Breathe.
Watch the view go black, sound fade away.
Take the headphones off.
Pull the view of the other world from my eyes.
Come down, with an ever so slight thud.
Add a little violence
I just finished Polybius, Llamasoft's VR … experience.
Such a pure thing.
There were levels I did not care for, levels which felt like a slog.
Like they ate away my shields with cheap tricks I just failed to grasp.
So what are you waiting for?
By the end, all that fell away. In the end, there were no cheap tricks. Just purity, that flow the game always aimed for.
Did it fix what was wrong with you?
Off hand, I can think of few games where the last levels actually felt the purest, most like what the game wanted to be. Polybius feels like that to me. I worked my way through the levels before and was rewarded with an extended experience of pure flow, everything the game wanted to be in one long, focused experience.
Are we less than?
I wonder how they did it. How do you make a great game which builds nicely, yet save the best for last? So many games start really nicely but seem to overshoot somewhere right before the end, passing the purity mark in an attempt to make the end different, bigger, stranger, in some kind of sudden lack of trust in the enjoyment provided by the levels before.
Not Polybius. I think the last level was the very best. And I think the way there played a very important part, ensuring I got the most out of it.
I want to replay it already.
Re-experience.
(VR matters. I would probably enjoy the game in 2D if I had never played in VR. Now, a 2D, non-surround version feels completely uninteresting.)