Wayward Sky Psvr

Gaming & Culture — How Wayward Sky’s theatrical principles stand above the VR fray Uber Entertainment's somber, family-friendly VR story is a far cry from its past games. Sam Machkovech - Oct. Wayward Sky has a cartoony appearance, with colorful robots and clean environments. The camera is usually third-person, positioned above you, and somewhat distant from the game’s protagonist, Bess.

BELLEVUE, Washington—I have used VR systems long enough to begin laughing when people describe the medium as 'magical.' At every conference, demo, and sales pitch, some starry-eyed speaker busts out the M-word a few too many times, and I make a joke about a drinking game for the word's overuse.

Let's be clear: I love VR. I am the kind of loon who built a 'Vive pit' in my home, who forgives bulky headsets, who pretends that thick bundles of wires are perfectly acceptable things to feel dangling around your head and body while playing a video game. (Let's not forget the time I stuck something in my pants for VR's sake.) I love what presence and hand controls can add to an interactive experience. I love watching people freak out the first time they paint in mid-air with Tilt Brush.

But after following and reporting on years of consumer-grade VR demos and launches, I've been waiting for something bigger: a moment where the 'magic' fades, and where VR feels normal. As if it's just another tool or medium to control a computer system and experience a story. The term 'magical' isn't really used as a catch-all description of books, for example (unless you make posters for elementary school libraries). Rather, books' ability to transport us elsewhere is effective because it's seamless. Will VR ever be known for the same effect, with its own unique twists?

Here, in October 2016, we've finally reached that point—in the form of Uber Entertainment's launch title for PlayStation VR, Wayward Sky. Its application of theatrical principles may not be the year's most wham-pow VR delight, but it is arguably the most promising storytelling title the medium has yet seen.

A long way from Monday Night

This week's crowded PSVR lineup traffics mostly in the kinds of games that transform you into superheroes, competitors, puzzle-solvers, and laser-blasters. Wayward Sky fits into that crowd, if awkwardly.

The title opens with a wooden bi-plane crash-landing onto a floating island, at which point a quest begins: your father's been kidnapped by a giant robot who, for whatever reason, leaves you (in the form of a little girl named Bess) untouched. Thus begins what the game self-describes as a 'look-and-click adventure.' You peer over Bess' world as a sort of overseer and use a PlayStation Move wand (or a DualShock 4 controller, in a pinch) to point at places for her to walk and objects for her to interact with. In some cases, the camera will warp to Bess' perspective, at which point you control her hands to do things like push a switch or solve a simple puzzle.

Uber Entertainment's last major release was a Kickstarter-funded RTS, and its 2010 breakout hit Monday Night Combat essentially put the 'hero shooter' genre on the map. This company has a reputation for full-on 'video games,' made up of complicated systems, tough gameplay, online interactions, and explosive action.

Wayward Sky offers none of these elements.

It's short, clocking in at less than three hours. It's easy, thanks to loudly telegraphed puzzles and an optional Waldo-esque collection element. It's simple, as it lacks many of the hallmarks of the classic 'point-and-click adventure' genre (such as an ongoing inventory system). Tonka construction 2.

Where to point heads and eyes

And yet Wayward Sky stands out in a unique and compelling way as the first VR game I've played that truly emphasizes 'theatrical principles.' Wayward's director and design leader, Chandana Ekanayake, is no stranger to framing shots in video games, having started out creating trailers and cinematics for Bethesda Studios games in the late '90s (and eventually joining that developer as a creative director). The Sri Lanka-born, Maryland-raised designer eventually migrated to the American West Coast to work for companies like Gas Powered Games before founding Uber Entertainment in 2008 (meaning, well before a certain car-sharing company changed that word's common usage).

Most of his time in the Pacific Northwest has been as a parent (he has two sons, ages 10 and 8), and Wayward Sky represents his first project with that fact keenly in mind. The game's plot explores children's relationships with parents—especially through loss—and while Ekanayake didn't specify how the emotional plot related to his own experiences, he emphasized that the story was a personal one for him, and one he thought about as a parent: 'It's just something I wanted to tell.'

Between the light puzzling and exploration scenes, the game punctuates its 'checkpoint' breaks with storytelling scenes. Some play out as non-interactive puppet shows, which look pretty cool in a VR perspective, but others sneak up on players within interactive moments—where huge, emotional beats emerge just as a semi-interactive scene melts into a fully theatrical presentation. In these, all characters are framed on the game's stage, presented to viewers with natural guidance for where they should point their eyes and heads in VR.

In a couple of very cool moments, a Wayward Sky scene warps from one moment to another, jumping in time or in perspective without disorienting the viewer. The result feels like some high-budget Broadway dream, where sets, characters, and other content melt and shift within milliseconds—yet viewers remain captivated and held by the emotional progression of the plot. I finished my run of Wayward Sky nearly a month ago, and I remember these scenes as if I saw them yesterday. Where Bess stands. The clear, beautiful sets she walks into. How her mother appears in a flashback. How the game's apparent villain becomes instantly relatable, even as he torments players along their way.

It took me that many weeks to unpack the game's real power: that its story moments emotionally resonate because you are within the story. Theater nails this by sticking you in a seat in a dark hall, taking away your smartphone and other distractions, and taking control of your every sense in a way that film, television, and books cannot. Watching a play or musical on YouTube isn't the same as being there. Now we can say the same, at least to some degree, about a VR game compared to its flat-screen counterpart.

What's right for 'first-time VR'

Ekanayake is modest when I point out his project's successful moments. He rattles off best practices that he's applied ever since his first job composing cinema scenes in Elder Scrolls games—lighting, visual effects, active elements, sound composition, and so on. He also says that the smoothness of the final product is the result of a barrage of player testing, which Uber used to figure out the best viewing angles and object placement for Wayward's various scenes. Comfort is important—'you don't want people craning [their necks] the whole time'—and so are the lessons learned from series like Uncharted, which Ekanayake notes are very good at guiding players without giant icons or hint arrows.

But for how this game was framed, constructed, and executed, there's something bigger for him and the team at Uber: this is probably a 'first-time VR' experience for many players. Ekanayake admits that he really doesn't know how long average new users will want to stay within VR, so Wayward Sky was made with breaks and stoppages built into every step in the story, along with a decision to keep the full experience pretty short. 'It's as long as it needs to be,' Ekanayake says. 'There’s a story we want to tell with a start, a middle, and a finish. And it’s light on puzzles. We want people to experience the whole thing.'

The game began life in 2014 as a GearVR project, complete with executives at Oculus expressing early support before backing off the project. Around then, the team had played with an early prototype of 'Project Morpheus' (as PlayStation VR was then known) and complained that it was slow and bad at tracking. But Sony persisted; its updated Morpheus prototype improved tracking and added PlayStation Move wands, which made Uber believe that Sony had a fighting chance in the VR space. ('Motion controls come off way more naturally to people than a DualShock,' Ekanayake says.) After an early-2015 courtship, the companies agreed to work together, and Wayward Sky (which was then called Icarus) became a PSVR console exclusive.

Next up: Looking into Godzilla's eyes?

Uber hasn't clarified any plans to release the game on other platforms just yet, but it's definitely not done with VR. Ekanayake says that his company is currently split into two teams, each one working on a VR project. He has hinted to two directions the company's projects could go. One of those is about scale. Wayward Sky lets players peer above a scene and control elements by pointing and clicking, and Ekanayake points out that his team found an ideal height for these moments: 'We scale you up to 60 feet tall.'

(Related: This perspective, and other facets of Wayward Sky, were inspired by Valve's earliest VR demos, the ones shown off to select devs before SteamVR was a finalized concept. One demo was populated with the tiny stick-people characters from various Portal illustrations and commercials. 'You could look down, see what they’re doing,' Ekanayake recalls. 'I got so excited. I loved that scale, the tabletop scale. 'I want to do a game like this,' I thought.')

A future Uber VR project, he says, could play with this scaling even more: 'To be Godzilla-sized, or on the ground, and have that dichotomy be more pronounced,' Ekanayake says. He pauses and laughs. 'It's not a Godzilla game, I promise!'

A second idea sees Ekanayake recalling his older RPG-development days: 'The thing I’m most fascinated with is character interaction in VR,' he says. 'We know where the player is looking. Imagine AI reactions based on your gaze. I haven’t seen those explored too much. We are exploring that. There's a prototype we made revolving around [that kind of] subtlety. Imagine a conversation in Elder Scrolls or Mass Effect. What kind of tells will the player have, or the AI have, that influence the outcome of [those conversations]?'

Meaning, perhaps Uber is already leaving behind traditional 'theatrical principles' and moving straight into the crazy world of 'immersive theater,' like New York's bizarre Sleep No More productions. There's no telling, of course; Ekanayake wouldn't admit anything else about what Uber might be up to, though the company's Seattle-area office has certainly adapted to a VR era, with its desks pushed tightly into a single corner to make room for a few giant Vive stations (and their enormous carpet footprints).

And, yes, Uber is only making VR games right now. I ask Ekanayake point-blank: is that scary? 'Yes,' he says with a laugh. 'Ask me again in a month.' But this kind of product has clearly revitalized the game maker. I ask how his family reacts to what he does, and he immediately tells a story of sitting his two boys down to play Wayward Sky's final version. His younger son, he says, looked right up at his dad upon completion and offered his own review: 'I think people are going to like this.'

The youngest of the Ekanayake clan is right for at least one person. I was, and am still, charmed by Wayward Sky. It's not a perfect game, but its blend of narrative and interactive elements, and how it keeps viewers involved in a sweet, sad, family-friendly story, resonated with me more than a lot of children's movies I've watched in recent years. Any PlayStation VR owner interested in something less magical and more practically compelling owes it to themselves to try it out.