Transference
Imagine an escape room set in a deranged mind. Experience a first-person exploration game in a chilling new dimension. Shift between three perspectives of a family in this troubled scientist's experiment, and attempt to unravel the mystery hiding in this mind-bending psychological thriller. A THRILLER THAT FEELS LIKE A MOVIE Project yourself into a narrative experience that combines movies with gaming, as you become immersed in an unsettling psychological thriller. SOLVE THE MYSTERY Recover a fragmented family as you shift between the corrupted consciousness of each individual’s perspective and attempt to piece together their mystery. IT’S YOUR UNIQUE EXPERIENCE In this first-person narrative mystery, you must explore the walls of this family's home to interpret events and discover your truth.
Steam User 167
I mean.....it's alright. The hype in the trailer is a bit much where Elijah Wood and others are saying how something like this has never been done before. It has definitely been done before and to be honest its been done better.
Is it a bad game? No.
Is it an overpriced game? Yes.
Is it a good game? Well, read on and decide because honestly I'm on the fence.
---------------
PROS
+ FMV. It is a genre I do not want to see die out and any chance I get to see it in a game I was usually applaud it and champion it. Even though the acting isn't really great (come on Elijah you are the creative director and you didn't even cast yourself a part?) I am always happy for some FMV action.
+ Creepy. The game for me played like a kind of Silent Hill PT and System Reboot mashup. Scare factor on the System Reboot side and gameplay more on the PT side. The map was pretty small and you seem to just walk the same corridors for the whole game while flicking a switch occasionally to move between floors of reality in the same map.
+ Story. Yeah its all been done before but I still enjoy the save your soul to a hard drive trope. The story gets a little bit dark but doesn't go dark enough to really blow me away. They had ample opportunity to go full crazy on me but they played it safe and as a result this positive also becomes a bit of a negative at the same time.
------------
CONS
- requires Ubisoft UPlay account. Sorry but I think that if you are going to sell on Steam then just sell on Steam. Other Ubisoft games from the past open on Steam without the Uplay launcher.
- movement. Dear Esther was a tad on the slow side for movement and had no sprint. But it worked. Transference could use a shift key sprint to boost you to a jog, or could up the regular walking speed a tad. It felt a bit sluggish.
- puzzles. The puzzles were so mind-numbingly easy. I don't know what they are talking about in the store-page blurb about "solving a mystery." The mystery solves itself.
- price. 25 bucks is steep for a 2 hour casual / 3 hour 100% completion game in my opinion.
------------
Over-priced and under-gamified this "virtual movie" is not going to scratch the itch of any puzzle fanatic. It is really a walking sim with some really cool aesthetics and a couple of "puzzles" thrown in as an afterthought.
It gets the old thumb up because I like the genre, I like FMV and it wasn't a bad use of 2 of my life hours.
I got this for 10 bucks on sale. I suggest you do the same or get it even cheaper.
Steam User 89
As stated in another review, to turn on the VR mode you need to open the game on the desktop with your VR off so it doesnt go in theater mode, select VR mode in settings, then reboot the game, it didnt want to work at first, the game will crash if you turn VR on in steam yourself, leave Steam VR off then let the game boot up and let it turn the VR on.
Aside from that, my biggest complaint is the controls, im playing on HTC vive and some of the mapping is bad, youll quickly adaptr to it, but just isnt intuitive.
When you bend over to pick up an object the game will try to readjust your height which means youll be 12 foot tall, and you need to wait for it to readjust height again.
Graphics are fantastic
The imagry in the game is really good, the digital demon dude ooks cool, character models look cool, overall great visually
story SO FAR is good, im 2 hours in and feel like im close to beating it which isnt cool.
Im going to leave this as a positive review for now, things are certainly lacking, but i dont feel like its a terrible game. If youe on the fence id wait for a few patches to hit and check reviews again, or wait for a sale.
Steam User 73
+++ easy 100 % Steam Achievement (with Guide)
+++ 5 Trading Cards (perfect Nr.)
++ weird Story Puzzle, nice Audio Logs & Videos to find
--- very short
Good for Achievement Hunters, Trading Card Collectors & Walking Simulator with Puzzles Fans
Steam User 55
If you've played Soma and Observer and want more of the same, this does an ok job of it. Only buy it if it's on sale, though
Steam User 29
NOTE AHEAD: I'm using the not officially supported Dell Visor. A Windows Mixed Reality headset.
So... I played a fair potion of the game during a live stream now and I played the demo at gamescom.
Livestream recording (German):
First the negative...
I did have some servere issues starting the game. First the game didn't launch at all. However after updating my graphics driver and restarting my computer it worked. However it first launches in non-vr, then UPlay launches and then the game launches in VR mode. Weird but yea. I guess it's an easy fix in the Steamworks backend settings (I'm an indie dev myself so I kinda know how to set these vr things up).
I then had the problem that the game wanted me to press enter to skip the health advise... however the keyboard input was disabled apparently and my controllers weren't recognized. After some tabbing out, wild mouse clicking and so on it worked. At next launch it worked immediately. To be fair... my headset isn't officially supported, but OpenVR is OpenVR and I read that Oculus users had similar issues.
Now the positive...
I'm not a fan of horror games since I'm quite jumpy. But when a game is fun... it fulfilled it's purpose. And this game is so catchy I kinda needed to force me to interrupt my play session cause it was getting late. The game has the perfect mix of spooky thriller elements and some jumpscares. However except for one occasion these jumpscares weren't unannouced or unpredicted, however still scary and frightening. Exactly how I think a jumpscare should be. It should announce itself (e.g. with small visual elements or audio) and end in a peak.
The story is very interesting, not wanting to spoiler too much. It seems kinda predictabel now but there could still be a plot twist at some point. I'll update this section once I finished the game.
Overall I'm very happy to see a AAA studio produce a VR focused game and not just porting some old stuff.
Also the community manager is very active in the steam discussions collecting feedback and interacting with worried customers since, yes... this game unfortunately still has some problems. But at the current point the issues seem not too severe once you know how to solve the few I had at the beginning and they shouldn't be too hard to fix.
Also a developer dropped by during my stream which was quite a surprise.
I hope this game won't drown in it's lack of marketing since it's quite a nice refresher in the world of VR. Overall I definetly would reccomend this game. If you still doubt it, wait for a sale.
Review will be updated once I finished the game.
Steam User 12
VR Review - HTC Vive
Great game once you work around some of its frustrating controls.
Recommendation for playing it standing:
1 - Use "Touch to Move" in a VIVE.
If you have a bad track pad or simply don't enjoy "push to move" you can change it to "touch to move". Go into SteamVR dashboadr (inside VR) settings and change the key binding profile for the game. (you may need to be running the game to be able to select it).
2 - Use a mat to mark the center of your play area.
The game turn off the Steam chaperone safety grid. (almost discovered it in a bad way).
3 - Avoid triggering the auto reset of your view height.
When crouching in real life to pick up some clue on the ground don't stay crouched or the game will reset your view hight. Pick the clue and analise it standing. In some sections you may need to use the ingame crouch command.
Pros:
+ Great unsettling atmosphere.
+ Environments full of details for piecing together the story.
+ Amazing graphics in general.
+ Unbelievable performance optimization. Could play it with 200% supersample with a constant 90fps on a GTX 1070.
Cons:
- The basics of locomotion are far from great. Head oriented movement, no chaperone grids in the game, no option for touch trackpad to move with Vive, only push to move, when crouching in real life the game keeps resetting your view height (as described above you can work around most of these limitations).
- The live action portions didn't convince me like the enviromental storytelling.
- Some of the characters' motivations are kind of hard to shallow.
Steam User 21
Experienced on the Oculus Rift with Touch Controllers.
So I bought the game today, post-patch fixing all the reported issues with the Oculus. I am happy to report that I did not experience a single issue during my full playthrough of the game. It look me about 3 hours to finish the game, however, it can probably be finished in 2 hours. I got stuck on one easy puzzle that I thought was more complicated than it was. I then noticed a number near the laptop which soon made the answer obvious.
So this is a puzzle adventure game that does feel like a walking simulator except that there is always a puzzle to solve to get to the next stage. So I would say this falls closer to a puzzle adventure game than a pure walking simulator. Some of the puzzles are very easy. But I found at least one puzzle difficult, mostly because I was looking in the wrong places. It's easy to look in the wrong place because this game is all about perspective. You will experience things differently as you go along.
It's no coincidence that the family dog Laika is referenced throughout. Laika is also the famous name of the dog that was sent into space to die a horrible death by those crazy Russians. That space incident is also the repeated concern of the little boy in the 1985 Swedish movie My Life as a Dog in which the boy is obssessed with that incident in the context of perspective ... how things are bad but how in perspective they are not so bad, just look at what happened to poor ol' Laika. So yeah, the reference is no coincidence.
This is a narrative driven game. It does have a creepy atmosphere but it is not a horror game. I would say if anything I would call it a psychological thriller / mystery. The graphics are gorgeous. There's lots of details in this world. There are several things to pickup and interact with. However, those interactions are limited and only certain items are interactable. So a lot of the assets are just there for the visuals. A slight disappointment, but It does make the puzzle solving easier though so it makes sense.
You can pickup audio and video logs. Then you can play them. They are well acted. Although, to understand the story you will need to find them all and try to play them in some semblance of order. Otherwise, it will just be a hodge podge of mixed ideas and themes.
I enjoyed the experience. It has AAA production values. However, it is not game of the year. I think it could have been better. When I think of strong narrative driven games I think of What Remains of Edith Finch. And this game is not on that level. I also don't think it's as good as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. However, it has very strong production values and you can tell it was built from the ground up specifically for VR. While not a must have, if you love VR, I think it is something you should consider purchasing to support a big developer putting out original VR content.
Rate 7/10. EA, Bethesda, Activision, Take-two ... when you guys putting out some original VR content?