were not things like ray-tracing, or particle effects everywhere. To give you an idea, I can tell you that for sure Half-Life: Alyx has much better visual quality than Squid Game.

Talking about the gameplay, the game started, and it was de-facto a collection of minigames. This makes sense because Squid Game is about various trials the participants have to go through, but at the same time it means there’s no “depth” in this game: you just play a bunch of mini-games with your friends. The minigames are all taken from the Squid Game universe and every match is made by 5 minigames. I don’t want to spoil to you too much, so I will just mention two of them: one is the very famous “Red Light, Green Light” where you have to stop moving when the voice says “Red Light” or you get killed and the other one was “Simon Says” where you have to change your body pose depending on what Simon Says (e.g. he says to raise your left hand, and you have to do it). The steward after the match told me that in case the same player returns to The Sandbox, the system is not giving him the same 5 minigames again, but it is adding two minigames he has not tried yet and it is scrambling the order of presentation. This is good to enjoy replayability.

The games were all very easy to play, fun, and a bit scary (in perfect Squid Game style). The goal is to make the most points possible, but being careful that if you do someting wrong, you die (you respawn after a few seconds, but in the meantime your opponents make points). It’s great that they studied the games so that to foster interactions with other people: you have to compete with the others, but sometimes you may even strategically partner to try to succeed together in a difficult game. You can speak with the others, so you may have fun about you dying, or you can exchange information. It’s fun to play together, and I remember that at the end of every minigame, I bro-fisted with the other player.

I loved playing it also because me and the other guy were having a very close match. He won, but I finished super close to him (just 12 points of difference), so the game was even more fun because we did our best to try to win, and until the last second, it was not sure who could have been the winner. After the match, there was the proclamation of the winner, and then a little fun moment where we had to dance.

The only problem in the interaction with the other player is that the games require you to move in the space, and sometimes you are competing to grab or touch the same objects, which creates a small risk of physically touching the other player. If you are smart people like us, there are no risks, but probably the gameplay should also take care of the dumb users.

It was also nice to have the haptic feedback on my chest, it made the game more immersive. But at the same time, I think this was never crucial for the game, and the haptic effects were mostly basic ones about rumbling and nothing more.

The experience required me to move a lot around the room, and I ended it soaking in sweat. It’s been a fitness experience. After we removed the headsets, we complimented each other and started chatting about the match. The total duration of the game was around 30 minutes.

The conclusion

After all of this, we had to remove all our tracking stuff, and we went back to the entrance of the venue. There the stewards showed me the videos the system made with the highlights of the match, and gave me a QR code link to access them at home. After some time I also got an e-mail with the same link, and I’ve been told that the videos are not removed for a long time, so you have all the time that you want to download them.

It was cool watching the highlight together and talking about the match we just had. I think it adds a lot to the experience: one of the best things about having an experience with friends is not only have the experience together, but also commenting on it together for the times after. Christian and I made a few jokes recalling the moments in the game where we died, and it was fun. And now I’ve also some videos to share on my social media (and in this article) about what I did.

The price

I have to dedicate a little chapter to talk about the price of the experience. Playing Squid Game in Sandbox VR costs $50-60 per person.

For Italian standards, this is a bit too much. For Silicon Valley standards, this may be acceptable. Just to make a comparison, in Italy renting a house is like 5 times cheaper than in San Francisco, so it’s hard to compare the price of things. If I had to apply this factor to the price of the ticket, and consider it being the equivalent of $10-15 in my country, I find it reasonable. But if it were $50 in Italy, it would be one of those things that you do once in your life to see how it is, but then you probably don’t do it again because it’s too expensive. I know they have to keep the price high to make the business sustainable (LBVR has a lot of fixed costs), but users have to pay the bills, too.

By the way, the ticket was offered to me by the company to let me write this review and I thank a lot Steven for the opportunity he gave me (yep, this is a disclaimer).

Final impressions

I came out happy from the experience of Squid Game in Sandbox VR. The game was fun, challenging, and a bit scary, exactly how a good game about Squid Game should be. I also had a very close match that made me put all my efforts into winning, making me enter into a flow state that made the experience more entertaining. I also loved the interactions with the other guy (who I thank a lot), both during the game and at the end of it, when we commented the experience together. All in all, it was a fun moment and I would do it again. It’s been very different from playing VR at home, where usually I’m alone, it was a more social experience. And the icing on the cake was feeling inside the iconic world of Squid Game.

But at the same time, there are two things that left me with a bit of sourness in my mouth. The first one has been the immersivity: I would have liked to play a game with higher graphics, more special effects, and more intensive use of crazy gadgets that people do not have at home like haptic suits. I would have wanted also a game with more depth. I would have liked to play a game that I could not play at home, while the game I saw could (with some optimizations and simplifications) run on Quest 3. Most of the fun did not came out for me by the technology, but by the interaction with the other player.

The second issue is the price: as I’ve said, I would play it without any issue spending €10-15, but I would have more difficulties in regularly playing it for $50. And even if I decided to spend $50 every month because I’m a VR enthusiast, I would have a hard time convincing all my friends to spend regularly that amount of money. But as I’ve said, the Valley is more expensive than my home country, so I can’t express a full judgment over it.

That said, I enjoyed my experience and I’m happy to have tried it. In case you tried it as well, let me know in the comments what have been your impressions, it would be nice to exchange our opinions!