Datura PS3 Release Date: now

now MSRP: $9.99 Official site

Much like recent abstract downloadable titles like Dear Esther and Journey, Datura (PS3 download, available now for $9.99) is a game that doesn't really easily lend itself to the word "game." While it draws clear inspiration from adventure games like Myst for its mechanics, Datura is less a simple puzzle-exploration experience and more a moral Rorschach test you don’t always realize you’re taking.

The game begins with the protagonist lying in the back of an ambulance and passing out before waking up in an autumnal forest. A quotation from Dante that flashes on-screen implies that you're somewhere between here and the afterlife, a feeling that's validated by the strange, seemingly nonsensical arrangement of objects, like a fountain, a statue, a carnival trailer with games to play, a rotating hedge maze, and an automatic tennis ball thrower, among others.

Moral Matters

The objects are mostly gateways to abstract spaces that exist outside the forest, each one offering you a moral choice. Sometimes, these choices are overt and obvious—do you use an ice pick to chop through a frozen lake and retrieve a golden chalice, or to save a person pressing their hand against the ice from the water below? But sometimes the choices are much less obvious, such as when a jumping dog practically forces you to reflexively fend him off with a crowbar before you know if he's really hostile or not.

Unlike most games that offer morality choices, the decisions you make in Datura affect more than just how the hero solves the game’s ultimate problem, or how you end up treating other characters in canned dialogue sequences. Instead, the moral choices you make in Datura force you to take a look at yourself in the mirror and really confront what you see there.

I deliberately chose all the worst, most vile choices in the game on my first playthrough, just to see what happened, and I'll admit that what I found was more than a little disturbing. Seeing the disastrous results of my evil choices was much more chilling than enjoying the results of more morally upstanding choices I made on a second playthrough (and with a total play time of about three hours, it's pretty easy to make a second run through to see how different choices affect things).

Still, the game's ultimate conclusion was a bit too abstract for me, requiring a lot of personal interpretation to figure out. While I appreciate that the game didn’t treat me like a simpleton, I was expecting something that reflected the dichotomy of my previous moral choices a little more directly.

Control issues

Datura offers options to play with either a standard PlayStation 3 controller or the PlayStation Move, and it's the first game where I've had such a choice and actually strongly preferred using the motion controller. Held in your hand, the Move acts as a pretty good surrogate for the disembodied hand you use to interact with objects in the game, though getting that on-screen hand precisely in the right position requires paying close attention to the details of your immediate environment.

Players using a standard controller can tilt and move the controller around to facilitate the same kinds of motions, but walking through and interacting with the forest was easier and more satisfying with the Move. Everything from playing a xylophone or turning a crank on an old-fashioned record player to examining a map or holding a shield in front of you just feels much more interesting with the Move. What's more, there was at least one sequence which I found nearly impossible to navigate with a standard controller, and a few where turning the controller like a wheel often resulted in hitting the guide button by accident.

Still, navigating the forest and finding which objects you can interact with is much more difficult than it ought to be, regardless of which controller you’re using. Pathways are marked with stones, but the way forward isn't always entirely clear. There's a map that gives hints about where to go next, but I found it pretty useless as a navigational aid. Dealing with this frustrating navigation was an unfortunate distraction from the internal reflections that form the heart of the Datura experience.

Head tracking

Datura can also use a second Move controller to activate a novel head-tracking mode, where your view of the game actually tilts and pans as your real-world viewpoint changes. This feature isn't actually advertised in the game—I only knew about it because developer Michal Staniszewski demonstrated the feature at a GDC demo by attaching a Move controller to a homemade clip on the side of a Sony Personal 3D Viewer.

For this review, I tried tying a second Move controller to the lowered antenna on a Boba Fett costume helmet (as pictured). When that didn’t work, a few elastic headbands and a baseball cap did the trick, after some finessing. In the end, the head-tracking feature was an interesting proof of concept, but it didn't really add much to the experience. You're probably better off just holding the second Move up to the side of your head if you want to experiment with independent head and body movement.

Dennis Scimeca is a freelance journalist from Boston, MA. His regular First Person column runs on The Escapist. He also blogs at Punching Snakes, and you can enjoy his commentary and random excitations on Twitter: @DennisScimeca.