"They better be important trees"Ĭrytek's reps talked about the full game offering multiple mountains, each coming in multiple difficulty flavors-meaning, different mountain geometry, more branching paths, different chalking requirements, and other tweaks to make players' attempts for fast times more challenging. Otherwise, the demo's challenge mostly came from positioning hands so that swapping from left to right flows smoothly-and looking for alternate paths to speed our climb to each of the mountain's save points. Sometimes, we'd have to use a button to trigger a jump across small gaps. The Climb's perspective and visual design offer equal measures peacefulness and intensity you can hang from a particular spot and take a calm breather, soaking up the rustle of wind and marveling at a remarkable view of the world behind and below you, or you can feel a brief rush of mortality while aiming for some of the game's tougher climb motions.Įvery once in a while, we'd have to tap a button to reapply chalk on each hand, as we'd lose our stable grip when wear, tear, and sweat wore down our virtual chalk.
#The climb vr release date free
We moved our head around until we'd aimed our free right hand directly over that ledge then pressed the right trigger to hold on.įrom there, we alternated hands and moved our head around, looking for grabbable spots and making our way up the mountain-and noticing how freakin' high we'd climbed after a pretty short amount of time. Our demo started with us holding down an Xbox One pad's left trigger once we'd looked at a mountain crag and positioned a hand over it, then looking around until we found the next grabbable spot. Players control most of the game by looking around, and even craning their necks, to guide either of their free, floating-in-air hands toward nooks and ledges on a mountain's edge. Instead, The Climb is a speed-climbing game that revolves around scaling mountains using only your virtual hands-but it uses neither a Wii-like motion controller nor a standard pair of joysticks. The retail game born from this experiment (which may still see its own retail release in a different form) isn't a VR take on Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, nor is it a slow-moving, on-rails glide up pretty mountains. Instead, this Robinson demo seemed meant to showcase Crytek's technically impressive engine work, which included expansive views of nearby tree-lined mountains and animated dinosaurs all around. Occasionally, players would use a conventional controller's trigger buttons to grab onto new pulleys, but there was little "game" to speak of. Robinson: The Journey simply had players scale a giant mountain's sides via an automatic pulley system.
We got to try out a Crytek VR experiment during this summer's E3 conference, but it was advertised as a tech-demo taste of Crytek's eventual first retail VR product.