The new mixed reality mode could give The Cabin a second chance

For the second year in a row, I left Gamescom excited to play more Drop Dead: The Cabin – except this time, in mixed reality.

In 2022, Soul Assembly’s Drop Dead: The Cabin demo at Gamescom was one of our favorites. Unfortunately, the game that launched a few months later got off to a rough start: not only were some of its highlights stolen by the release of PSVR 2 in the same week, but there were also player reports of Bugs and other issues hinder the experience.

One year on, Soul Assembly is back at Gamescom 2023 with a new update to showcase. The team says they’re not only addressing the issues players encountered with the main game’s launch, but are also working on a new update that could give the title a second chance.

This new update for The Cabin will focus on the mixed reality features that Meta is pushing with the Quest 3 headset, which is expected to launch this fall. A new mixed reality game mode called Home Invasion will launch in October as a free update to The Cabin. Soul Assembly clearly hopes that the new mode can provide a broader experience for players to re-evaluate.

Reverse cabin

For owners of the new Quest 3 later this year, Home Invasion looks like one of the few mixed reality experiences that truly puts your entire play space to use, becoming a dynamic and indispensable in the experience. While other experiences like Cubism or Demeo will bring a game board or puzzle into your room, The Cabin’s Home Invasion wants to go a step further, turning your environment into a battlefield.

First teased in a video by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg showcasing the potential of mixed reality in Quest 3, Home Invasion reverses the premise of the original: instead of slowly venturing out leave the cabin to fight zombies and protect equipment, the zombies will come to you, invade your play space and force you to defend from the inside.

Zombies will arrive through virtual windows and doors, as well as giant virtual holes that they will smash through in later waves. You will use a series of familiar guns and melee weapons to stop them, protecting the real-life room you are playing in.

Our demo at Gamescom used the Quest Pro and took place in a fairly small area, with the room’s real door transformed into a Drop Dead-style virtual door, while a virtual window was placed on the wall. adjacent wall. These virtual puzzle pieces give you a glimpse of the virtual forest, from which zombies will appear and rush towards you, eventually rushing inside to attack you.

There’s also a transmitter in the room, which includes a mini-game that makes the satellite – visible outside through a virtual window – work. This starts the 10-minute countdown to extraction, but if zombies attack the satellite, you’ll need to complete the mini-game again to continue the timer.

Unlike the main mode that focuses on co-op, Home Invasion is a single-player experience. At first glance, this mode feels like a fun arcade mixed reality experience that you could easily show off to friends and family instead of a challenge equivalent to the main product.

With the Quest 3’s full reveal coming later this month – and its subsequent launch – we’ve yet to see evidence of any mixed reality experiences that really sell the feature as such. a must-have. Home Invasion will certainly be as entertaining as Resolution Games’ Spatial Ops in its commitment to integrating with physical space to create a new kind of experience. That said, it can be difficult to upgrade a headset or buy a new one on a mixed reality basis. Granted, that’s clearly not intended, but it’s interesting to note nonetheless as we get closer to Connect. We’re still looking for semi-headset mixed reality experiences.

That said, it’s hard to see Home Invasion flourishing beyond a see-what-my-new-ear-can-do state. Anyone wanting something more in-depth and challenging will probably play the standard VR mode. While the aforementioned Spatial Ops experience comes with its own quirks (mainly related to room setup and play areas), it also introduces a concept that would only really be valuable in mixed reality. fit. Taking The Cabin’s mechanics and playing with them in mixed reality would be fun but hardly necessary. Its clear advantage over previous experiences is that it has a single-player mode and can adapt to any room no matter how big or small – Spatial Ops only really shines with the high order of multiplayer present in it. a huge, empty play space.

A few notes

There are also a few other things to consider with Home Invasion. While it’s cool to see a virtual window placed on a real wall, you’ll find yourself trying to stick your arm through the window to give your weapon a better perspective when a zombie ghost is approaching. Result? A hand hits a real wall, instead of going through the virtual hole you see in the headset.

Understandably, the Soul Assembly team saw this as evidence of immersion – but at the same time, it also broke immersion in a reminder of the limitations imposed by technology. Perhaps punching holes in drywall will become the mixed reality equivalent of room-scale VR users breaking their TVs jumping off of Ritchie’s Plank?

That said, this may not be as big of an issue in a less confined space. Our demo took place in a fairly small room, without much room to move or place many windows and doors. It would be interesting to see this style in a spacious living room with more furniture and space to move around. Soul Assembly even told me that if your sofa is clearly marked, zombies will interact with it and even stand on it. Personally, I would love to see them take their seats.

On the Quest Pro, virtual elements, such as Drop Dead doors and windows, are manually positioned around the room by the user before starting, as the headset does not have automatic room detection and setup features. dynamic. The Quest 3 will apparently be able to understand the play space more intelligently using its depth sensor. It seems likely that Home Invasion could dynamically generate a mixed reality battlefield more seamlessly in Mission 3, but Soul Assembly was understandably coy with those details at Gamescom.

The demo we played was also error-free. Soul Assembly wants to emphasize that Gamescom’s demo is an early pre-release build, which will be improved and tweaked before launch. That said, there were problems with weapon spawn locations in my demo, and an unexpected problem occurred for my colleague Henry when zombies stopped spawning mid-round. Again, these may be fixed before October, but are nonetheless worth mentioning given that the base game first launched buggy in February.

Home Invasion will be available in October on all supported Quest headsets (including the Quest 2, but only with black-and-white transitions), included as a free update to The Cabin, and accessible Accessible from within an existing game.