LOS ANGELES—Oculus may be the best-known name in the virtual reality gaming space, but it's still lacking in one key category: motion controllers. The HTC Vive has proven how fun those devices can be in a VR game or app, and Oculus' answer, the "Touch" set of motion-tracked controllers, still doesn't have a price or a release date.

Thankfully, Oculus Touch is getting closer to a "fall" launch, and at this year's E3, Oculus Studios gave Ars a chance to try two brand-new games in wildly different genres—to prove how serious the company is about hand-tracking gaming.

Our first hands-on game in the above video is Wilson's Heart, which comes from the once Microsoft-exclusive developers at Austin, Texas' Twisted Pixel, who spent quite a few years focusing on silly games like 'Splosion Man and Kinect games like The Gunslinger. The company's latest game is far less silly in tone, as it drops players into a strange mental hospital and forces them to come to terms with a rapidly growing feeling of psychosis. Players can easily warp around a huge, 3D environment and use their hands to interact with objects and solve puzzles, and the game's feeling of dread is sold by appropriately creepy surround-sound design and a noir-affectionate black-and-white aesthetic.

Ars' testers agreed that Wilson's Heart looked particularly good in monochrome, and its 3D engine, which Twisted Pixel says is a modified version of its in-house system, appeared to apply an incredible anti-aliasing solution to mute Oculus's usual "screen door" display complaints.







In the other half of our demo session, we played Insomniac Games' The Unspoken, which includes something not often seen in either 2D or VR: active, real-time gunfights between only two players. Rather than dumping players into a large battleground that requires a lot of running, The Unspoken has each of its fighters stand on one side of a giant chamber (rendered here as a garbage dumping ground in an alternate-reality Chicago). Players battle by conjuring and throwing spells at their opponents, which range from simple fireballs to giant, summoned beasts.

To cast the crazier spells, players must aim their hands at floating platforms on their side of the battlefield to auto-warp to them to gather glowing orbs. With enough of those orbs in hand, players can conjure a superpower, which is activated by completing a series of motions with your hands. One motion has you smash a virtual anvil with a hammer a few times until a glowing, fiery spear appears, which you can then pick up and chuck at your opponent. In another, you use your hands to fold a paper airplane, which then becomes a giant ghost bomber plane that auto-hits your opponent. To defend themselves, players can hold up a small default shield, conjure a stronger shield, or warp to other platforms to dodge shots (and sometimes warp toward points of cover).







The result feels proper in VR without requiring a large room or a lot of real-life movement like ducking and side-stepping. The only hitch came from the lack of a directional focus on the Touch controller hardware—meaning that when I would let go of the controller's trigger button at the apex of a real-life "throw" motion, I struggled to understand which direction my thrown object would travel. Conversely, the full-length HTC Vive wand makes that sort of activity easier, as it gives me a perpendicular reference point for which direction a thrown object will be released. This problem may be solved by clever software design, but for now, it's a major problem point for a system that will likely have a lot more throw-and-catch systems in its upcoming games.

Still, Insomniac is clearly onto something clever, clear, and fun in its two-player dueling game, and we'll be curious to see if the developer boosts the player count for the sake of two-on-two battles when Oculus Touch finally, eventually launches.