Detective VR on Quest 3: Being a mixed reality investigator is pretty cool
Detective VR lets you collect evidence, interrogate suspects, and even manipulate time, and it all works surprisingly well.
Detective VR is coming to Meta Quest 3 and 3S on February 27th.
I played the game for about 90 minutes and found the implementation surprisingly good. Find out below what makes Detective VR unique.
Between virtual and mixed reality
Assuming the role of a private investigator tasked with solving a murder case, one of your first actions will be to visit the scene of the crime: a studio where a young aspiring artist has been murdered.
Designed for hand tracking, Detective VR makes effective use of the technology. Using simple gestures, you teleport from one point in the room to another and collect evidence by photographing objects and clues relevant to solving the murder. These interactions are so easy and intuitive that I never missed the VR controllers, which is rare in other games.
The investigation of a crime scene takes place in virtual reality. Once you have found and photographed all the evidence, the game returns to your real room. The transition is cleverly done: the physical room is built up in front of you in the same way as the virtual rooms, so that you almost get the feeling that the real room is also virtual, just one virtual room among many.
Once in your room, you must examine the evidence you have collected. The photos appear in front of you on a detective board. You can select individual photos and place them on a pedestal, bringing the objects depicted to life in front of you. Now you can use a magnifying glass to examine them for traces of blood, fingerprints, and textual evidence.
You can use these clues to match the evidence on the detective board to suspects, and then confront them directly with your discovery. They appear as volumetric characters directly in front of you in the room and react to your findings.
An example: Examination of the murder victim's smartphone reveals that the last voice message he received was from his girlfriend. Armed with this knowledge, you are given the opportunity to question the girlfriend about the voice message. Unfortunately, the interrogations are not interactive. Instead, a pre-recorded scene is played every time.
As you progress in your investigation and uncover facts and relationships between people, so-called timelines will open up to you. These are past events that you can step into using advanced holodeck-like technology, to rewind, fast-forward, and examine. In these scenes, you gather more evidence for your investigation before going back to the detective board.
Detective VR thus constantly switches between VR (finding evidence in timelines) and MR (investigating the evidence in your room and questioning suspects).
An exciting new way to experience a crime story
What might sound a bit complicated in my description plays naturally thanks to hand tracking and intuitive VR design, which is an achievement.
Technically, the title disappoints in an area that is important for a mixed reality crime story like this one: The motion-captured animations of the actors portraying the characters are sometimes of poor quality, resulting in lack of detail in facial expressions and strange contortions when moving. A little more effort would have made a big difference here.
I also found that Detective VR takes you by the hand a bit too much, which is my main criticism after 90 minutes of play. There's no room to make mistakes or be creative, and every step is predetermined, which destroys the illusion of agency.
But what ultimately makes Detective VR interesting is less the gameplay than the way that hand tracking, VR, and MR are used to tell a crime story in a new and interesting way. Detective VR does that better than I expected. The game turned me into a mixed reality detective equipped with futuristic technology, and it felt very cool.
Detective VR will be released on the Horizon Store on February 27, 2024. Those who pre-order the mixed reality game will receive a 20 percent discount. Meta Quest 3 and 3S are supported. The studio promises a playtime of four to six hours.
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