Brilliant Oculus game lets you defuse a bomb nobody else can see
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.
A quartet of Canadian indie developers have created one of the most clever uses of the Oculus Rift I've seen with Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, a game about bomb defusing.
Created as part of last weekend's Global Game Jam, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes' brilliant premise has one player tasked with defusing a bomb that only they can see via the Oculus Rift, while their friends sift through various documents trying to sort out the explosive's make and model so their bomb-defusing pal can alleviate the threat. Obviously the bomb's on a timer, so both parties have to hurry.
Like Henry Smith's wonderful iOS miscommunication madhouse Space Team before it, the situation will naturally get hectic as everyone yells over one another in this matter of life and virtual death.
Unfortunately, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes has a rather steep barrier to entry as it requires not only the Oculus Rift, but the Razer Hydra motion controller as well. If you happen to have these components, you can download the game prototype here for free.
As for whether this will ever get spruced up and ported into a commercial release, the team is still sorting that out. "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is just a game jam concept, so a commercial version hasn't actually been discussed between the team yet," said developer Ben Kane in an e-mail to Eurogamer. "The reaction the game has garnered has been great so far though, so it's definitely something we will be discussing. None of us had ever worked together before the jam though, so there will be some wrinkles to work out there."
When asked what new features the team would like to add if it ends up making a commercial release, Kane replied, "As far as things to add go, we did have a tremendous number of ideas that we weren't able to implement during the limited time of the jam. We had plans to make the manuals more dynamic, so that experienced players would be unable to simply memorise the rules. There was a wide variety of different components, like tilt sensors that would prevent players from flipping over the bomb, or panels that required unscrewing to access multi-stage puzzles. Surprisingly, we had to forgo almost all the devious tricks we had come up with to make the game harder because the core game was already tough enough for new players."
But hey, no one ever said bomb defusion was easy. Check out the video above to see the Hurt Locker sim in action.