Hypnosis Reveries Reviews

this is insane

Looks like a pretty swell experience, but I quit after a few minutes. The soundtrack has that trendy/annoying "toddler messing with the volume knob" feel (side-chain compression or LFO controlled VCA, whatever). Besides just sounding like crap, it actually makes me a tad nauseous. I'll try it again later without the "musick."

Different from the VR experience with strong immediate positive feedback or strong entertainment features in previous cognition, this work is more like a work of art and a relatively innovative attempt. In its minimalist narrative style, many images, such as the interaction of different shapes, have symbolic meanings. As I watched, I felt like I was floating up in the air and looking down on the crowd. As I experience more in life, I may look back and see more of myself.

To be honest, I didn't expect to go through such an experience. It certainly doesn't feel like a game in the classic sense. Considering how our definition of a game has evolved over time, it's more of a modern indie game. The first two games I think of as similar experiences are "The Witness" and "Journey". It does't mean the volume of this content is comparable to those two. It's that they use a form like this to express meanings that cannot be expressed directly in words. Due to VR's unique sense of immersion, most VR games are sold on strong sensory experiences. However, this content is a very bold attempt to take this minimalist approach in the opposite direction. In terms of the result, it did the narrative effect that I had not expected. For the first 70% of the experience, I thought it was a low-difficulty VR decryption game. Until it occurred to me that these abstract geometric shapes were actually symbols of human beings, that they were alive. The first thing I felt was guilt. Because up until then, I had used them as tools for my own purposes to satisfy my curiosity for exploration. This reminds me of the unintentional harm my ignorance did to people around me a long time ago. Perhaps it did hypnotize me, remind me of a lot of things I haven't talked about for a long time. When I looked at the relationship between these geometries as a living body again, I seem to see the variety of relationships I experienced growing up. By the way, the sharing of other players in Memory Mode has really blown my mind!!! I can't say that I fully understand what other players are naming these screens for. But it also goes to show how differently each of us thinks and feels about life. Overall, thank you for making this unexpected experience so unique. I hope to see more artistic VR games like this in the future. Well done developers.

For those who don't know, this project was originally an VR installation exhibited in multiple film festivals and art conventions across China. It uses redirected walking algorithm to solve the issue of locomotion. It manipulates your sense of distance and turning angle to make sure you can continuously walk in the whole course of the experience without hitting any physical walls. I was very impressed by the artists' level of execution of combining the continuous sense of uninterrupted walking experiences and the abstract storytelling. The Steam version cannot utilise such a feature because users all have different types of play spaces, but it still captures the essence of the original work. This very reflexive piece of artwork is about the artist's experience of growing up and being an artist in China. It is demonstrated in an very abstract way, so anyone may find their own sense of resonance in it. Contrary to popular belief in the West, the problems faced by today's Chinese youth is not necessarily anything related to political struggle. Instead, it is precisely the disciplinary power coming from the alienating market capitalism that is producing a single narrative for everyone to kill their individuality and creativity. The artist uses this abstract experience to look back upon the memories of how the young people of today's China are shaped and disciplined to believe in a very alienating form of 'normality'. For western audiences who would like to experience and understand the perspective of contemporary Chinese young people, I would highly recommend. Also, the spatial design of the experience is quite impressive.

It's way too expensive for such a short student project. I think it would be better suited for an art installation in a museum where you're probably already in the right mindset. Also I encountered a game breaking bug, that forced me to restart. This is catastrophic for these kinds of "games".