Spies live a life that’s as deadly as it is stylish. The cool cars, fancy gadgets and killer wardrobe are balanced against an array of death traps set by evil supervillains (mad scientist/industrialist types, not super powers) but it’s nice work if you can handle the lifestyle. I Expect You to Die puts you in the seat of a spy carrying out missions to take down a madman with too much money and a desire to spend it dominating the world, and it puts the Oculus Rift through its paces in the process.

I Expect You to Die initially came out as an experimental locked-room type of game for the DK2 version of the Rift and picked up a nice pile of awards, so now it’s being expanded to a full game complete with support for the Oculus Touch controllers. It’s still playable with mouse or gamepad, of course, but having gotten a hands-on PAX East demo with Touch controllers it’s hard to imagine playing it any other way.

The demo starts with you seated at a desk and a few cards scattered about with instructions. Controls are simple enough, using two buttons on each controller and the thumb stick, and the in-screen representation of the Touch controller is a pair of hands that tracks perfectly to you real-world hand position. This was my first time getting a chance at the Touch controls and the thing that still impresses me is that, after the helpful rep got the Rift situated on my head, I could see where my “hands” were as he held them clearly enough to just reach and accurately get them, even with my eyes completely covered by the screen.



The rest was pretty simple, from a control perspective. The middle-finger button on each controller was to grab something with that hand, keeping the button held down until you want to drop it, and the index-finger button used the item. Holding down the action button let you set an instruction card in mid-air for easy reference, which is now an ability I need in real life. Grab a lighter and hit the action button and the top pops open and flame springs up, and holding the lighter to a hovering card set it on fire.

The final ability was a little light telekinesis, activated by pushing up on the thumb stick. This shoots a blue circle out into the environment, and hitting the grab button holds on to whatever’s highlighted. See a book on a shelf out of reach? Shoot out the blue ring, grab, and reel it in by pulling back on the thumb stick. Don’t need it? It only took a second to reverse the process, putting the book back where it came from or just tossing it to the side. In practical terms it’s an excellent way to keep the player sitting rather than walking around the environment.



After a short time in the tutorial room (too short, but there was only one demo unit and a line behind me that I was holding up) it was time to do the demo mission, where things get properly playful. The job at hand was to steal a car from the back of an airplane, but of course the car is trapped, you can’t leave the driver’s seat, and the rear door of the plane is sealed shut. It’s a day’s work for a spy, though, so the first thing to do is explore the environment and see what tools are available.

None of the car’s devices do much without power, and the key isn’t in the ignition, but having watched more than one movie it’s not hard to get past that problem. The retinal scan doesn’t go well, though, setting off a series of traps that end with a bomb dumped on my lap. Defusing it led to one of the more interesting issues with the game, because the spy doesn’t have a body. This is done to eliminate the player seeing a body that very clearly isn’t theirs, but this led to two separate bits of weirdness. The first is looking down and suddenly feeling like one’s legs have turned into a car seat, and the second was one stick of dynamite rolling into the driver’s side chair. I like a tidy workplace so, while it wasn’t technically necessary, my first response was to not have a heavy explosive in my lap. It took several tries reaching for it to realize that 1) my real-world body was in the way and 2) I was pawing at my groin in front of an audience. While holding a Touch controller. Really, the controller and I are just good friends *cough*withbenefits*cough*



Asking the developer afterwards it turns out that’s pretty common. Remove the image of the body and people automatically start working as if it’s not there, despite decades of experience otherwise. It’s not that people forget how to move or anything as excessive as that, but that they’ll try to reach through the thing they know is there but can’t see. It’s an interesting side-effect of I Expect You to Die’s approach to representing the player, and should provide much hilarity for those who already think people look silly flailing about inside their virtual worlds.

What made I Expect You to Die special was the one-two punch of interactivity and presence. It’s still early days in VR so games like this have far more impact than they will five years down the line, but it’s not five years from now yet so being able to pick up, turn things, activate them, and solve puzzles by playing with items mapped to the controls on a pair of controllers feels instantly engaging. Rolling down the car window with one hand while using telekinesis with the other to pull over a screwdriver on a far shelf, then closing the window with the first hand again so the poison gas couldn’t flood the car was a fun test of multitasking. Turning around and reaching back to pick up the gun on the back seat, twisting and turning and aiming it, felt really special.



There were ways to play with the level outside of simply solving the puzzle that I didn’t get around to trying, such as tossing a wad of $100s out the window to watch them get sucked out of the rear of the plane, and each of I Except You to Die’s four levels will have plenty of details like that. Asking about the four levels, I was assured that the next three are bigger, more open and more complicated, with plenty of toys to play with and ways to mess around that have nothing to do with a straight path to the solution. The locked-room puzzle box is a well-established genre at this point, but I Expect You to Die‘s VR approach to it breathes new and playfully fascinating life into the familiar experience.