Golem, a forthcoming PSVR title that’s been in the works since 2015, resurfaced in late 2017 at Sony’s PSX event after staying out of the spotlight for some time. At the time the studio revealed that the game would ship on March 13th (having been delayed once prior). Now the studio has announced another delay as they put the finishing touches on the PSVR exclusive.
Update (3/6/18): Just a week before the game’s previously delayed launch date of March 16th, Golem developer Highwire Games has announced that they’re delaying the launch of the game indefinitely, but say they “don’t expect the delay to be very long,” which suggests the game will still safely land in 2018, optimistically still in the first half of the year.
“There’s no single reason for the delay,” the studio shared on their blog, “just a few small things that taken together make it the right thing for the game and for Highwire. We want to release a polished VR experience that we are proud of — there’s still some tuning and optimization to be done […]”
Highwire Games, an indie studio founded by Bungie veterans, say they want to avoid the sort of taxing development crunch they endured with the making of Bungie’s Halo 2 (2004). With today’s poorly received launch of PSVR title Bravo Team, they’re probably feeling like they made the right choice.
Original Article (12/10/17): Golem was first announced way back in 2015, and after surfacing briefly in 2016, few concrete details have emerged from the studio since. Speaking with the official PlayStation Blog’s Sid Shuman at PSX this weekend, Highwire Games showed off some new Golem gameplay and talked about how development of the title has been coming along.
In footage shown during the interview, we can see how the player’s character, a bed-ridden teenager, discovers that they can use telepathy to control a doll in the room. The player will explore and eventually find that they can also inhabit huge stone statues called golems. The ability to jump into vessels of various sizes makes for an interesting way to play with scale (which is especially impactful in VR); at one point we see the player exploring through a crack in the floorboards, and later battling as a golem with a huge sword.
We saw a similar demo last year, but the new footage shows more polish and character development, and goes on to show new enemies—spear throwing skeletons—environments, and combat.
The game’s interesting control scheme, which involves leaning to move, remains, however the developers say they’re increased the level of control by making the player stay still (even while leaning) unless the trigger is pulled.
Golem is a PSVR exclusive which Highwire announced will launch on March 13th. See update above.