LOW-FI is an upcoming VR game from the veteran indie VR developer behind TECHNOLUST (2016). The game presents a dark but plausible future where most of the population lives in a VR simulation, while at the same time the city’s poor inhabitants live unseen on the streets of the real-world. They are the ‘low-fi’.
It’s not entirely clear what’s so strangely alluring about the gritty cyberpunk aesthetic, but Blair Renaud, the developer behind the early VR title Technolust, certainly knows how to wield it to form an instant emotional setting.
Described as a spiritual successor to Technolust, Low-Fi taps into that moody cyberpunk feel even on a flat screen, as seen in the game’s new teaser:
Set in a far-future Toronto, Low-Fi presents a dark but plausible future where most of the population lives in a VR simulation after the AI singularity. But there’s still a society a society living in the real world, comprised of the destitute and unfortunate. They are the ‘low-fi’. As a setting, it’s an interesting exploration of wealth and class—the low-fi could be thought of as the homeless of today, except in this dystopian future, the dark reality of their world is completely invisible from most of the population—out of sight, out of mind.
In the game, you’re a police officer assigned to city-block 303, and while teaser footage released so far doesn’t explore the gameplay in much depth, the developer says that players will “patrol the streets (and the skies above them) solving mysteries, fighting crime, or giving in to corruption.”
It’s not clear at this point to what extent Low-Fi will really explore its intriguing cyberpunk setting—or simply use it as a ‘this is just the way things are’ sort of backdrop to contextualize a more discrete story and associated gameplay—though we certainly hope to find out as we move toward the game’s expect 2020 release date.