Robinson: The Journey

see deal PSVR Robinson: The Journey - PlayStation 4 $19.99 on Gamestop

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You’re playing a game with puzzles. After trying a handful of solutions that seem obvious, you realize none of them are going to work. Twenty minutes later you’ve resorted to trying something bonkers, something there’s no reasonable way the developers could have intended for you to do. When that doesn’t work, you begin the pixel hunt for some hidden clue or item to solve your problems. Sometimes you find it, but sometimes you fall into a tar pit or off the side of a cliff, and feel the sweet but temporary release of death before being respawned and having lost a frustrating amount of progress.

Loading

That’s the core loop of Robinson, a not-so-subtle futuristic/prehistoric take on Robinson Crusoe. The tale begins one year after your massive spaceship crash lands on an alien planet that happens to be populated by prehistoric Earth creatures. You are Robin, the lone survivor, a young boy whose only company is a an adorable hide-and-seek-playing pet T-Rex named Laika (they’re cute when they’re still small) and a floating AI ball called HIGS. He’s well acted and occasionally a bit funny, but Portal 2’s Wheatley he is not.

The premise of searching for other humans is simple but intriguing enough, but it’s really all in the service of showing you new environments – which are Robinson’s double-edged sword.

Jurassic World

No matter where you look, the world of The Journey is beautiful. Lush jungles of twisted trees of all types crawl with wildlife big and small. Looming cliffs tower overhead and bubbling tar pits look so thick and gooey you can almost smell the sulfur. And because your crashed spacecraft was quite massive, the incredibly scenic environments are littered with white and silver space-age materials which contrast well against the natural look. It’s not uncommon to peer up and see a massive section of a ship jutting into the sky like it’s another snow-capped mountain.

“ It feels like a space that has been lived in by a real, lonely human being just trying to get by.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, getting through these environments can result in literal headaches. While maybe half of the puzzles are clear enough, the other half left me wondering what the heck I was supposed to be doing, which is much different (and worse) than a good puzzle making me wonder how I’m supposed to accomplish the goal. Sometimes you need to drag a tool or a piece of debris along with you, and sometimes you can but don’t need to. When you die the checkpoints are too unforgiving, so you’re never sure if hauling something along is worth the hassle. But if you don’t take it and you need it later, you’ll need to backtrack or just kill yourself to reset the checkpoint and try again. Making you experiment to figure out how to solve a puzzle and then punishing you for that experimentation is not a good combination.

Loading

There are also times where you can command Laika to roar and scare animals so they move or drop something, but that ability is so rarely used that it’s often an afterthought. Sometimes HIGS will explicitly call that out to alert you, but other times he won’t say anything at all.There’s also the issue of trying to navigate this world and accomplish your goals, which is an unnecessary hassle. At any time you can bring up an objective list, but there’s no objective marker to follow. This isn’t a huge issue in some games, where movement feels good, but in a VR game where you’re using the gamepad to walk, lots of exploration can be nauseating. There’s no option to warp to where you’re looking, only to make the right stick turn you in increments instead of smoothly (which can be a big cause of motion sickness), so the DIY approach to finding the path forward just creates a situation where you’re forced to do a lot of needless walking.Worse, you spend a good amount of time climbing to high and low ground using a climbing minigame where you have to find and grab handholds on the rock face. But bizarrely, Robinson doesn’t have Move controller support (even though you’re carrying a device that looks a lot like one) or even use controller tracking to move your hands, so guiding those virtual hands onto ledges requires you to bob and slide your head around, awkwardly guiding them to the handholds with your nose and controlling the grip with a gamepad. Combine that movement with the fact that the ledges appear to be a few inches in front of your face (this is a first-person game, after all), and you have all the ingredients needed for a bad time.