Fire Escape Review (FastLawyer)
Experienced on the Oculus Rift. Spoiler Free Review.
You can watch my review here: https://youtu.be/iZr5nyI8fxA
This is a 1 hour long, mostly cinematic experience running on the Unity Engine. You're basically a voyeur on the fire escape of the adjacent building where you observe the drama unfold in front of you. You can zoom in with your smart phone to pay close attention to the action in a particular apartment window open for viewing.
The interactions are of the point and click variety. You select which apartment you want to snoop on and then at times you can also select which reaction you want to convey to the question being asked of you through the use of emojis. There's a whole cast of suspicious characters, but you can't snoop on everybody at the same time. So there is replayability to see which important scenes you missed play out to get a more thorough view of the story.
You can easily go back to the menu to play out the scenes again for the particular time frame or you can just continue to the next time frame. You can also pause or unpause the action. I did not like how the game automatically pauses several times in a row within a short time period for you at times. I hope that gets patched and is my biggest complaint about the game.
The episodes are set out in 3 chapters. The voice acting is pretty good and I was surprised to find out that ASMR Sweetie is actually ASMR Darling and she did a great job of playing herself. She was the highlight of the cast of characters and the sound mix was done well. However, the graphics are a bit outdated and it was annoying to see clipping from some of the characters as they moved around. The lighting was also poor.
I enjoyed the game. It's a good mystery and I'm still not sure who the culprit was. The writing was excellent overall and there's just this guilty pleasure of watching & listening in on private conversations. I actually got 10% off the price because I owned 1979 Revolution: Black Friday (which I also enjoyed). I think I got my money's worth. it's better than most of the VR games of this type.
Rate 7.5/10. I'm not sure if you can get different endings. I will have to make some different choices to see if they impact the story at all.
p.s. Game does NOT work on Windows Mixed Reality