Fight your way through the crowd, solve some light (but fun) puzzles, then engage with the boss in an arena specifically designed for battling bosses. Each of the four settings follows this pattern. There are a few puzzle pieces scattered about, and finding them and plugging them into place while battling your way through the undead hordes wins the day, and allows you to move onto the boss battle. Instead, exploring the scary farmhouse is - while not exactly breezy and light – fairly straightforward. However, players are not in for a Resident Evil 6-style deep-dive exploration of that space. Just one look at this place and you will know that nothing good is going to happen inside. But that doesn’t prevent you from totally spazzing out, trying to stay alive.Īfter a brief training area to teach you the serviceable controls, things kick off with the player dropped onto a lonely, dark country road outside of an abandoned farm house. Nothing really bad happens if you die in game, you just start up again where you got killed after a five second breather. And of course, the simulation aspect of the narrative gives the development team an excuse to openly spawn bad guys right in front of you (and behind you), giving you the sensation that you are never safe. The story is really just an excuse to run the player through four beautifully realized and unique location-based scenarios. In the end, it’s a big “whatever, who cares”, though it does provide some chuckles, because the dialogue is sprinkled with generous helpings of dark gallows humor. The storyline somehow involves you being in a coma, and the simulated scenarios you are being subjected to in your mind are actually impacting the disease that is threatening you in the real world, and maybe that’s not really happening, because another faction keeps breaking the feed and telling you not to trust anyone. I’m not 100% sure what is going on in the maybe 3-hour story, but whatever it is, it is delivered with wit and style. If you were wondering, Killing Floor Incursion is spooky. You can almost physically feel the presence of beings behind you. It is terrifying in a very immediate and primal way. To call it a jump-scare is a disservice to the sadistic bastards that created the “Boundary” effect. This leads to moments where you fight off an encroaching horde, pausing to catch your breath, and turn your head to find more demonic creatures inches from your face, breathing down your neck. In fact, the monsters and “Zeds” in Killing Floor actively run up into your grill, distracting you with their threatening snarls and flailing attacks, and all the while, other awful creatures are creeping up behind you. You see, Killing Floor: Incursion does not respect your personal space. I’m going to call this one the “Boundary” effect (I coined the term! I get credit!). But while playing through Killing Floor: Incursion, I noticed a new VR horror dynamic at play that I haven’t picked up on before. The game’s story leads players through a variety of settings, and some of them are very bad-feeling indeed. This “Bad Place” effect (I coined the term! I get credit!) is in full effect while playing Killing Floor: Incursion. While I was having a grand time playing a video game, my sub-conscious was dashing around in circles setting little fires. While wandering around that seemingly abandoned rural horror show of a house, my brain started pummeling me with panic alerts. I first noticed this effect when playing through the Resident Evil 6 demo on PS VR. “We should not be in this place! You are responsible for our safety! Get us out of this place!” The illusion of being in a real place takes over, and though you consciously understand that you are playing a game, the lizard-brain sub-conscious starts shrieking at the conscious brain. Why should playing in VR be any more effective than when seeing the same images on a TV screen? But something happens in your brain when you play a good horror game in VR. The settings are the same, the music and sound design are the same. The imagery is the same as a game played on a monitor. This might not make a lot of sense to gamers that have not tried a horror game in VR.
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