E3 2016: PSVR Launch Title Wayward Sky Translates the Adventure Game to Virtual Reality

Uber Entertainment (Monday Night Combat, Planetary Annihilation) describes their forthcoming title Wayward Sky as a “Point and Look Adventure Game.” They want to highlight the ways they are translating and iterating on the point-and-click adventure game for virtual reality.

Wayward Sky follows the journey of aviator Bess to save her father from a mysterious flying fortress. At the beginning of the game, the two of them are flying together and their plane crash lands on the fortress. “There’s plenty of games to rescue princesses, we want to flip it around,” Art Director Chandana Ekanayake said.

Wayward Sky is played using PSVR and Move controllers, shifting between a faraway third-person view and a first-person view. Third-person view is used to navigate Bess around the flying fortress and then switches into first-person for puzzle solving. “After I first experienced VR … exploration becomes something that you can’t really do without VR,” Ekanayake said. He wanted to create a game that took advantage of VR for exploration and scale. Based on demo they showed, Uber Entertainment is using VR to drive home the scale of the world they’re building, which from far away, looks like a miniature set.

Uber has created an expressive and colorful art style for their world. “Because you can play with this scale, the first time we put you in the miniature world, it felt like a miniature set,” Ekanayake said of the art style. “So let’s play that up, let’s make the characters feel sculpted, and the world feel like a miniature set.”

Wayward Sky aims to be welcoming to players, not an exercise in frustration like some older point-and-click games can be. One way they are subverting that is by removing the penalty of death. “To me, death is just a time penalty, so we said, ‘Let’s just get rid of that,’” Ekanayake said.

Wayward Sky centers around the mystery of this flying fortress and why its robot protectors are kidnapping people. Uber Entertainment looks to be experimenting with VR in interesting ways, rather than just copy-and-pasting regular mechanics into VR. It’s nice to see one of PSVR’s titles starring a woman of color, something far too rare in video games. We’re looking forward to playing Wayward Sky, which is releasing this fall for PSVR. You can watch the demo and interview below.