When I was far too young, I had a fascination with a haunted house ride that was part of a series of rides littering Durban’s beachfront one year, very many years ago. It was a mechanical contraption of cheap jump scares, cotton-wool spider webs, plastic skeletons and other animatronic evils – but it both terrified and excited me.

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It’s the same sort of feeling I’ve had playing Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn: Rush of Blood on PlayStation VR. Just like that haunted house of horrors, Rush of Blood is an on-rail experience whose scares you can guess coming from a mile away – but that make you giddy, excited and occasionally terrified anyway.

Yes, it’s an on-rail shooter, not dissimilar from the light-gun games of yore, but once you strap on the VR headset it becomes a surreal, genuinely frightening experience. It also does away with motion sickness, by putting you in a cart that’s moving along a track, like a creepy rollercoaster. This sort of constrained movement cleverly tricks your brain in to allowing you to move along while remaining seated, doing away with the cognitive dissonance that free movement games invoke. Still, the effect is mesmerising and gripping, and everyone who I’ve made play this has moved back in their seats, holding themselves upright as the virtual cart barrels down its track. It can feel like you’re on a rollercoaster, and it’s a wild ride.

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It’s only loosely related to Until Dawn, seeming to happen within the confines of Josh’s disturbed mind, but won’t scare off series newcomers as there’s no real plot holding anything together. With its loose connection to its namesake, Rush of Blood lets you use either the DualShock 4 or a pair of Move controllers. You’ll be at a disadvantage here if you don’t use the Move controllers, which show up as a pair of limbs in the game, each brandishing a loaded gun. Shooting in VR is both intuitive and fun. Your guns double as torches, letting you peer in to the darkness ahead – which is usually filled with horrible things to shoot. Clowns, ghosts, crazed madmen, and oh god, spiders are all begging to be pumped full of lead. Coulrophobes and arachnophobes? This game is going to make you cry. While the game is largely unimaginative, employing every cheap horror trope imaginable, it perfectly exploits the immediacy of VR to frequently chilling effect.

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Shooting the festively coloured boxes that sometimes show up on levels gives you temporary new guns to play with, some of which – like the shotgun – feel really weighty (and very appreciated when an army of the undead is rushing towards you). Rush of Blood’s other, less deadly threats come in the form of obstacles – like spinning blades, swarms of bats and barrels of dripping sludge – which you need to physically move out of the way of.

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Sometimes, the ride will come to a stop and voices (oh god, the voices) and sounds of crying babies and ghoulish and ghastly whispers envelope you, utilising the PlayStation VR’s 3D audio processing to its full potential – perfectly building up atmosphere and tension. Yes its scares are cheap, and it’s a trick used perhaps too often but they’re real, and terrifying, especially the first time around. That level with the spiders? Just horrible.

It’s a short experience though, and you’ll probably have rushed your way through its seven levels in an hour and a half. While I’d love for it to be padded with a few mini games, there are some increased difficulty levels, a few branching paths and leader boards to add a bit of replayability.

Last Updated: November 29, 2016

Until Dawn: Rush of Blood
Rush of Blood employs an overbearing use of rote horror imagery, but its immediacy in VR makes it an effective horror game. Brevity aside, Rush of Blood is a PlayStation VR game that you want to own, because it’s one of the best games to demo the PlayStation VR with.
8.0
Until Dawn: Rush of Blood was reviewed on PlayStation 4
72 / 100

12 Comments

  1. Lord Chaos

    November 29, 2016 at 14:34

    I think Matty should do a separate review for… research.

    Reply

    • Admiral Chief Argonian

      November 29, 2016 at 14:47

      Video proof!

      Reply

      • Andre Fourie

        November 29, 2016 at 14:48

        Oh yes!!!!!! That will be fun to see.

        Reply

  2. VampyreSquirrel

    November 29, 2016 at 14:41

    ” everyone who I’ve made play this”… Geoff you monster!!!

    Reply

  3. Kromas Ryder

    November 29, 2016 at 14:45

    Soon I will be torturing small children with VR myself. 😛

    Reply

    • Admiral Chief Argonian

      November 29, 2016 at 14:47

      …uploading Mandini v2 pics?

      Reply

      • Kromas Ryder

        November 29, 2016 at 14:54

        That affects all ages … not just small children. In fact small children tend to forget that trauma faster than adults.

        Reply

  4. Pieter Kruger

    November 29, 2016 at 16:15

    So no screen door effect or need to re calibrate before each session…..?

    Reply

    • Geoffrey Tim

      November 29, 2016 at 20:27

      Screen door is there – is less prnounced than on the vive/Rift. No need to recalibrate – though some games do get screen drift, which you can usually reset by pressing the options button.

      Reply

      • Pieter Kruger

        November 30, 2016 at 09:49

        Think I’ll wait for next or next next gen VR before I dip my toes into it. Still a lot needs to be improved on hardware and especially software it seems…..

        Reply

  5. Avithar

    December 1, 2016 at 14:37

    Alan Wake VR Sony you can do it

    Reply

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