"Transference" Review - In which Frodo scares me with a German Shepherd...

Available for: Playstation 4, Playstation VR, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive

Reviewed for: Playstation VR

In my persistent quest to justify my purchase of VR hardware earlier this year, I've been known to make VR game purchases on impulse. As VR games tend to be much cheaper than your average games, it's an easy mistake to make, and the result is that, at the moment, I have a bunch of titles waiting in the wings that I haven't really felt compelled to fire up the hardware for. With Transference, however, it's a different story. Anybody who watched Ubisoft's E3 press conferences for the past two years probably remembers Elijah Wood making the announcement that his studio, SpectreVision, would be partnering up with Ubisoft for a VR experience like no other. Details were scarce, but the presentation of this game was always interesting to me, at least. At time of writing, I've finished this vaguely-presented VR title, and let me say this: If Moss sets the standard for VR storytelling and To the Top sets the standard for VR gameplay, Transference sets the standard for VR horror. It isn't exactly an experience "like no other," but it's great nonetheless. This is a relatively small game, so let's just jump right in.

In Transference, your goal is simple. You're walking around a virtual apartment constructed from the perceptions of a man (the scientist who created the virtual space), his wife, and his son, and your goal is to synchronize all the perceptions to perfect the space's construction. As you go about this, you learn more and more about the family and its history, and that's about it. You transition between the perceptions by clicking light switches, and if you've ever played a "multiple versions of the same space" kind of game (i.e. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes), you know what to expect from gameplay. If you haven't played such a game, it amounts to making a change in one "world" that affects another "world." I've basically summarized the entirety of the game already, and it's because of the simplicity of the concept and gameplay that the short runtime isn't too offensive. If you take your time, it'll take you somewhere around 3 hours to reach the end of Transference, and this makes it so that you likely won't end up bored of walking around. I would've liked to have seen a little more content for my money, but for the time factor, it's just right. If this paragraph has felt a little jumbled and a little all over the place, it's because there just isn't much to talk about in terms of story and gameplay. The family dynamic that you uncover is interesting (and you can end up unearthing a video of the wife singing a beautiful rendition of one of my favorite folk songs), and in spite of my terror I was always compelled to keep walking, so what we have is great, but it just doesn't warrant much discussion.

In the introductory paragraph, I mentioned that this game sets the standard for VR horror. If you read the "available for" section at the very start of this review, you may have noticed I listed platforms other than VR hardware as well. This game is perfectly playable in a non-VR setting, but everything that this game does well in its horror is done well because of how great a job SpectreVision did with aspects of the VR hardware. To be quite honest, I think Transference would be incredibly dull without a headset, so if you don't have one, I'd suggest stopping here, saving up the money for one, then going out and playing it. Now, chances are good you saw the subtitle I gave this review and wondered what it was all about. Obviously the reference to Frodo is a reference to Elijah Wood, who had a hand in the creation of this game. But what about the German Shepherd? We'll get to that, but first, a breakdown of some of the particulars of VR.

The Playstation VR utilizes a camera that keeps track of the lights on the front and sides of your headset. By doing this, the camera determines where in the game "world" you're looking and adjusts what you see accordingly, taking into account the angle you have your head at, how crouched over you are, etc. This also allows the hardware to determine your height and scale the game accordingly. Unlike other games, characters and objects in VR games are exactly as large as they would be in the real world. A mouse in a game like Moss actually appears to be the size of a mouse. A dragon in Skyrim VR towers high above you. And most importantly, just about any character you talk to is your height and makes direct eye contact, all thanks to the way that the camera and the lights on the headset communicate. Even in a non-horror setting, this allows for even the smallest of interactions to feel more realistic (especially in the case of Skyrim VR, where you stand face-to-face with bandits as you cut them down). This immersion is helped along by a significantly higher framerate than we're used to seeing in games. Whereas most games run at 30 fps and aim for 60, VR titles tend to run at around 90 or above (usually at the expense of overall resolution), which is quite a bit closer to the natural framerate we see at. It isn't a perfectly realistic framerate (which causes some initial depth perception challenges in the real world until you get used to the experience), but it does cause VR games to feel more lifelike. 

Right, now let me lead up to the German Shepherd moment, showing you how well Transference utilizes all of what I just mentioned along the way. After an initial segment outside the apartment, you finally gain access in what turns out to be the son's perception. The son obviously lives in a state of fear, as the apartment is littered with dark drawings on the walls and framed portraits of scary clowns with sharp teeth, and the general atmosphere is painted in reds and oranges. As I entered the apartment, I turned to the left and went exploring that way (at a snail's pace, because I was friggin' terrified). This led me to a dead end, and I started to head the other way. As I walked, I gradually started to view what I would've seen if I'd turned right at first. It was a long hallway leading into another section, and as more of it came into the left side of my vision, I noticed something standing at the end of the hallway. I ducked behind a bit of wall and gradually peeked out to look. It was a child appearing to be about as tall as my stomach. My mind started strategizing, thinking: "I've seen this trope before. It won't move as I walk toward it, but when I get halfway there, the lights will go out and it'll scream in my face." I didn't get halfway through that thought before the child physically turned his head and looked me dead in the eyes before gasping and running away. Do you have any idea how unsettling it is to have a potentially foreboding figure off in the distance physically turn and look you in the eyes? Do you have any idea how much more unsettling it is to have the figure wait until you're peeking out far enough to turn? After that, the apartment gains a new bit of background audio in the form of the son yelling and crying on his walkie talkie from his room (which is initially locked). As I continued to make progress, I kept hearing the son cry about there being something scary in the apartment with him and about how "[he] can't find Laika!" I recognized the name from the drawings of a dog on the wall, and I immediately had a bad feeling. The game progressed, and I couldn't shake the feeling of "this dog is going to show up." There came a section outside of the apartment where the dog house and garage were, and I had to close my eyes and tiptoe around the doghouse, so sure was I that Laika was going to pop out from it. I went so far as to not look at the various dog toys too long, so paranoid was I that the camera might be tracking how long I looked at something Laika was protective of (who knows what VR is capable of?). I entered the garage and was treated to audio logs that thoroughly suggested the dad had done something terrible to Laika in order to further his experiments with the virtual apartment...all of this was staged to put a slightly budging freezer with little dog whines coming out of it into the spotlight. I "interacted" with the lock and a voice screamed from all angles, "DON'T TOUCH THE GODD**N FREEZER!" at which point the door I'd come in through slowly reopened. I thought for sure that the required tippytoeing past the doghouse would finally put me out of my expecting-dog-jumpscare misery, but nothing. The game progressed more and I reached a major puzzle conclusion and found myself needing to walk back down the hall. As I exited the room I was in (slightly adjacent to the start of the hall I needed to walk down), I heard two firm barks. As I started down the hallway, Laika (a German Shepherd, from the looks of it) flailed down the hall full-speed and leapt at my throat, snarling the whole time. I've never been scared of dogs, but have you ever seen a dog run when it wants to kill a squirrel? That rabid, primal, ungraceful sprint? Remember what I said about the way VR works? This thing was German Shepherd-sized, doing that sprint in a highly-realistic framerate, and staring into my eyes as it launched itself at exactly my neck. Even after all the time I spent thoroughly expecting this dog to scare me, and in spite of the two barks to indicate that the scare was about to happen, the experience was so terrifying that it made me scream louder than any other horror game. I actually took a second to yell "Sorry, I'm ok!" in case my neighbors thought I was being stabbed to death. Folks, this was just one set of examples showing how Transference utilizes the perks of VR to deliver unconventionally effective horror. Everybody I've talked to about this game has had to hear me talk about the dog scare, but there's more unsettling content than just that, and the result is a game that never once lets you stop being scared...that is, if you're using VR. Having gone back and watched videos on youtube, Transference looks like just a slightly tense thriller (rather than a horror game) if viewed on a flat screen. So again, if you're going to play this game, play it in VR.

As one final note on this topic, as much as the horror did affect me, it becomes much easier to power through when you realize that nothing is actually a threat. In fact, the ambiguous code monster that occasionally pops up serves more as an animated invisible wall than a threat to take seriously. If you enter a room and get jumpscared by it, chances are you just went into the wrong room at the wrong time. Even the dog jumpscare just ends with the dog vanishing once it reaches your neck. The VR hardware makes these moments more intense, but knowing that terror is a temporary thing (as opposed to something like the monster in Amnesia, where failure means having to try to sneak by it again) somewhat cheapens the experience.

I wasn't lying when I said there isn't much to talk about with Transference. If I were to do my usual technical paragraph it would just be a couple sentences and a waste of space. Suffice it to say that the game runs smoothly and, as I've already described, builds great atmosphere. The voice acting (even that of the son) is superb across the three characters, and the sound design lends itself well to VR's 360-degree audio system. It's a strong technical package that utilizes the hardware it was made for to the benefit of its genre. Though Transference is really more of an "experience" than a "game," it's still well-worth the price of admission, given how well-crafted the experience is. If you own a VR headset, then I can assure you that Transference will help along that little pang of guilt you feel for having purchased the hardware in a time where the VR market is still teething.

Let us review:

Content-poor for the price - 0.5

Terror loses its bite (pun very much intended) - 0.5

The final score for Transference is...

9.0/10 - Fantastic

Excellent work, SpectreVision, excellent work