Did you ever know this game was out? Elijah Wood personally came out to show off the game at two E3 showcases. But now the game is out, and not a peep. Also, despite heavily marketing it as a VR experience tailored for the PS4, it’s also available on Xbox One and PC. Which is suspicious, but how does it play? It plays like someone tried to combine Get Even with PT, that’s what it is.
Transference is a first-person sci-fi horror experience for VR. It was developed by SpectreVision and published by Ubisoft. It was heavily advertised as a psychedelic adventure and was heavily promoted by Elijah Wood during E3 2017 & 2018. The plot focuses on your navigating through a computer simulation of the minds of a three-person family. Depending on whose memories you explore, the layout of the house in which you spend the majority of the game will rearrange itself. Surprisingly, when the game came out in late September, it was largely ignored with no fanfare or ads. It also released on Xbox One and PC, despite being slated as a VR-only title. It’s quite possible that VR would enhance the experience, but the game still has to hold up on its own merits. This copy was reviewed without the use of VR, but still on PS4.
GRAPHICS: 2/2
This is definitely a case of style over substance. The game has a great array of really good looking lighting FX, visual glitches, transition sequences, and mocap. There are also several scenes that blend 2D videos into the 3D environment in interesting ways. The problems this game has come from a technical standpoint. Despite the spectacular use of props, colors, and layouts to represent different psyches, one thing takes you out of the experience. The texture quality is just abysmal. Cables look like squares, a jar of sand had jagged edges, a cassette tape looks like a blown-up JPG. That’s really too bad because it definitely shows that a lot of detail was put into everything else. You can pick up props and look at them but the details are muddy. Still, the overall look works.
STORY: 0/2
Absolute drivel. The story of this game is about a family man who went crazy and digitized the minds of his wife, child and himself onto a computer. But the context of why you’re experiencing these memories in the first place is never made apparent. You’re just there to stop in and look at some things that happened to this family. The kid had a dog he loved, and honestly, I can’t remember the actual fate of the dog. Just that something bad happened. The wife is sad because she thinks she gave up her career to be with this man, but I’m not really sure what it was he did that made her have to give everything up.
You never really feel like you’re in danger, and these NPCs are at worst a minor inconvenience…
And the husband? Well, he went crazy. Why? I don’t know, it appears that he just did. The game has several points where you get to watch camcorder footage of the family to get a better idea, but it felt very inconsistent. In one scene, they are at a park having a birthday party and the dad is acting just okay. You find another video later that appears to be the same time and location, but the dad has turned a complete 180 and was acting like a drunken abusive asshole. Why? I don’t know, it looks like he just did. Maybe the truth was hidden on one of the collectibles? That might be the case but it’s not much of a story if it’s mandatory for me to pick up every single object in every room. Also, the less said about the “acting” in this game, the better.
Audio: 2/2
Despite the terrible script and bad acting, the quality of the voice work is well implemented into the game. Several wonky features are added to the voices of the family, distorting them, echoing them, and burning them. This game dives into the reality of horror for the most part, and this game expertly implements the “horror atmosphere” that many scary games excel at. It has everything, cramped spaces, hums, random noises, door knocking, clock ticking, music boxes, the usual. This is amplified with a soundtrack that blends into the scenes you encounter. There are heavy padded synths feeding through distortion tubes as scenes get more and more intense. Zero complaints about anything in the audio department of this game.
GAMEPLAY: 1/2
This is a relaxed horror experience if that makes any sense. You enter an apartment, and spooky things happen. You will walk around, look at things, watch video logs, and avoid walking afoul of the enemies in the game. These phantoms you encounter look like the Endermen from Minecraft. If you touch them, you just get sent backward a little bit. You never really feel like you’re in danger, and these NPCs are at worst a minor inconvenience and one of the least scary things about the game. Thankfully, there really aren’t any jump scares. The biggest problem was that there were a handful of puzzles that either stopped the game dead or were extremely easy. I won’t be able to forgive this game for the “piano puzzle” sequence any time soon. Some of the puzzles made sense plotwise, while others were real head-scratchers.
VR: That said, VR might have enhanced the scares just a little bit. This is literally the only section that VR could have improved the experience. It might have been scarier to walk around this cramped place in a fully immersive manner.
FUN: 0/2
The couple of puzzles that stopped me dead in my tracks were rather annoying. Once I did figure them out, I didn’t feel smart. I just felt “Oh really? Just that? Okay then.” My interest in the fate of this family diminished by the minute. When the game rolled into its conclusion about 2 hours in, I was glad it was over, because I didn’t want to play it anymore. Even then, the ending is incredibly abrupt and completely unfulfilling, accomplishing nothing. You basically just rode around on a haunted mansion ride until you had to get off. The game just shrugs and says to me, “Yup, that’s it. Have a nice day I guess.” Maybe it’s my fault for having high expectations, but I’ve had these expectations for other games in the SciFi/Horror genre that live up to the hype. This one doesn’t.
This whole experience is basically a shaggy dog story about a broken family. Transference is content with itself; it tells you about a series of unfortunate events (which is a crap book series, fight me). This generation of gaming is finding more and more “AA” experiences resurface and make for some high-quality adventures. We got tales like Hellblade, Get Even, Soma, and several other games that serve as an experience on top of being a game. This particular title doesn’t really make the cut.
In case you missed it, there’s a new movie coming out from big time director Luc Besson, famous writer/producer/director for countless blockbuster films like The Fifth Element, The Transporter Series (the good ones), Leon: The Professional, Lucy, and Taken. This new feature’s full title is Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. It’s shaping up to be one of the biggest sci-fi films of the year, especially in a year and a half that’s chock-full of the genre. You now have stuff like Ghost in the Shell, Westworld, Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars and the upcoming Blade Runner 2049. But don’t let me tell you about it, have a look at the trailer above.
See that? Listen up Bioware, though this film may not even be out yet, the trailers alone already have more interesting plot developments and characters than all of Mass Effect: Andromeda. A 20-60 hour title. Even the small snippets of soundtrack from the trailer are better than the mess of an original score Andromeda had. EA Games’ faith in the series after launch is so low that it diverted the entire staff of the game off to other projects and have all but acknowledged the failings of the new entry. Even the multiplayer, usually a big holdout for some games, seems to be in its own death throes.
Indeed readers, if you are one of the many disenfranchised souls who had their hopes and dreams crushed with the lackluster-at-best Andromeda sequel to the Mass Effect trilogy, here is where you can lay your new aspirations. Valerian, despite sharing it’s name with an herb that promotes sleep, is a very ambitious and very stunning looking glimmer of hope coming to a theater near you. Launching on July 21st, this film is showing nearly Avatar or even Star Wars levels up hype and excitement. This is big for a new IP Not only that, but the visuals and costume design are so on-point, you’d be forgiven if you’d think that this film is actually a film version of a Mass Effect game. The action shots, the color palette, the plot; everything you need to make a perfect new space adventure project are her. This film is laying the foundation of what could possibly be a glorious new series, and if not a new series, at least a great new original movie.
And speaking of the costume design, is it a coincidence that the armor and outfits in Valerian seem very similar to Mass Effect? Is it possible that there was maybe even some inspiration from the game series? This new film may be an adaptation of an old graphic novel, but apparently Besson had considered making Valerian as early as when he was shooting the Fifth Element back in 1997. The news of the ambitious title tackling the title didn’t come until 2012. The Mass Effect trilogy’s release dates were in 2007, 2010, and 2012. Regardless of who inspired who and what inspired what, Valerian is showing a whole lot of promise and its bringing it’s whole universe along with it.
Fans of the original Mass Effect Trilogy enjoyed an exciting sci-fi romp filled with amazing characters, lore, action, and excitement. It’s a shame Andromeda was not able to hold up to the impossibly high bar that was set. It’s even worse that Andromeda was actually pretty bad for some people. But if you want to see a rich universe full of interesting aliens, cosmic conflicts, and explosive space epics, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is ready to deliver!
UPDATE 7/22
Saw the film. Everything I said above was accurate. Film was only slightly above average. It had great special effects and costumes, but dialog and action sequences were rather wooden. But to to delve further into the analogies, the protagonists Valerian and Laureline were like Renegade MaleShepard and Paragon FemShep existing together at the same time. But, instead of being brother and sister like Andromeda, they’re actually bickering partners, both in the space police and in the bedroom. Their lines were pretty bland for most of the film, yet somehow still more compelling than Scott and Sara Ryder, main characters who are so utterly forgettable I had to google what their names were while writing this blurb. So yeah! Go see this film if you want to see a considerably better high fantasy experience. One that is guaranteed to give you two hours and seventeen minutes more enjoyment than you will if you play Mass Effect: Andromeda.
