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Earlier this year I spent what felt like an entire week inside Oculus, and now I'm taking off the PlayStation VR and blinking in the harsh light of actual reality after a straight run of days in which I sat, like a lonely Daft Punk, lost in new worlds, surrounded by games, embedded, in the truest sense, in the heart of the action.It's been wonderful and puzzling. Wonderful because PSVR is wonderful. As Rich has already said, Sony's take on virtual reality feels entirely coherent. We've had a faulty unit, so you might want to wait for the hardware to prove itself, but once it has, the lower definition compared to Oculus and Vive doesn't matter as much as you might expect, the device itself is very comfortable to wear, and the Move controllers are far more precise than I remember them being. The games are frequently great, too. Tumble VR is the clear winner for me, with its weaponised take on Jenga, but Battlezone is fun, Thumper is suitably transporting, and Batman: Arkham VR is absolutely fascinating.
Here's where it gets puzzling, though. I always suspected, given the slightly flat launches for Vive and Oculus, that PSVR would be VR's best chance at mainstream success. It's cheaper, it seems made for the living room, and it feels, in an odd way, like less of a gamble: Sony's turned VR into a peripheral, and console manufacturers have sold us all kinds of weird peripherals before. Now I've played with it, though, and despite the fact that I think it's much better than I had even hoped for, I am starting to suspect that the mainstream is not beckoning. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time. I'm starting to think that I had this all back to front. I'm starting to think that VR is simply not a mainstream proposition - whatever a mainstream proposition means for games anyway.
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