Hi, my name is Erik Odeldahl and I’m the creative director at VR game developer & publisher Fast Travel Games. Welcome to the Afterlife.
Tomorrow, the doors to the Barclay Mansion will open for all you PlayStation VR players out there. In our horror and exploration game Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife, you need to enter the place where you met your ultimate demise and find out the reason why you died, while revealing a much bigger mystery. You do this as a Wraith – one of the restless undead – now with supernatural abilities and with your dark subconscious as the in-game guide and narrator. Be ready though; The Barclay Mansion is a place filled with Hollywood decadence and occult secrets and you need to be careful, you will not be alone there…
With Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife, we have tried to create a horror experience that focuses on tense atmosphere and rewards exploration. We are also moving away from the traditional jump scares and environments like gothic castles or haunted houses. Searching through the opulent Barclay Mansion, you need to use stealth and the surroundings themselves to progress and find the answers that you are looking for.
As you progress in the game, you will learn Wraith abilities such as Sharpened Senses that help you track your objective and the movement of other spirits, Wraithgrasp that lets you pick up heavy objects from a distance and Insubstantiality, that grants you the power to walk through solid walls. There are also items you will find to aid you, like a camera to reveal memories in the mansion and a flashlight that has more than one use… The game is made exclusively for the PlayStation Move controllers, so you need to use your arms and hands to play with the powers and items at your disposal.
Being a Wraith does not mean that you are safe from harm. Even though your powers eventually enable you to walk through solid walls and manipulate items from a distance, there are sinister beings inside the Barclay Mansion that wish you no good at all… These evil spirits are called Spectres, and every Spectre has its own backstory and connection to the bigger mystery in the game for you to reveal.
Afterlife is an official World of Darkness game, which means it shares the universe with other popular games like Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. The World of Darkness is an entire supernatural world hidden in plain sight, where monsters of many different kinds are living among us. In this world, you are the monster, the anti-hero afraid of what you’re capable of should you give in to your inner conflicts. This conflict is presented in our game through a character called ‘the Shadow’. You know that little voice in the back of your head telling you to do things you really shouldn’t do? For a Wraith, that voice is all too real. A manifestation of your dark subconscious, the Shadow will be your in-game companion and narrator. The Shadow speaks to you, reveals things that might sometimes be helpful – but maybe you shouldn’t trust everything it says?
If you are new to the World of Darkness, fear not: The story and the setting in Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife have been created from scratch, and you do not need any previous experience with this universe to fully enjoy our game.
I have enjoyed many horror games on PS VR myself and could not be prouder to finally add our own game to this amazing genre on the platform. We have worked tirelessly to optimize the game for PS VR, bringing in real-time shadows, higher resolution on textures, and more, while also custom-creating the way you move around in the game to match the PS Move controllers.
Do you dare to become a Wraith and enter the Barclay Mansion tomorrow?
Source: Playstation Blog
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