In the mixed reality game "Shattered", the horror spills into your reality
Shattered successfully blends psychological horror, escape room puzzles and mixed reality. MIXED played the new Quest 3 exclusive.
Shattered is like a broken mirror, the shards of which must be first pieced together to form a coherent picture and story.
You take on the role of private detective Jessica Gonzalez, who finds herself locked away in a mental institution. The young woman is obsessed with putting a powerful but shady CEO behind bars and has run afoul of the law. Only gradually do we find out why and how.
I've been playing Shattered for two hours and there's still a lot I don't understand. Who am I? What is memory, what is reality? Am I working to free myself from my prison, or am I just a guinea pig in an experiment I can't understand?
Shattered keeps you in the dark, but that's what makes this mysterious and sometimes disturbing mixed-reality game appealing.
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Blurring the boundaries
Shattered mixes escape room elements with mixed reality in new ways. The game consists of individual chapters, called shards, each of which begins with you opening a portal to your memory on your wall.
In the first chapter, you look through the portal into your patient's room. To escape, you must aim at individual objects in the room and literally bring them into your reality. Once the objects are in your room, you can interact with them. This includes doors that open up new perspectives into adjacent rooms in your memory. Sounds mind-bending? That's because it really is.
At the very beginning, I bring a painting from the patient's room into my reality and hang it on one of my walls. When I want to take it down again, I discover a hole behind it, through which I can look into the neighboring patient's room and thus into a possible new escape route.
Entertaining puzzles
Little by little, my real room fills up with digital objects and furniture, increasingly blurring the lines between reality and the game.
The puzzles themselves are solid escape room fare, sometimes with a mixed reality twist, sometimes without. You have to collect clues, combine objects, and crack door codes. The first two chapters, which took me about an hour each, had a pleasant flow and kept me puzzling without getting stuck for long. If you get stuck, you can ask for hints.
What makes Shattered unique is its mixed reality component, its psychological and physical horror, and its mysterious story that keeps me curious and motivated to continue. Ultimately, like Jessica Gonzalez, I want to regain my sanity and freedom and bring the truth to light.
Shattered will be available for purchase from the Horizon Store on December 5th. Only Meta Quest 3S and 3 are supported.
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