Detective VR Review: Unraveling The Mixed Reality Mystery

Mystery. Murder. A magnifying glass. And of course, that corkboard where you pin bits of evidence and connect them with string. Does Detective VR’s alibi stand up to scrutiny? We put the clues together.

Detective Work

As Detective VR’s namesake but as a nameless detective, it’s your job to unravel the mystery of why the arrogant artist Richard Hue has gone missing. There’s an array of plausible suspects: his resentful partner, his sleazy benefactor facing financial troubles, and more.

The entire game is set up for hand tracking, which works great. Action is split between crime scenes and your back office. You play the crime scene in VR, surrounded by the suspect’s apartment which you can traverse via teleportation to search for clues. Your back office is experienced in Mixed Reality: the detective’s evidence-bearing corkboard appears floating in your actual VR play space. Successfully connecting two items produces a VHS video reel where the suspect in question appears life-size to explain themselves, occasionally divulging something incriminating or, at least, narrative-progressing.

Time Trial

The moment you’ve collected enough evidence from the crime scene or corkboard, you’re prompted to advance to the next stage. This produces a tension, but not the narrative tension the developers likely intended: It prompts my gamer instincts to kick in. I want to speedrun.

At the crime scene, my camera has infinite film; it’s faster & easier to aggressively fire shots, hoping to trigger the game’s acknowledgment that I’ve spotted a clue, than it is to slowly and deliberately canvas the venue for curiosities.

Once I’ve collected all the evidence from a crime scene, I’m prompted to return to shop — even if I was in the middle of watching a narrative unfold.

Testimonials from suspects which advance the plot produce a highlighted lanyard string and a green check mark, regardless of my actual attentiveness. 

Before long, I step back and wonder: I’ve certainly developed my in-game skill set - hand gestures for my camera to take photos, the rapid cycle through the blood, fingerprint, and text magnifying glass filters in my back room. But… do I have my own strong opinions about the suspect and motive? Particularly, since everyone’s a suspect, which characters do I really care about?

Technical Marvel

The essential context for considering and consuming Detective VR is that it’s a product of a minuscule team of 3-4. That’s made evident throughout their website and promo material. It’s one thing for Meta, with its overwhelming resources, vast workforce, and utter disregard for annual profits, to produce a mixed reality demo like First Encounters.

It’s something else entirely to imagine the team that brought Detective VR to life, and the various tradeoffs & challenges overcome. Studio Chipo y Juan navigated narrative design, gameplay design, technical development, casting, translation, and the infinity of other details to bring a project like this to life.

There’s still room for improvement: I noted occasional grammar errors, while the magnifying glass gameplay loop is skilless and boring. Of course the phone one character was touching has their fingerprints; of course the bloody shirt has blood traces. Finding the last 1–2 pieces of evidence in a room can be tricky — which, as a true detective, of course it should be! There’d be no work or gameplay fun if the scene presented the gun, still smoking, on the table in front of you.

That said, I wish it required more skill and would therefore feel more rewarding to find that last bit of evidence: say, a suspect seems fixated on a locked drawer, innocuous when you arrive at the scene but obvious from paying attention as it unfolds. Evidence discovery often feels more like solving a Where’s Waldo, where persistence beats deduction.

Yet: it’s monumentally inspiring to consider what small, impassioned teams can accomplish in this space, given the Chipo y Juan team’s success with Detective VR.

Immersive Theatre

One great promise of the headset medium is “immersion” — obliterating the barrier of a stage or TV screen, radically dialling up one’s sense of intimacy. It’s undeniably cool that Detective’s suspects appear life-size in my kitchen. However… I wish Richard, Agatha, and the rest of the cast made more eye contact with me, or otherwise engaged or acknowledged my “physical” presence in the “room” with them.

In Detective VR, I want to embody the Detective, not just the witness. What would it mean, and how would it feel, if Agatha tried appealing to me personally? There’s no in-game currency, but if there was, how would it feel if Karl looked me in the eye and tried to pay me off?

What’s Detective’s next move?

The premise is primed for episodic format. With the upfront work developing core gameplay & technical capabilities behind them, Studio Chipo y Juan seem ready to deliver new mysteries, settings, and characters evoking the production schedule of, say, James Patterson’s books or Walkabout Mini Golf’s DLC courses. If they can manage that, the game’s (and genre’s!) future success is no real mystery.

Detective VR - Final Verdict

Detective VR is fun! It's inspiring! Suspenseful. While there's room for improvement with the gameplay, it's an impressive effort from Studio Chipo y Juan that's a delight to play, with so much room for more to come. If you want to catch a murderer in mixed reality, I'd recommend picking this one up today.

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