The Oculus Rift hit store shelves today, ushering in a dazzling future of deeply immersive gaming that I suspect will prove particularly beneficial — revolutionary, even — for our favorite genre. Additionally, virtual reality is going to be an invaluable tool for developers to introduce a new way to experience many of the games we’re already playing.
This is what New Zealand-based developer PikPok is doing with their mobile horror hit Into the Dead. Originally designed for iOS, Android and Windows phones, this atmospheric first-person shooter tasks players with fleeing from a zombie apocalypse. Accomplishing this is pretty straightforward, just grab one of the guns that have been scattered about each environment and use it to carve an escape route out of a seemingly endless sea of the undead.
The goal is to survive, but there’s an assortment of optional side objectives, unlockable perks and leaderboards to keep the run ‘n gun ’em up gameplay feeling fresh.
Where Into the Dead really excels, as you can see in the trailer above, is in its visuals. It’s an attractive game, with environments and models that have a level of visual polish that betrays the technical limitations of its chosen platform.
Over the course of my playthrough, it managed, more than a few times, to be genuinely frightening. It squeezed a few yelps out of me, probably more than any mobile game has since I practiced some spectacularly poor decision-making on a crowded flight by playing Dead Space on my iPhone. I got about 4-5 shrieks in — or roughly the same number of worried glances from my fellow travelers — before I had put it away.
This game can be just as scary, only in a slightly different way. By forcing players to keep moving, it turns what could’ve been another vanilla, albeit way above-average, mobile zombie runner into a frantic, adrenaline-fueled race toward a finish line that always seems so impossibly far away.
PikPok has been steadily improving Into the Dead since it released three years ago with patches and content updates — the latest added new weapons earlier this month — and in November, Samsung Gear VR support was added, paving the way for its move to the Rift this year.
When that happens, you’ll find me in a corn field, rearranging zombie faces with a shotgun.
