Meta Quest: The Passengers offers a train ride like you've never experienced before
The Passengers is an extraordinary VR experience that puts you in the skin and mind of strangers on a train ride.
Four strangers sit across from each other in a train compartment: a woman, a man, a child, and an elderly lady. The Passengers allows us to embody all four strangers in turn, experiencing the same ten-minute train ride from their individual perspectives. Their inner world opens up to us: we hear their thoughts and immerse ourselves in the memories that haunt them.
Each of the travelers is preoccupied with something different. The woman is thinking about her relationship, which is at a crossroads. She remembers a fateful moment and wishes she had acted differently. The man sitting across from her is struggling with self-doubt and shyness as he hesitates to approach the woman. He, too, is lost in his memories, reliving scenes from his past when he did not have the courage to say and do what he wanted to say and do. The child, poring over a drawing, wishes for the return of his father, who left the family in a quarrel. Here, too, we participate in remembered moments that are etched in the memory of the guilt-ridden child.
While these three passengers are haunted by their traumatic memories, the elderly woman struggles with the fading of her memory. She tries to recall disappearing details of a memory from her youth that haunts her to this day.
Colored realities
The scene on the train is animated and reflects the different colored subjective realities of the four characters. For the woman, the outside world appears as an oil painting painted with expressive brushstrokes; for the shy man, it appears as a paler watercolor piece. Seen through the eyes of the child, the world looks as if painted with colored pencils, and for the woman, as a black and white pencil drawing.
A visual contrast to this are the memories in which the viewer is repeatedly immersed. These scenes were captured with a 360-degree camera from the person's perspective, making the material seem more immediate and personal than the shared reality of the train compartment.
The Passengers also has some interactive moments. The person you are impersonating reacts in thought to the passengers you are looking at, and at some points you can decide how they behave by the act of speaking. But these and other interactions remain superficial. What makes the VR experience memorable is the narration and the visual style, not the interactivity, which had no consequences, at least in my playthrough.
A moving VR experience
The Passengers resonated with me because I spent four years of my life as a commuter, sitting on the train for hours on weekdays. To experience the perspective of other passengers, to see the world through the eyes of strangers, to immerse myself in their lives for a few minutes, was a moving experience that is probably more immersive and intimate through virtual reality than it would be through any other visual media.
It is unfortunate that there are no significant interactions or conversations between the characters. The experience always stops before it gets interesting. The people remain trapped in their private worlds of thought, without any encounters or real exchanges taking place. For me, this makes The Passengers a deeply sad work of art.
Where the action leads, what happens next, remains open, left to the imagination. There is no fifth perspective, no omniscient narrator, no framework in which the events are embedded and from which they could make sense. In the end, you are left a bit perplexed, confronted with a multi-perspectivism that remains unresolved.
You can purchase The Passengers for $5 in the Horizon Store and on Steam.
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