The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Supermassive Games had a hit on their hands when they took the Until Dawn universe and mashed it up with a rollercoaster in Rush of Blood for the original PlayStation VR launch, so it’s not surprise that they done exactly the same thing for PlayStation VR 2, but this time we are playing around in The Dark Pictures anthology universe.

Switchback VR begins with you seated on a train with a number of other characters around you that will soon reappear in rather more horrific circumstances. An explosion, a brief appearance from a sadly silent Pip Torrens as The Curator and we’re off, welded in to a rollercoaster for no logical reason other than that’s how the game will work. The core mechanics of the game are identical to Rush of Blood – you wield a gun in each hand with unlimited ammo, and can shoot crates for time limited upgrades which give you revolvers, shotguns, and sub machine guns. Shoot the bad guys, survive, win. It’s that simple.

The levels (each split into two stages) are all really quite lengthy for a VR shooter, taking each of the first four The Dark Pictures games for inspiration. The first is based on 2019’s Man of Medan, finding the coaster racing through a ghost ship before the action moves to a spooky woodland town for Little Hope. After that it’s off to tombs and caves of Iraq for House of Ashes and we conclude in the ‘Murder Hotel’ of The Devil In Me. I should point there are spoilers for those games, and especially House of Ashes plot twist ending. The final fifth environment is brand new and brings the story of the train crash and the demon Belial to a conclusion.

Some of the levels work really well – a rollercoaster zipping through waves of a wrecked ship is really quite something – but I did find the