Edge of Nowhere review

[Administrator]

One of the most exciting powers of VR is the power to make developers see things afresh. Edge of Nowhere is hardly an enormously experimental title - Insomniac's first Oculus outing is a traditional action-horror game about an expedition to the South Pole that goes terribly awry - but I'm not sure the team would have handled the cut-scenes, say, in quite the same manner if they weren't counting on tech that put players right inside the moment. In third-person VR, the player is a camera, and that often means that you feel like an un-named lurker within the game, viewing proceedings from a physical vantage point. Edge of Nowhere opens with something very bad happening in a jungle, yet Insomniac chooses to place you behind a clump of bushes for much of the action. In VR, this strange conceit works beautifully, as it creates a real tension. Something ghastly is unfolding, but the view is blocked. Or is it?
So although Edge of Nowhere's story stays very close to the standard Lovecraftian template, its cut-scenes - and I can't believe I am typing this about cut-scenes - are pretty much unmissable. Even when you aren't parked behind foliage, VR's special abilities with presence are on full display as characters materialise out of the mist around you, taunting you, imploring you, begging you to help - or to stay away. And even when the game itself is in motion, and we're back in standard third-person, your own first-person perspective, tracking the game's stoic, heavy-footed hero through a frozen polar world of caves, sheer drops and collapsing ledges lends a palpable air of vulnerability to proceedings.
Lovecraft was always going to be perfect for VR anyway, and Insomniac's environmental and character artists have done an astonishing job of bringing his dark polar fantasies to life. As the game moves from white-out, snow-swept open air to cramped, shadowy cave interiors and stranger landscapes beyond, there is a real care paid to the little details: the crunch of snow underfoot, the creak and grind of ancient stones shifting overhead. Ice gets special treatment: thick green spars of the stuff webbed with age-old fissures, scalable walls emitting a soft glow from within and spidering with cracks as it threatens to give way.
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