2345: Keep Talking

I went over to my friend Tim’s house this evening for our semi-regular games and food event that we at least attempt to have on a fortnightly basis. Tonight it was just three out of our usual five members, so we spent the evening playing VR games on Tim’s HTC Vive.

The most interesting experience we had was with a game called Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, which I’ve been curious to try for a while. This is a game that doesn’t actually need VR to play, but keeping one player quasi-isolated with a VR headset adds a great deal to the experience and makes it considerably more fun. It’ll be even better when full support for the Vive controllers is added; at present, the room-scale movement works, but you have to interact with it using a standard gamepad.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a party puzzle game in the Spaceteam mould in that it’s asymmetrical in terms of player roles and requires good communication in order to be successful. The player with the VR headset on is faced with a bomb consisting of a number of discrete modules, while all the other players (which can be literally as many as you want) are “experts” telling the VR player what to do. The twist? The “experts” can’t see the bomb, so the VR player has to describe what they see in the hope that the experts can decipher the rather garbled instruction manual and make the correct decisions.

The bombs start off simple with modules such as collections of wires, which require you to read a sequence of logical statements and cut the appropriate wire according to which one is true. There are also buttons that require you to first of all determine a specific condition and then, in some cases, press and release the button with appropriate timing. These are pretty easy to work out and execute.

The more complicated modules range from a memory test that requires you to push buttons according to one of four logical statements, some of which refer to things you did in previous steps, to working out a five-letter password using the available letters in each position to determine what it’s most likely to be from a list of possibilities. Then there’s a more advanced wire-cutting exercise that requires deciphering a ridiculous Venn diagram according to the colour of the wire and whether or not lights and stars are lit up, and a maze that the VR player has to navigate without being able to see where the walls are.

After a little while, it’s possible to “learn” how all these modules work, so at this point the game starts introducing distractions. Initially these are simple: the lights occasionally go off, meaning that you can’t see the bomb (but can still interact with it if you remember what you’re doing), or an alarm clock starts bleeping obtrusively. Later there are so-called “needy modules” on the bomb which can’t be disabled and keep doing inconvenient things during your defusing attempts, so you have to divide your time between taking care of these persistent pests and making progress on the actual disposal effort.

I really liked it as a game. It’s simple and intuitive to play, surprisingly immersive as both the “experts” and as the VR player, and has a real, genuine sense of tension to it all. Some of the modules are pretty difficult to work with — the Morse code one being the worst by far — but what’s a game without challenge?

I’m glad we gave it a go, and I’m looking forward to playing it again sometime soon. If you’re lucky enough to have a VR headset and at least one friend, I recommend grabbing a copy. Even if you don’t have a VR headset, for that matter, it’s worth a play — just make sure your “expert” players can’t see your screen!