SONG IN THE SMOKE

17-Bit’s VR survival game takes us into the prehistoric wilds

- Jake Kazdal

Developer/ publisher 17-Bit

Format PSVR, Quest, Rift

Origin Japan

Release Q3 2021

Since picking up Oculus dev kits on day one, Jake Kazdal has been “blown away” by VR. So much so that when it was time to plan a new game after launching 2D shooter Galak-Z, 17-Bit was eager to pivot towards a medium that felt truly next-generation. “It’s been a long haul – we’ve really watched the beginning of all these different games coming out,” Kazdal says. “I really learned a lot about the differences between a videogame that’s got a lot of standards and templates and something that’s very unknown and different.”

His team had to adapt to COVID-19 conditions, making it difficult for this prehistoric-themed survival adventure to get wider feedback – 17-Bit would ordinarily have been demoing it to people at conventions. Nonetheless, Kazdal gamely does his best as he puts on a headset to walk us through the latest build. As a title co-funded by Sony and Oculus, the studio has had to accommodate the quirks of each VR platform, so there’s a wealth of locomotion options: room-scale, if you have an Oculus Quest (and unlimited space); stick movement; and a context-driven teleporting system that appears remarkably similar to the traversal in Half-Life: Alyx. “We actually had that in place before Alyx came out,” Kazdal says. “Alyx really justified a lot of our decisions, so we were all very excited. I have friends at Valve, so I was in there a couple of times to see some of the early dev stuff. They already established a good working knowledge on a lot of this.”