Robinson: The Journey

(written dec 31, 2016)

Robinson: The Journey is about exploration. A young boy has crashed and stranded on Tyson III, a planet stuck in the Mesozoic Era, and is determined to explore the alien world to survive. I feel strange using the word “survive,” because Robinson: The Journey felt more like a presentation than a threat.

Robinson: The Journey is a sci-fi adventure game for PSVR and the latest from Crytek, developers of the FPS series Crysis. That’s the name this game sold on, as the graphical fidelity of Cryengine was the quality you could expect. I did expect that quality and definitely got it, but it felt like the only thing Crytek wanted to emphasis to the player.

The environment is somewhat open-world; the player can approach four different areas in any order. Robin holds a wand-like device that can manipulate objects and guide Laika to different locations. I almost never used the latter except once in the final section of the game, but the former was heavily used for puzzle-solving.

Most of the gameplay could be summed up as puzzle-solving, really. Environmental puzzle-solving requires Robin to manipulate objects or creatures to retrieve objects and open pathways, while clicking on HIGS gives the player a diorama view of the area, showing puzzles to output electrical sources to multiple points.

The interactivity of the game feels too set-up, almost fake. It’s well-designed and fairly enjoyable to play, but the placement of everything, the danger the game tries to present feels too contrived for “survival” to be a key aspect.

The way the player climbs environments, how scanning animals works, manipulating objects, it all works intuitively, but the way those elements come together feels artificial, like examples of VR mechanics than implementations. It steers towards a tech demo in that sense, but the gameplay is, at the least, there.

That’s what the four main areas boil down to, but the achievement for each of them is an object containing audio recordings of what happened before Robin crashed onto Tyson III. These are what carry the story along, even though HIGS sums up the important bits if you don’t listen to them.

Relying on optional, easy-to-explain audio logs to be the brick house around the narrative is a big reason why I didn’t much care for the story Robinson: The Journey presented. I never felt a deep emotional connection to Laika, mainly because I almost never needed her in gameplay, and HIGS only establishes a smidgen of character development at the very end.

I’ve been asked not to go into specific story details, but immediately after the final battle (if you can call it that), the player is given all the exposition they need for their answers, a bit of endearing character interaction, and roll credits. The story just…ends, showing no potential for the mystery to play on further.

This all brings me to the major problem I had with Robinson: The Journey; the atmosphere and world-building conflicts with the nature of Robin, HIGS, and Laika’s characters. I had no idea whether or not the game was trying to go for a genuine sci-fi adventure or a PG-rated kids movie.

I will admit, I was interested in the game’s marriage of technology and nature. Other AI pods looked very similar to HIGS, with one glowing blue eyes and similar architecture, while areas on Tyson III were vastly different from one another, in color and atmosphere and wildlife. Not original, but well made nonetheless.

The story soiled a bit of my interest in this world, although. Again, the way the characters interact feels childlike, in dialogue and delivery. There’s no real plot discussion outside of the audio logs wrap-ups and the last 5 minutes; it made my expectations of world-building go down. Maybe I should have expected this, but the game sure presented itself in a much more ambitious manner.

Robinson: The Journey is safe to a fault. It’s easy to see that graphical design was the highest priority, as the story is too simplistic for its own good and the gameplay feels like a presentation on how to develop games for VR. It borders on being a tech demo, and in the era of knockout VR titles, we don’t need that.