For the second year in a row, I’m heading to Gamescom looking forward to playing more of Drop Dead: The Cabin – but this time in mixed reality.
Drop Dead: The Cabin, showcased by Soul Assembly, was one of our favorite games at Gamescom in 2022. Unfortunately, the game encountered some issues when it launched a few months later: not only did the PSVR 2 launch steal some of the thunder that same week, but players reported crashes and other issues that affected the gameplay experience.
A year has passed and Soul Assembly showed off a new update at Gamescom 2023. The team says they've not only fixed the issues players had with the game's initial launch, but are also working on a new update that may finally give the game a chance to be re-evaluated.
《The Cabin》的新更新将着重展示Meta与其即将在今年秋季首次亮相的Quest 3头戴设备一起推动的混合现实功能。名为“Home Invasion”的新混合现实游戏模式将在10月份作为《The Cabin》的免费更新发布。Soul Assembly明显希望这个新模式能让更多玩家重新评估这个宏大的体验。
Subvert "The Cabin"
For new Quest 3 owners buying a Quest 3 later this year, Home Invasion appears to be one of the only mixed reality experiences that fully utilizes your entire play space and becomes a dynamic and integral part of the experience. While other experiences like Cubism or Demeo bring a game board or puzzle into your room, The Cabin's Home Invasion wants to go a step further and turn your environment into a battlefield.
In a video in which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off the potential of mixed reality on the Quest 3, Home Invasion flips the original game's premise on its head: Instead of slowly leaving your cabin to fight zombies and protect the device, you Zombies will come to your play space, invading it and forcing you to defend it from within.
Zombies will enter through virtual windows and doors, and will smash open giant virtual holes in subsequent waves. You'll use a familiar array of guns and melee weapons to fight them off, protecting the real rooms you play in.
Our demo at Gamescom, using the Quest Pro, took place in a fairly small area, with real doors converted into virtual ones like in Drop Dead, and a virtual window on an adjacent wall. These virtual scenes give you a sneak peek into the virtual forest where zombies will emerge and lurch towards you, eventually jumping in and attacking you.
There is also a transmission in the room with a mini-game that will get the satellite (visible through the virtual window) up and running. This will start the extraction process with a 10 minute countdown, but if zombies attack the satellite you will need to complete the minigame again to resume the countdown.
Unlike the main co-op mode, Home Invasion is a single-player experience. At first glance, the mode looks more like a fun arcade mixed reality experience that you can easily show off to friends and family, rather than equaling the challenge offered by the main game.
With the Quest 3's full launch and subsequent official availability later this month, we've yet to see an experience that truly sells its mixed reality capabilities. There's no doubt that Home Invasion is entertaining, and like Resolution Games' Spatial Ops, it strives to blend physical space with gameplay to create a new category of experience. Still, it's hardly a basis for upgrading the headset or making a new mixed-reality-based purchase. Of course, it's clearly not intended to be such a basis, but it's still an interesting question as we get closer to the Connect conference. We're still looking for that mixed reality experience that will make people buy headsets.
Still, it's hard to imagine Home Invasion succeeding beyond "hey, look what my new headset can do." Anyone looking for something a little more in-depth and challenging may ultimately choose to play the standard VR mode. While the aforementioned Spatial Ops experience comes with its share of issues (mainly related to room and game locale settings), it also presents a concept that's only truly valuable in mixed reality. Playing The Cabin's mechanics in mixed reality would be fun, but not essential. Its clear advantage over the previous experience is that it's single-player and can fit into any room size - Spatial Ops only really shines when there are multiple players in a huge, empty game space.
some warnings
There are a few other things to consider when it comes to Home Invasion. While placing virtual windows on real walls is great, you'll find yourself trying to stick your arms through the windows so your weapons can better hit approaching zombies. The results of it? The hand hits a real wall, not through a virtual opening seen in the headset.
The Soul Assembly team understandably laughed it off, as it's an immersive experience, but at the same time, it breaks the immersion and serves as a reminder of the limitations that technology can impose. Maybe punching through drywall will become the mixed reality equivalent of room-scale VR users smashing their TVs?
Still, in a more spacious space, this might not be as big of an issue. Our demo was in a fairly small room, with no extra room to move or place multiple windows and doors. It would be interesting to see this model in a spacious living room with more furniture and room to move around. Soul Assembly even told me that if your couch is marked, zombies will interact with it and even stand on it. I personally would like to see them sit down.
On the Quest Pro, virtual elements like doors and windows in Drop Dead are manually placed around a room by the user before starting because the headset doesn't have automatic room setup and detection. It looks like the Quest 3 will be able to use its depth sensor more intelligently to understand the game space. It's possible that Home Invasion will be able to generate mixed reality battlefields more automatically on the Quest 3, but Soul Assembly was mum on those details at Gamescom.
The demo we played wasn't entirely bug-free either. Soul Assembly emphasized that the Gamescom demo was an early pre-release build and will be refined and tweaked before release. Still, there are known issues with weapon spawn locations in my demo, and in my colleague Henry's demo, zombies stopped refreshing in the middle of the game. These issues may not be fixed until October, but considering the problems the base game had when it launched in February, they're certainly worth mentioning.
Home Invasion will launch in October on all supported Quest headsets (including Quest 2, but only supports black and white penetration view) as a free update to The Cabin and accessible from existing games.
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