Now That's What I Call Immersion | Subside VR
Plus it's eBook time at last!
Hey Subscribers! Pop the cork on the Asti Spumante🍾and break out the posh biscuits🍪. I’m having a celebration!
My new eBook is finally available for you to download. Yes finally. Really.
You’ll find a link at the end of this newsletter that will take you to a landing page on my website, realisedrealities.com, where you’ll be able to fill in a quick form and then download the book. And the beauty of it is, you guys are getting it a week or two before everyone else. To be fair, it’s taken me forever, and everyone’s getting it much later than I intended, but on aggregate I think you’re coming out ahead. That’s a bingo!
I’ve finally had a week where I’ve been able to log a decent amount of time in VR. One of the most fun things about my job as VR Design Consultant is that I occasionally get involved in projects where my clients ask me to play their games, or a competitor’s games, or games within certain market sectors they’re looking into, and report back. This week was one of those, and while it was still lots of hard work (of course - just in case the clients or my wife are reading this), I do have to admit I had great fun while I was doing it. I thought I’d use this as an excuse to to flag up a lovely VR title that I’ve been looking at for both work and pleasure recently, because it’s really something special IMO.
Subside
A2D Games / Khena b | 2024 | PSVR2, PCVR | Reviewed on PSVR2
When I’m faced with the opportunity to spend some time gaming, the first choice I always have to make is whether it’ll be a flat screen game of some type, or an immersive game. In my head, I find myself framing this choice as ‘Do I want to play something, or do something?’. If it’s the immersive choice —‘do’ — then I’m wondering what exactly do I fancy doing right now? Do I want to be a starship pilot, do I want to be a soldier, do I want to be a detective, do I want to be vampire slayer? A photographer? Batman even?
Over the years that’s the fundamental distinction I’ve established in my mind between the two forms : On the TV I’m playing and watching, but in VR I’m doing and being.
I’ve actually been playing this one for a few weeks, and I think it’s one of those quirky and interesting titles that, for some people, might just be their favourite VR thing ever. It really concentrates on the being side of things.
To describe Subside as a scuba diving simulator would paint the wrong picture, and be factually incorrect because your lungfuls of air are a limiting factor in the gameplay, especially early on. But it’s not a free-diving simulation either, which conjures images of someone swimming too deep, too fast, to retrieve some pearl from some distant seabed mollusk. And it’s not a ‘TheBlu’ simulator either. In fact, it’s not really fulfilling any of the usual deep sea showpiece fantasies that you might expect VR to focus on.
Instead, it’s a game that captures something more attainable and more likely to have been experienced by it’s users. Y’see, what Subside reminds me of most accurately is going on holiday as a kid and going snorkeling close to shore on a sunny day in the south of France; sunscreen, Cheap plastic flippers, cheap mask, a snorkel that tastes eternally of salt and sand, my Darth Vader breathing turned up to 11 in my ears, and me drifting and paddling along, face down staring at the seabed, getting lost in an upside-down free-floating world of otherliness. Following a school of fish one minute, exploring the rocks and studying plants the next. Happy days in a me-world where I could (and regularly did) forget entirely about the land above the waterline, or the fact that my Mum had said only 15 more minutes back at some point but maybe it’s time to head ba… wait! is that just a pebble, a bottle top, or… could it be a genuine pirate doubloon? And on I would go. (Thinking back, my poor mum admitted in later life she had recurring nightmares her whole life about me drowning (apparently as a toddler I once wandered off to some rock pools and they lost me for an hour and had the police searching for me, or something) so this was probably torture every time I’d swim off and go missing. I’m pretty sure that to contrast and balance this, my Dad readily welcomed the peace and quiet so he could read his beach novels sans screaming kids, and probably would have only been annoyed in the event that I’d somehow made it all the way across the Golfe de San Tropez mindlessly following a seahorse, because he would have to put his book away and drive all the way around the coast to come get me).
This is exactly what Subside simulates (apart from your kid going missing, of course - maybe Khena b, digital artist and one-man developer at A2D is saving that for a sequel). I love it because it aims for something harder to pull off; something I would imagine is more familiar to most users. And while it’s ambitions may be more humble than other underwater VR experiences, what it does it does it almost perfectly. It’s not offering the usual VR fantasy of diving down from your expensive Yacht in a $15K scuba setup, or bearing witness to a once-in-a-lifetime mass manatee migration. In fact, it seems to be pulling in the opposite direction, trying hard not do the usual underwater VR thing. Instead it recreates a very specific and relatable experience that anyone who’s worn a snorkel and mask can relate to, and I believe more people will be pulled by the familiarity and authenticity in accordance with their own experiences.
And I really appreciate the way it does it. Rather than the usual checklist of objectives, upgrade trees, and clear instructions as to how to progress through the game, it keeps it’s cards close to it’s chest. You just explore, and find stuff. You’ll probably spot a shiny gold coin within your first few minutes of exploring, and dive down the 5 or 6 feet to fish it from the sea floor. When grabbed, it disappears into some unknown and unseen inventory and you just keep exploring. You’ll maybe find a locked safe-box with no sign of a key, or a security chest with two solid padlocks holding it shut, and wonder how - or if - you’re supposed to gain access. You’re just as likely to find a discarded machine part or a sunken, rusted out car wreck, and wonder if they serve a purpose. No way to store objects means you’ll be swimming around with that crowbar or fuel can in one hand if you want to try something out, trying to find where you saw that other thing 5 minutes ago that it might just work with.
Just withholding the traditional videogame affordances of information and inventory from the player in this way helps the exploration feel organic and believable, and helps it to shake off any traditional videogame expectations. At first you may find yourself wondering ‘Is this going to be a game, or a VR tourism experience?’ — something many types of gamer have automatic defences against. But for me, those questions were steadily washed away by the tide. The magic here is so immersive that it’s very easy to lose yourself in just existing in the world, doing the things you’d be doing IRL, and before you know it the distinction doesn’t really matter to you at all because your mind is totally preoccupied with more important things like your curiosity about what that you might find behind that rock, whether that chain half-buried in the sand is worth following, and calculating whether your limited capacity of air will let you get to the bottom of that fissure to take a peek, and make it back before you pass out.
We often talk about achieving deep, sustained presence in a virtual world as the north star every VR experience is aiming for, the thing we’re all trying to attain. The moment you’re pulled from that world — by encountering a bug, a mismatch of expectations, or even your cat brushing against your leg — we talk about the presence state having been damaged or even shattered. VR designers are always trying to minimize these breaks, or remove them where possible. But this presents a challenge for VR gaming, especially when we place the user in the middle of big events and present them with big decisions. It’s unreasonable to expect users to face these moments without slipping outside of the instant situation and considering their options, thinking about an overall strategy, calculating how to maximize the benefits to ourselves by making the right decision. It’s hard to keep players thinking diegetically and reacting in-character in these moments. Because these are typically unusual situations that most of us probably only ever recognise from videogames, rather than real life. Our brains will tend to respond in that same way, stepping back and considering it from a meta-game perspective, looking at how to win at the game, rather than reacting however we might if faced with that actual situation in real life. Every time we present archetypal videogame experiences in VR, we can expect many users to react the way they would in a videogame. And this can be a useful insight.
Seemingly aware of this, Subside skirts away from presenting an explicit gameplay structure for as long as it can, and prefers to offer a minimum of information. By not explaining itself, it encourages the player instead to just explore and experience the world and figure things out as they go. You get the pleasure of wondering about the possibility space you’re swimming in, and slowly figuring things out. Once you’ve found a few coins, you’ll start to really wonder what, if anything, you may be able to use them for. So you’ll start treasure hunting in earnest. The game doesn’t tell you to do this, but your curiosity will insist. Intermittently, the gameplay options will broaden out as result of this, and without a word the game has pulled you into a compelling loop that’s hard to pull away from. The thought that this was just game design - and very straightforward and basic game design at that - managed to stay out of my head for long stretches of time. And as someone who works in the sausage factory, that is notably unusual for me. I’ve seen scores of more complex design implementations that fail to overcome these issues quite as simply and elegantly as Subside manages it. This could be by accident, but it feels more by design. Either way, I doff my hat to the end result, it’s a very notable achievement in getting the game mechanics out of the way of the experience, at least for the opening hours.
It’s very chill, too. There’s no scary fish until a long, long way into the game, no glide-bys from a consortium of giant squids, no Pokémon Snap photo-album of fishies to build out. Instead, there’s increasingly sizeable underwater domains to explore that are only meters deep, but wide and intricately populated with endless details, realistic fish, lots of unique things to discover, and teases me with the same attraction that the real experience held over me as a child, turning idle minutes of curiosity into hours of fascinating exploration.
It might not be everybody’s cup of seawater, but it’s hard to deny that the thing it’s doing, the experience it’s emulating, it’s simply pulling it off fantastically well, and the believability is so high that it can keep you convinced, present in the virtual space, and forgetting about the real world for long stretches. It can create very deep immersion, in a world where you’re never actually immersed that deep in the water. (Alright, I couldn’t resist. But I’m claiming it as a freebie, it’ll make up for the fact that as an ‘Immersive Design Consultant’, I’ve had to deal with inquiries from businesses looking for swimming pool design expertise on several occasions). It’s a real showpiece experience that VR owners will want to show off to anyone who they can coax into the headset. There’s a caveat to that which I’ll get to later, though.
It’s amazing that I’ve got this far without mentioning the graphics, to be honest. They are simply stunning on the PSVR2, arguably as believable and photo-realistic as anything you’ve ever tried on any VR platform, running on UE4 at 90hz and making great use of the PSVR2’s Dynamic Foveated Rendering to give a presentation that is smooth and crisp, with everything feeling very solid and believable. The portrayal of the underwater world is completely plausible from moment-to-moment, avoiding the authored showiness and staged spectacle of other VR experiences in the same vein, but really leaning into believability with spot-on light absorption and scattering, evoking everything from murky, leaf-strewn canyon waters to crystal clear coastal shelves with impressive accuracy. The caustic refraction of light dancing across the seabed feel impressively accurate. There’s even night time versions of some of the areas - being undersea at night while thunder, lightning and rain pelt the surface is quite a memorable VR experience.
Speaking of the surface, the moment of breaking the membrane and bobbing your head up into the fresh air is a real standout. Everybody I’ve shown this to comments on how well done it is. Anyone who’s ever swum in water or had a bath in their life will instantly recognise the feeling of breaking the surface, it’s something all but the very filthiest of us are intimately familiar with, and the general rule is that the more familiar something is, the harder it is to pull off convincingly in VR. In fact, many undersea VR experiences don’t let you reach the surface, or might just use it as a proximity trigger to cut to an animation of you climbing onto your yacht for this very reason. Subside ignores that and just goes ahead and pulls it off. I’ve clocked 15 or so hours in the game so far and it still feels like a standout moment every time it happens. There’s a great sense of buoyancy, too, with different objects behaving as you’d expect both above the surface and below, rarely breaking the plausibility illusion. You can float on the surface and grab the scenery to move around or steady yourself, but you can’t ever hoist yourself higher than a couple of feet above the surface. I did spend a happy 20 minutes feeling extremely smart about myself while loading a load of found objects into a rowboat bobbing up on the surface, before I discovered I could never lift myself high enough to get them back out again. They’re probably still in there. Ah well.
The animated fish, turtles, jellies and so on that you meet are nicely modeled and animated, and react to your interference in pleasing ways. Chasing a baby shark as it darts to get away from your hands or surprising a flat fish camouflaged under the sand make the environment feel real. The sea life itself can be prolific in certain areas, barren in others, and this distribution makes encountering these creatures feel significant and interesting when you come across them - again, this feels like intelligent design scoping; at no point did I feel there should be more fish to make this compete with its peers or for more visual impact, instead it had me diegetically wondering what other fish I might find if I just kept exploring. When a school of fish swims by, it’s elevated into a little bit more of a special moment — just like it would IRL. And this all combines with a super-impressive audio soundscape, that feels absolutely spot-on. The second you hear it, it’s such a striking recreation of those muted, distinctive undersea soundscapes that I remember from my snorkeling holidays. Breaking the surface completely changes the soundscape, and I guarantee you’ll experiment with ducking your head under the water to see how it affects the sound propagation — and it all checks out convincingly. This was made by a solo developer, remember, and from the evidence here, Khena B seems insanely talented at a lot of things. Somehow, along with everything else, they’ve managed to deliver best-in-class spatial audio on their first try, too.
I mentioned earlier about the game structure being realistically simple, and that this works so well to maintain the immersion in my opinion - but I accept that this might be divisive for some people looking for a more traditional modern game structure. Well, there’s another element to this title that’s proven divisive to the user base, and it’s something that might make me hesitate to show it to some of my friends and colleagues, because it’s a ‘feature’ that can be both frustrating and also a discomfort trigger. But it’s quite fascinating to me and I’ve been debating about the approach a lot. You may have gathered that I think this game does so many things excellently. Well, another thing the game does brilliantly is modelling the physicality of interacting with the world. The swimming feels great and behaves as expected, even if it’s a bit of a workout (this gets easier as you progress, but I’ll say no more). When you touch a surface, your hands have collision and can grab objects and the world by squeezing the grips as usual in VR. So you can maneuver and propel yourself around the undersea world by pulling yourself on rocks and along the ground works just as you’d expect. Most of the time.
You see, something is amiss in how the sense of touch is translated through the game controllers, and when you pull yourself forward and let go, sometimes you don’t quite let go at just the right moment, even though you’ll feel like you’ve let go naturally, and you get snagged like your sleeve is caught on the rock. There’s a discrepancy between the players intention, and the mechanical translation of their interaction.
This is very similar deal as those times when you try to throw something in VR, and it doesn’t work the same way as IRL, and you get a wonky throw, or it thuds to the floor or whatever and you don’t understand why. Actions that are easy and natural IRL shouldn’t have to be relearned in VR so that the user can achieve the expected result. Instead, the player’s intention should be understood and the action resolved accordingly.
In Subside, I can’t think of one occasion where I wanted to push myself away from a rock or surface, but also retain my hold on it so it yanked me back and spun me sideways. But I feel I have to make exaggerated open-hand poses to make sure I’m not accidentally going to snag on something. This can be especially bad if you’re swimming with your hands by your side rather than out in front of you, as the slightest touch on the grip might see you snag on something out of sight and pull you around. It results in an unexpected lateral movement and an arrest of motion that can be a strong discomfort trigger, so you have to remember to keep your hands wide open while they’re out of sight. It could and should be a simple thing to fix. And yet…
The weird thing is that it kind of feels right. Either by accident or by design, it replicates the way that you’re affected by tidal forces when swimming close to land in real life. My snorkeling adventures were very much affected by this as a kid, and when it happens it feels like it actually adds to the believability for me. My initial thought is always that I’m being buffeted by a wave or pulled by the undertow, and I’m wondering if the developer Khena b left it in on purpose because of this. Who knows, but it doesn’t really matter — enough users have complained about it on forums and review pages that it’s clearly a discomfort trigger for a number of people, and so some kind of fix for it - whether it’s across the board or (ideally) optional - should be addressed.
So Subside is all quite fascinating to me as an offering, sitting somewhere between ultra-realistic virtual tourism and a laid back, fairly simple gaming experience that does it’s best to stay out of your way, but proves very compelling. It could easily land between the two stools, not really offering enough for either side of the divide to get comfortable with. But instead it feels very much like a game that’s had a confident guiding hand leading it to exactly this point. It’s either that, or it’s just an incredibly lucky confluence of factors coming together to create something so immersive. The reduced and altered sensory expectations of being underwater with diving gloves on are actually a really good fit for VR so maybe it’s a fortuitous mixture of the two. However it manifested, to think this is the alchemy of a single independent developer is just staggering, it’s truly one of the most impressive things you can experience in VR.
I’ve found it to be a perfect experience to keep returning to even after a day working in VR; it’s siren call not some gameplay structure that has me on it’s hook, but instead a gentle welcoming song, seducing me to relax and spend some time being in these locations. That’s a hoary old excuse that plenty of reviews have said about plenty of VR games in the past, but for me its never rung true, because it’s always too hard for me to forget for more than a few moments that these worlds are anything other than synthetic constructs put together by talented artists and modellers. Technically they might impress me, and on a checklist of ‘are you doing all the right things for maximum immersion’, they might be ticking plenty of the right boxes. But the layer of game — the GUI, the interaction prompts, the maps and inventories and progress structures — that are sitting atop the experience are always a constant reminder of exactly what I’m looking at.
But with Subside, I’ve finally found a virtual experience that is fulfilling enough and convincing enough in and of itself, no gameplay required, that I find the idea of just popping in for a 10 minute splash around to be exactly the exotic place I want to visit after a busy day. Of course, while I’m there, I’m going to be exploring and finding stuff and engaging with the game side, sure, but the key point for me is that Subside is doing everything it can to make sure this doesn’t feel like a game while I’m playing it. Sooner or later the structure clicks, of course, and I’ve tried my best not to spoil any of that here. Because for a long glorious period you’re just going swimming and finding cool stuff along the way, and it’s just absolutely ace.
While we’re not quite there yet, this has started to make me feel like one of those long-held VR dreams we’ve all held might finally become achievable; worlds you can lose yourself in completely and forget that you’re actually in a virtual reality for long periods at a time. A proper escape from one reality to another, transport through means of a magical helmet. Or in this case, for me, a powerful nostalgia machine that sends me back to fondly remembered childhood moments from half a century ago. Some of this is going to be me-exclusive of course, and your mileage may vary. But if even a word of what I’ve said here has conjured for one second the memory and experience of a sunny holiday swim, looking underwater through cheap goggles or a snorkel-and-mask and discovering a whole hidden world lying just beneath the surface, then I’d give Subside the strongest possible recommendation.
There are free demos available on Steam and the PlayStation Store if you fancy, y’know, dipping a toe in and finding out for yourself.
UPDATE - Shortly after finishing up the main review above, in trying to find out more about the developer, I found a very relevant quote from him from 2023 on reddit which reflects my own take on his intentions. I’m feeling all smug now, and like I’m totally in-synch with this guy!
“It's mostly a snorkeling simulation which is inspired by my own real life experiences, haven't bothered to look at what's on the market, I'm sure people will appreciate the level of immersion (where) I've put most of my efforts in.”
Khena B, 2023
Your exclusive subscriber eBook link
Download your copy of Breaking the 5th Wall - A Filmmakers guide to Immersive XR Storytelling now!
And once you’ve read it / scrolled through it / printed it out to use as toilet paper, I’d love to hear what you think about the book - seriously. It’s taken me around 18 months to write and put together, I’m not expecting to make any money out of it (although if it brings me some consulting work I’ll be delighted) and I’ve been lucky enough to rely on the kind help of a few domain experts to get their thoughts along the way. But I want to know if it’s useful to you - if so, why? If not, what should I add, improve or remove? If I don’t know, I can’t grow! I’m happy to update to a new edition in the future, especially if it can help more filmmakers, storytellers and game designers to avoid creating wholly unnecessary challenges for themselves as they’re moving into the boundless realms of Immersive XR Storytelling.
Righto, enjoy the book everyone, let me know if you have any download issues with it, and I’ll see you next time!
Keep on Swimming,
Jed
Jed Ashforth has been working in the games industry since 2002, and working with VR, MR and AR apps since 2010. He has too many headsets and not enough time. If you’re interested to find out more (or even bring him on board to help you) you can reach him, and check out more of his work and articles, at www.realisedrealities.com.
All of my illustrations and text - in fact everything in this newsletter - is achieved without the use of AI. I like writing, and I like doing graphic design. Call me human, but I like doing the fun bits myself.
Well, I’m convinced to dive into the demo. The PSVR 1’s Shark Attack game — more of a ride, really, as you didn’t do anything but stand there scared — was a terrifying fave back in the day so a more serene underwater experience sounds appealing!