#oneaday Day 809: VR Theatre

I played through Project Lux this evening. I've been meaning to do so for a while, so I thought I'd finally just sit down and take the hour and a bit needed to enjoy it in its entirety. I'm going to write more about the experience over on Rice Digital tomorrow, but for now I thought you might like some initial impressions.

For the unfamiliar, Project Lux is a virtual reality visual novel. The concept is that you are in a courtroom of the future as a member of the jury, and you are being given the opportunity to "relive" the memories of an individual who has been accused of murder.

Said individual was a government worker who had been tasked with approaching Lux, a young woman who lived by herself and worked as an artist. In the world of Project Lux, the vast majority of humanity has outfitted itself with electronic brains and remains almost perpetually plugged into "cyberspace", so Lux is seen as something of an anomaly — and potentially valuable for reasons that become apparent later in the narrative.

You witness the agent's attempts to get to know Lux, and his encouragement of her artistic talents in various ways. Lux, in turn, creates a number of works of art that are seemingly well-received by her adoring digital fans, and so things progress. To say much more would be a spoiler — as I say, the whole thing is only about an hour long, with two possible endings — so I'll leave it at that for now.

What's interesting about Project Lux is that it doesn't feel like any other kind of story-centric game I've played before. In fact, given that it's a largely passive experience, it's more akin to watching a theatrical production than anything else — except rather than sitting in the audience from afar, your viewpoint is from the perspective of one of the two participant characters.

Lux herself has been lovingly motion captured and is well acted (in Japanese), so it's not just a case of watching a mannequin flapping her lips at you. You're watching someone actually doing a genuine performance, and it's fascinating. And interestingly, the nature of the narrative addresses certain aspects of the limitations typically placed on oneself while enjoying a VR experience — particularly in one of the endings, which is very clever.

I'd like to see more stuff like this. It's probably expensive to produce and a lot of people baulk at paying over a few quid for something that's only an hour long, but I'd still love to see more. It's a potentially fascinating new medium of creative expression.

Now I'm intrigued to see how Tokyo Chronos, which I believe is a more substantial VR VN, handles things. Think I need to give my head a bit of a break from VR first though!