My character leapt, while my real body stood up on tiptoes as if leaping in unison. Honestly, I got a bit of a chill down my spine. In virtual reality, as in real life, you can tell if the drop is a long one, and yet you can't tell if you can make a long distance jump until you try. Inside the Oculus Rift, there were no helicopters with machine guns or crumbling cliff faces to compel me to make that jump.and yet somehow it felt more exciting and terrifying than a traditional game with those incentives pushing me forward. If you've played Uncharted, the hit PlayStation series where you play the wisecracking adventurer Nathan Drake, or one of the recent Tomb Raider games featuring gun-toting adventuress Lara Croft, you're probably familiar with scenes where you have to rapidly scale a sheer cliff with your bare hands and jump from one to the next, repeatedly, to avoid certain death. (As did my character's heartbeat, which pounded in my ears if I moved too quickly.) I actually began to work up a little bit of a real sweat, too.Īnd that's when the game told me I needed to jump from one cliff to the next. It made me move my body like I might if I was actually climbing, more or less, which added to the sense of immersion. Every so often, you press a button to chalk your hands so your (virtual) sweat doesn't cause you to lose your grip and plummet to your death.īut the game cleverly pulled me out of my comfort zone, making me stretch - even stand up on tiptoes - to reach the next handhold, time and again. So basically, all you have to do is turn your head, and move it a bit, to move your hands to the next handhold on the rock face, one at a time. The only thing the game can see is your head, because that's what the Oculus Rift's camera tracks. It's pretty impressive, really, how simple it is to climb in The Climb. A Crytek developer handed me an Xbox controller, and told me to look up, then pull one of the controller's triggers under my index fingers, to start my ascent upwards. I saw it all from my perch atop a rocky column, where a series of clearly marked handholds showed me the path up. Birds flew overhead, while a sea turtle gently swam below. The moment I put the headset on my noggin, I was thrust into a picturesque tropical paradise - an emerald cove filled with palm trees and bathed in golden sunlight, ready to be explored.

The climb vr statuses