Half-Life: Alyx, hands down.
I may have cried a little bit after my first round at it.
I came here with the intent of saying the same thing.
Maybe putting “immersion” and “VR” in the same paragraph is a cheap shot. But Alyx is the first and possibly only VR title that, in my opinion, actually manages to nail all the aspects of real world presence to the extent that it actually does feel at times that you are standing in a genuine place. It’s not just the visual design and fidelity of the world and the models in it, but all the little details and aspects added together that make HL:Alyx feel right, and when you go back to other VR titles afterwards you suddenly realize how they’ve been getting it so wrong all this time. Even other games that have “realistic” rather than cartoony graphics.
It’s things like the scale of the world, which feels genuine. A lot of VR games seem to scale their world slightly too large, and as a result there are lots of familiar objects in them that seem uncannily wrong until you figure out that their scale is off. All the doorframes are just too big, so you don’t feel like you’re getting stuck in them. But you’ve walked through a million doorframes in your life and they feel wrong. And the desk tops are nearly at chest height, so you don’t have to bend over to look at their contents. But you’ve sat at a desk a thousand times in your life so that feels wrong, too. Etc., etc.
Alyx doesn’t do this. Everything is life scale. This means that, yes, you probably will have to get down on your knees or grovel around on the ground to search the lower drawers in that desk or turn over all the boxes on the floor looking for ammo and resin. All the window frames are at realistic, rather than convenient, heights. So you might have to get down very low to avoid incoming fire below that windowsill. Or stand on your tiptoes to reach a top shelf.
Sometimes it’s just as simple as being able to look down and see yourself. Or see Alyx, anyway. So many VR games present you, the player, as just a floating pair of hands. Alyx doesn’t. As a matter of fact, the developers even experimented in the beginning with fully modeling Alyx from the perspective of the player, i.e. giving her not only hands but also arms and elbows. They gave up because the experience was visually disconcerting.
Then there’s things like the gunplay and manipulation of healing syringes and so forth. This is another aspect where a lot of “realistic” games fall down, by trying too hard to mimic real life firearms and tools which inevitably winds up shoehorning the controls onto the available buttons in a way that winds up feeling unnatural. But all the guns in Alyx are Half Life sci-fi guns, so Valve could make them work however they wanted to. So they seem real despite being pure fantasy, and operate in an intuitive manner that matches the controllers very well and feels right. The only thing I don’t like is the squeeze-to-arm grenades. I get it, but I think a ring-pull mechanic would have been a bit more intuitive as well as potentially allowing players to put the pin back in… (Perhaps, if you can’t put away the gun in your main hand in a hurry, an available gesture should have been pulling the ring out with your teeth.)
It’s also packed with incredible setpieces. I can’t list them all, but one that absolutely will stick with you is watching a 1:1 scale freight train careening at high speed with the wheels screaming mere feet away from your face, and crashing into a wall.
And despite being so immersive, Alyx is not an immersive sim. It’s thoroughly linear, and your interactions with most objects do boil down to shooting them, poking them, yanking a lever on them, slotting a key item into them, or throwing stuff at them. And every interactable for the most part only has one way for you to interact with it. Yet even despite this, emergent gameplay… well, emerges. I read a story online (and you probably did, too) about one player who absolutely could not stand leaving grenades and stims and grub jars lying around that they couldn’t use just then thanks to the limited inventory space. So they found a crate and dumped all their extra items in it and carried the crate around with them everywhere, throughout the entire campaign. And the game lets you do this. Even bringing your junk with you across loading zones. It is an incredible benefit to immersion if you can logically think of a thing and then find out that you are able to do that thing, even if it’s not an explicit game mechanic that was explained to you in a tutorial.
It’s unfortunate the barrier to entry to even be able to play this is so high, because it’s a damn shame a lot more people haven’t played it. Sure, you can watch a playthrough on Youtube or whatever but that absolutely does not do it justice. You have to be there.
I will never forget my first play through. At one point I was exploring a pitch black tunnel with my gun and just a narrow beam flashlight to see by. I couldn’t see anything at all outside the beam of the flashlight. Somewhere in the darkness I could hear a head crab approaching but I couldn’t find it with the light. I was shining the flashlight this way and that trying to spot it and hearing it get closer and closer… and then my cat brushed my leg.
I jumped and screamed and scared the hell out of the poor cat. I may in fact have tried to shoot her with the controller. Needless to say, she no longer trusts me when I’m wearing the headset.
My fond memory of that scene was finding the head crab immediately, and smirking as I started killing them. I ran out of ammo, No worries, all I had to do was reach into my backpack and… oh shit, the flashlight is on my wrist!
Very well put!
You really nailed it mentioning the scale of the world. In retrospect, everything did feel “right sized”. And, yes, the freedom you’re allowed for such a linear game was amazing, to say the least.
Man, I wish I had the patience to articulate as well as you did 😅
You really nailed it mentioning the scale of the world.
If you’d like a particularly egregious example, try playing Elite: Dangerous in VR. E:D’s universe makes no sense when it’s viewed in real scale, because the designers obviously made everything to look right on your flat screen with a 90 degree FOV or whatever, and didn’t think about the implications. And the same models and UI are used in VR as they are in flatland.
Like, Elite’s classic radar thingy. It’s hovering right over your console and about the size of a dinner plate, right?
Well, no… It’s actually the size of a kiddie pool and it’s six or eight feet forward of your chair. You can walk around the cockpits in the various ships at least to a limited degree, and even those in what are supposed to be compact and nimble single seat fighter craft are inexplicably cathedral-like. The cockpit canopy glass in an Asp Explorer is like 18 feet tall.
I played it on a Quest 2, it’s like 300 bucks. With a 10th gen Intel 3070ti laptop I got from a pawn shop for 400.
I probably wouldn’t have bought it, but it came with my Index and Holy shit what an incredible experience. I’ve been playing the Arizona Sunshine remake and it’s been scratching the same itch. The reload mechanics are a ton of fun.
Top contenders:
- Subnautica
- Dishonored
- Prey
- Bioshock
- Control
- Titanfall 2
- Modern Warfare 2
- The Outer Wilds
Subnautica is so immersive I’d find myself holding my breath if I was running low on oxygen as if it would help.
Yeah, by the end of Subnautica I spent my time
spoiler
just going around to my bases and decorating them and fixing them up so they were pleasant places to be in. I built the rocket ship, and I did use it just to see what happened, but canonically in my head I chose to stay on the planet by myself and not leave. Hands down the most immersive game I’ve played.
Outer Wilds and subnautica still trigger all my phobias so effectively. It’s terrifying
As much I love those games I cannot get very far into them. Especially Outer Wilds. That ocean planet is something I’ve literally had in my nightmares.
Yep. As far as I know there isn’t even anything dangerous on it but it’s such nightmare energy for me that I will literally run out of the room like a child.
Also, I found that space feels eerily like underwater for me mentally. Fucking terrifying
Yeah that’s what made Outer Wilds terrifying, it’s veeeery realistic with handling outer space. Elite Dangerous gave me the same feeling, took a long while to get over the fear. Still gave me the jeebies infiltrating a Titan (large xeno ship that generates hazardous space weather around itself, like a hurricane in a fog).
The rest of the Outer Wilds just ups that nope factor. Thought I should go to a different planet but my choices were the newborn singularity, planets eating each other, or a planet that defies reality and home to very angry space bees.
The quantum moon was the only one I could handle, was super fun.
I can handle everything but dark bramble, giants deep and just…anything with open space. I did almost everything on the sand twins tho! That wasn’t too bad at all.
Oh I struggled most of all on the sand twins. I’m mildly claustrophobic and those caves freaked me out (especially as I tend to think poorly under pressure, so running out of time made me panic and get lost more).
I can get that. I do get claustrophobic IRL but luckily it doesn’t really equate to games, unlike my thalassophobia. I was just happy it was sand and not water
The space mechanics was definitely one of the great things about that game, in my opinion. Most space games when you land you just press a button and it plays an animation. Having to land manually with a landing camera is very satisfying. When you crash and parts of your ship break and you have to float outside to fix it, that was also very fun. I feel like a lot of space games are a bit lazy about the actual space mechanics, this game did it very well.
Dishonored is the one game I’d love to erase from my memory just to have to joy of playing it for the first time again. It’s easily in my top 10 favorite games of all time. I wish there were more like it - Prey was great, too, but not quite the same, and there hasn’t been anything else that’s really scratched that itch.
With that list of games, you may like Green Hell.
Prey yes
Football Manager. I’m a simple man. I don’t like starting off as a top team, it’s always more fun for me to download one of the extended databases and take an amateur Sunday League team to the highest heights. I’ve been managing my current side, Wakefield AFC, for almost 20 years. I’ve led them up the ladder from the Northern Counties East League Division One to the Championship.
I remember the first time we averaged more than 100 fans in attendance per season. I remember the first player we sold for cash (veteran midfielder Jack Sang, for a whopping $2,400) instead of letting go on a free. I remember our first ever televised match in 2030 during our Cinderella run in the FA Cup. It was a respectable 2-1 loss to a team 3 divisions above us, but the $250k share of the gate receipts saved us from bankruptcy. I can picture the statue they’ll build someday of Seb Bolton, who scored 116 goals in 223 appearances between 2026-2032 and led us to back-to-back promotions. I’m currently trying to shepherd the development of youth player Tony Okonkwo, a 6’5" center forward who very well could become our first homegrown million dollar man.
That was an enjoyable read in the same vein of reading about crazy EVE Online shenanigans. I will probably never touch it but I admire how fun you make it sound.
do you follow tradition and put on a suit for the Finals?
The first STALKER game. Near the beginning when I had hardly any ammo.
I saw a pack of feral dogs in the distance and while they didn’t sound friendly I didn’t know whether they would be hostile or how close I could get before they would aggro. Since I had so little ammo I resolved to not take any shots unless they got close.
Well, one of them did start running towards me, but before it got that close it cut off and ran away at a 90° angle. Then another, and another did the same thing. “Maybe they’re not hostile?” I thought to myself, “Do they just run around randomly?”.
Then I realized I was being circled. Which was an extremely unnerving realization. I went from thinking about aggro ranges and AI states to being thrust into a situation that I sometimes have to worry about not falling into in real life.
Then I realized I was being circled. Which was an extremely unnerving realization. I went from thinking about aggro ranges and AI states to being thrust into a situation that I sometimes have to worry about not falling into in real life.
Makes it that much more sad seeing A-Life getting trashed in STALKER 2. Moments like these were awesome
Red Dead Redemption 2, by far.
Honorable mention to Elite: Dangerous while playing with a HOTAS
Elite got too real. When you pick a “job” the grind gets real enough to feel like a real job.
That reminds me, my carrier is probably in a ton of debt.
…Meh. I’m pretty sure I can’t be bothered.
Yeah, lost mine. I got it, thought it was cool, and then never really felt like I could utilize it well. Ran out of $ and that’s that.
You can always buy another one with just one afternoon’s worth of mind-numbing Robigo passenger runs.
Oh, I prefer exobio, but that’s a slog sometimes. Everything gets to be a grind after a while with that game. The common lamwnr: lightyears wide, an inch deep. It’s a great game, just need a break.
Probably skyrim. The first time I played it, it made me feel like I had a 2nd separate life that I had to pull myself back out of to rejoin the real world.
Same. I remember seeing a lot of buzz surrounding it on release day, but I’d never played a TES game before. Decided to download it and play for an hour just to see what it’s about. I remember after what felt like roughly an hour I suddenly had massive hunger pains, checked the time and realised I’d just been playing for about 9 hours straight with no break. I don’t think I’ve ever had another game do that to me before.
Control. Not the entire game but one very specific sequence with a hard rock tune stitched throughout. If you know, you know.
The ashtray maze was a great sequence and a ton of fun, but immersive? I don’t think so.
SOMA. Downright existential horror in all the right ways.
SOMA was fantastic, I played it in peaceful mode
Same I think the monsters work better as museum pieces than threats
Cyberpunk 2077 by far
Came here to say this. One of the only games I went back to beat several more times. I was sad to finally stop playing, but I definitely got my monies worth. I don’t think I have been that into a game since half-life 2.
The Long Dark with headphones in a dark room. Really makes you feel cold.
Elite Dangerous as well. My ship auto-docking while I look at my side screens and hear various radio chatter is awesome.
I love TLD but have never played the actual game. I just get lost playing survival mode
Subnautica. Literally immersive
That’s virtually immersive. Literally immersive was when I fell into an actual pool while playing Super Mario on a gameboy.
I remember being soldered to my game boy as a kid, too…
Actually happened in my 30s LOL.
when you walked into a pool of tin ?
Prey.
They really put the immersive and sim in immersive sim. So much player agency over the world and everything you do in it just makes sense. The computers you use are physically interactable, no UI as dressing. Your menus are just you accessing your handheld smart device (inventory, logs, map).
Every object on the map is persistent. You want to fortify your office to fend off Typhon on your return? Gather the turrets around the map and have them guard the staircase leading to your little paradise. Want to decorate it? Drop items from your inventory and drag them around. Have some trophies of your accomplishments.
I could go on and on about other mechanics like the fantastic gloo gun or how the maps are filled with little secrets/shortcuts, but then I’d be here all day.
Playing for the first time currently and I can’t put it down. We finally got a good successor to system shock 2 and I am so happy
Elite Dangerous in VR.
I know there are much more immersive games, but the most immersive I’ve played is The Witcher 3, I don’t play many realistic games. Stardew Valley and Minecraft for the win.
Fallout New Vegas, had me fantasizing for weeks about being a desert cowboy. My wife and I finally went to Vegas and we visited a bunch of spots from the game. We played FNV all week together and then we went up the strat tower to get a birds eye view of the city. It was a really fun experience.
Game definitely shows its age now, but it really sold the atmosphere and dragged you into it when it came out.
…definitely shows its age now…
What I’m hearing is we need someone to make Fallout 4Vegas.
