With mixed reality gaming still in its relative infancy, we interviewed Detective VR’s team about designing a narrative-driven experience for newer tech.
No matter your medium, detective stories often remain a compelling sell for many of us. It’s one thing to witness these suspenseful events unfold across a film or novel, but another entirely when games let you be the active investigator. A good mystery arguably lets you feel smart while actively putting the work in to uncover clues. Following prior attempts like L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files and Home Detective, presenting its case next is Detective VR.
Out now on Quest after starting development in 2022, Detective VR takes inspiration from Minority Report, Return of the Obra Dinn, and Immortality. Scenes swap between immersive VR environments where you investigate for clues, while mixed reality then lets you piece the evidence together on a board filled with photos and string.
Josh Petersel
Our review awarded it 3.5/5 stars, calling it an “impressive effort” that’s both inspiring and suspenseful. While this review was by Josh Petersel, I recently attended a separate hands-on event in London. My initial thoughts are largely aligned with Josh after playing for two hours, which was followed up by an interview with the team.
Speaking with the game’s director, Alexandre Garland from Studio Chipo y Juan, and Valem Studio’s CEO, Quentin Valembois, both developers had prior experience with games before working on Detective VR. Valembois has a YouTube channel dedicated to VR development, while Garland previously designed escape rooms and his focus is on the player experience.
“I want [the players] to have an emotional rollercoaster, and to make everything easy for them. I don’t mean an easy game, but the interaction needs to be simple. Because when you are struggling to remember what you need to do, you are not connecting with it.”
The team avoided too many tutorials to keep things natural, and Valembois also highlighted the game’s use of hand tracking controls. Quest’s Touch Controllers are supported, but everything in Detective VR was designed with hand tracking in mind. This created some initial challenges.
“An example of this is scanning objects by taking pictures. The first thing we tried to do was have a physical Polaroid that you can grab with your hand and that you could activate. It was easier to do with the push of a button because you had a big Polaroid in your hand, which worked, but it was unreliable. With hand tracking, you have no button to push, and we initially used the index curl to do it. That worked, but it didn’t feel good to do that little movement every time you press.”
This saw the team try to find common ground that suits both hand tracking and controllers, leading to the idea of forming a big square to take photos. This involves doing a pinch motion with both hands, then moving your hands apart to create a larger frame. That frame is your camera, and a successful shot of evidence sees you keep the photo.
A key point that comes up during our discussion is the fact that mixed reality is a comparatively new medium. Garland explained that it’s about finding something new, believing that not everything with MR has been “figured out” like with VR. Valembois states there’s “not a common idea of how everything needs to be done,” calling this another challenge in making Detective VR.
“We are just eager to find out how new people that are not familiar with hand tracking or even VR will feel about the game. We have a good feeling about how it can be easily learned, I think we did a good job at explaining how the game works. We made all the interactions simple. At the end of the day, even if the rules of XR and hand tracking are not written, we hope that what we’ve done can help even newcomers to learn how to play our game.”
Asked about the considerations that went into Detective VR’s design, Garland says that it’s sometimes “better to do something more simple, and to be focused on that, than to be distracted by something that is ambitious.” He’s more concerned with the player experience than with new features that don’t necessarily work as well as originally imagined.
“Our goal was not to create any friction between the player and the story; the interactions had to become natural, almost invisible. That’s why mixed reality and hand-tracking were so important… you feel at ease, interacting in the comfort of your environment.”
The team considered using occlusion, spatial anchors and other MR elements and while these didn’t work for Detective VR, Valembois states they’re open to taking another look in the future. He would rather not add something “just for the sake of it” if it’s to the player’s detriment, saying “it needs to be valuable to the game” while also being mindful of feature creep.
Even with these challenges, Valembois considers it exciting to be working on this type of new technology to create a game that’s more unique. Like anything though, it’s about finding the right balance.
“It was so much fun to work on, we made this game with passion while trying to find some cool things to also add. We really wanted to push some new features because we like them but on the other side, we had to sometimes remove them. It’s a hard balance to find.”
Detective VR is available now on the Meta Quest platform.
