Triangular Pixel’s Unseen Diplomacy is an ambitious virtual reality obstacle course set in a world of spies and subterfuge. The new title for the HTC Vive really invests in the concept of room-scale VR by having you walking and crawling around environments cleverly designed to sit snugly within your play space and uses clever tricks to make you think you’re moving beyond it.
Ever fantasize about storming the underground lair of an evil genius who’s hell bent on taking over the world? Unseen Diplomacy assumes you have and gives you the opportunity to act that fantasy out in virtual reality.
Using the HTC Vive’s room-scale capabilities, the title from British developers Triangular Pixels, casts you as a member of an elite force, The British Espionage Tactical Initiative, whose mission is to take down evil covertly.
The game sees your working through multiple rooms connected by ducts, corridors and elevators, all cleverly assembled to fool the mind into thinking it’s occupying a space much larger than it actually is. Gameplay revolves around solving puzzles or performing a range of physical actions in each of the interconnected spaces in order for you to proceed.
These 1:1 actions range from unscrewing vent covers in order to gain access to the next crawl space, or opening draws to find key-cards all the way to more complex, multi-action events. So, you might be required to dodge laser traps for example or move rapidly between computer terminals, mashing the keys Hollywood hacker style to in order to hack the mainframe’.
A neat twist is that a second, seated player can also join you by donning an Oculus Rift headset – allowing them to visually scout the areas and offer verbal assistance and perhaps a little moral support.
The game is actually designed to be exhibited at events which could accommodate the space required to do it justice. Unseen Diplomacy made its debut in October of last year at the GameCity festival in Nottingham, UK and made quite an impression.
The title was put together by the duo behind Triangular Pixels, Katie Goode and John Campbell who are currently hard at work on their next title, Smash Hit Plunder for the Gear VR – a title with the simple yet appealing premise of “explore and wreck a dungeon, looking for as much treasure as possible.”
Static images courtesy of GameCity Festival