Steel Crate Games, an Ottawa based indie studio, has today announced that their bomb-defusing party game—Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes—is now coming to the Gear VR store.
The co-op bomb-defusing game makes for an ingenious way of involving a whole group of people both in and outside of VR. The game’s prototypes already boast a number of awards, including ‘Media Choice Award’ at Indiecade Festival 2014 and ‘Editor’s Choice’ at PAX East 2015, and now Steel Crate Games is publishing the Keep Talking‘s first consumer edition for the Gear VR platform.
In Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes a single player is tasked with defusing a procedurally generated virtual time bomb that if incorrectly dismantled—as in every MacGyver time bomb TV trope—will blow up in your face. With no outside direction, you’re surely in for a faceful of shrapnel, and that’s where the “experts” come in (aka the other party guests).
A lengthy manual contains the solution to defusing the bomb, but the catch is that the experts might very well be your drunk friend Dave and your ex-girlfriend Sandra who broke up with you because “you don’t communicate well.”
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When the timer is counting down to destruction, and your expert manual-readers tell you to “cut the first wire only if the serial number is odd and there is at least one red wire, but if there are more black wires than yellow wires, cut the second wire. If there are the same number of black and blue, cut the third wire. And if not, cut the fourth wire,” a cool head and precise instructions go a long way (actual instructions taken from the prototype instruction manual).
Because the Samsung Gear VR’s easy portability (and requisite Note 4 or S6/S6 Edge), you can take the game to impromptu get-togethers of all types—like lunch breaks, bus rides, or waiting at the airport … ok, maybe the airport isn’t a good place to be screaming about bombs, but you get the picture. Stash it in the backpack, and instead of one lucky person experiencing the fun of VR, you potentially have a room of people fighting for a turn.
The game plays with either the Gear VR’s native touchpad controls or an external gamepad, although the devs admit that “having touchpad support makes it easier to pull Gear VR out of a backpack and play with other people.”
The full game is currently only available on the Gear VR store for $9.99, with future versions slated for PC+Oculus Rift DK2 support later this year, and possibly even Sony Morpheus and HTC Vive in the not-too-distant future. An older prototype of the game can also be found on their 2014 Global Game Jam entry page, but as with all early devkit-targeted demos you may need to fiddle with older Oculus runtimes to get it working (Advisory: Razer Hydra controllers are required for input).
