Apr 29th 2017 Become a Wizard in VR

Have you ever wanted to become a wizard before? Have you ever imagined what it would be like to wave your hands around and cast spells from your fingertips? Well, so did Stormborn studios and that is why they made Runes: The Forgotten Path for VR.



Runes is a story heavy VR adventure where you play as a wizard who has been punished by an order of powerful wizards for learning too much magic. Why have they punished you? Oh, some silly nonsense about too much knowledge being dangerous, and dooming humanity and other prattle, but you don't care about that do you? No, you just care about bending the natural planes to your will, and becoming all powerful. Right? Right.



Anyway, that punishment they gave was to imprison you in Oblivion, an eternal sleep prison within your own mind where all your knowledge and spells are sealed away into an eternal limbo. Now, some catastrophe is befalling mankind and they are nearing extinction. You are woken up and since your in your own mind, you don't seem to remember what you looked like, but you're certain you were roguishly handsome, so you create a body for yourself to move around within your mind.



A lot of the problems with VR is movement. This game is designed for room scale VR, but that is still limited to the size of a single room to move around in. A lot of developers are thinking of creative ways to get around this without making people want to hurl up chunks. Stormborn decided that since you were already within your own mind why couldn't you just step back from your avatar of yourself and control it from a set 3rd person perspective. This perspective is used for long stretches of moving across areas while 1st person is still used for combat and actual exploring.



Runes is an interesting looking game. It does promise a solid looking story, but it seems like that will be coming out in installments, so if you're averse to that you may want to stay clear, although it does mean there will be more coming out sooner, albeit smaller games. If you're a fan of VR this is definitely one to check out, and on their kickstarter page there is a free demo where you can get a taste of how the game works for yourself. You can also check out the trailer below.