Virtual Reality's fantastic, but some games need a little more Reality...

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Gaming shouldn’t, on the whole, be a painful experience, but after playing a certain kitchen-based horror I feel it’d be great if PS VR delivered more of a sting.

I really wasn’t sure I wanted to experience the Resident Evil Kitchen teaser. I love a good horror film (and really cheesy ones are even better), but did I want to participate in one? What if it left me a sobbing wreck? The rest of the team didn’t care – the chance to laugh at Mim’s Girly Squeals was too good to pass up – so on the headset went.

The environment was great, and maybe that was half the problem. I was so busy looking around at the grimy furniture, and being entranced by the way the VR headset took me into another place – I still haven’t been able to find out if the teacup design is a real one, and therefore purchasable – that the main foe’s shenanigans were more annoying than frightening, and by the end I was flapping my hands at her in an effort to get her out of my face in order to continue being nosy. And then, ‘she’ stabbed ‘me’ in the leg. Being stabbed didn’t hurt. So I didn’t care.

No-one wants a game that actually stabs them in the leg, of course (unless it’s a Special Edition bundled with branded plasters; then I might be prepared to give it a go), but it’d be great if being injured or dying in virtual reality felt a little more startling, perhaps via a vibration pack. I’d have paid a lot less attention to the crockery if I’d been able to experience the knife in the thigh in some non-visual way.

Why not have a zapper for each arm and leg? Imagine getting hit in a first-person shooter and feeling the impact in the relevant limb. Wouldn’t that be great? Or if that all sounds too violent, consider Rez Infinite. Developer Tetsuya Mizuguchi built a full-body vibration suit too expensive to sell, but four little buzzers would be a good, mass-market alternative…

PS VR is genuinely exciting and opens up all sorts of new gameplay. Spend long enough with it and you’ll forget what you see isn’t actually there. The next step from seeing it should definitely be feeling it.

This article originally appeared in Official PlayStation Magazine. For more great PlayStation coverage, you can subscribe here.

Miriam McDonald
Miriam McDonald
A terrifying cross between Mary Berry and the Marquis de Sade, Operations Editor Mim enjoyed Kitchen far more than is healthy. “Don’t worry about the Bakers,” she says. “Now, who wants a nice Sweeney Todd pie?”