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The Dark Pictures Anthology
The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR is a rail shooter video game developed and published by Supermassive Games for the PSVR2. It was released on 16 March 2023. It is a spin-off of The Dark Pictures Anthology and features the player riding a horror-themed roller coaster.
If you remember an another PSVR title called Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, which was also developed by Supermassive Games. It was also a horror-themed roller coaster first person shooter game. It was a OK game, but can The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR surpass that?
Let the horror show begin
The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR has a very vage storyline. The game starts of me being in a train with all the familiar characters of The Dark Pictures Anthology with me. The train crashes and I’m left stuck there. Then suddenly I’m in a roller coaster going through areas. All the areas are from the The Dark Pictures Anthology games. There are areas from Man of Medan, Little Hope, House of Ashes and The Devil in Me games.
The gameplay consist of player trying to avoid obstacles by tilting their head, shooting enemies, shooting objects around to gain points and doing some puzzles. I found the whole gameplay to be boring if the game would’ve been long, but it was about 2-3 hours long, so I didn’t get bored. I played this in two sessions.
The game tried its hardest to be scary and, personally, I found it to be rather scary and anxiety-inducing at some points. There were scenes where if I blinked the enemies came closer. But sadly, no matter how hard I tried; I HAD TO blink to get over that scene. I thought if I managed to not to blink I could go through that area without enemies attacking me. So it was rather disappointing design-wise.
Technically the shooting and aiming worked just fine. Not perfectly, but fine. What comes to the performance, well, the game lacked in that apartment. There was so much of pop-ins, where the graphics popped in in front of me all the time. Even the graphics were not up to standards, making the game look PSVR1 game rather than something current-gen.
Even the loading times were long, the game had framerate issues, lazy desings and the 3D audio was bad. The audio from enemies usually came from behind or when I was in a boss fight the boss’s voice came behind me when it was right in front of me. It was overall very lazy and outdated experience, nothing I would’ve expected from a 640€ PSVR2 system I bought.
The last laugh
The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR was a nightmarish experience. It wasn’t bad or unplayable; it was just outdated and lazily made. It was scary at times and it had a good replayability value, because there was routes player could choose and trying to hit the new high score.
Do I recommend this game? Well, if you are easily scared and not keen on technical or graphical issues, then sure go have a ride.
The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR is available only on PSVR2.
SCORE:
3/5
“The game tried its hardest to be scary and, personally, I found it to be rather scary and anxiety-inducing at some points”
One More Level 