Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (PS4)

The animated comedy series Rick and Morty manages to be more than just a funny adult cartoon thanks to a blend of imaginative science fiction concepts pursued to unusual extremes and a grounded family drama. While its self-aware writing and improvisational performances tend to define its humor more, these elements help root the episodes in something beyond a procession of punchlines and quips. Being able to enter the often ridiculous but fascinating environments of Rick and Morty does sound like a promising prospect for a game, but as its name implies, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality is a virtual reality game, the PSVR not quite packing the power or controls necessary for actually achieving that angle. Instead, the game settles mostly for throwing a lot of show references at the player as the characters chat around you, the game not really leaning into the other core strengths of the animated television series.

 

Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality is created by Owlchemy Labs, the team behind Job Simulator, something that quickly becomes apparent as the game focuses mostly on messing around in a limited environment with various gadgets and doodads within reach. Here that space primarily consists of the Smith family garage, this being a primary operating space for the misanthropic and sarcastic scientist Rick Sanchez. Usually relying on his nervous grandson Morty to join him for adventures and assistance as needed, Rick has decided now to make a clone of Morty to do some tasks while he and the real Morty are off doing more exciting things, although the particular clone he creates is a little strange. The player actually takes on the role of the clone Morty, the game taking the fact you play in first-person with a VR headest and two Move controllers and representing that in-game as clone Morty being just a pair of hands and a floating head. While your workload initially consists of rather basic tasks like putting some laundry in the washing machine, Rick repeatedly finds new uses for you, the scope of your chores starting to extend beyond the garage a bit as soon you’ll be plucking batteries out of a satellite or shooting down aliens on another world.

While you’ll head to another location for a short new activity, it is still fairly limited as you mostly stand in place and perform whatever task is asked of you. However, there is an incredibly large amount of dialogue, the game angling to preserve some of the show’s comedic style by letting Rick and Morty talk at length with other characters like Morty’s sister Summer with his father Jerry sometimes contributing as well. There is perhaps an overemphasis on just letting the voice actors continue waffling on about a topic for a long time, often not introducing too many new elements to the humorous subject that might have worked better if it was more tightly scripted or condensed to be punchier. Part of why the writing might not be as sharp as the animated show it is based off of though is that the activities the story follows don’t often provide much material for the performers or writers to riff on. Since there is no room for exploration in the game’s design you’ll often be locked into a location for a bit fiddling with whatever is in arm’s reach, the characters trying to underscore that work with some rambling on but without many subjects to grasp onto. It’s certainly not without its moments and there are some situations that do provide a bit more fertile ground for a sequence of jokes rather than dragging one out for a while, but even stranger is the fact that if you stop working to listen in, almost the moment the conversation ends the characters will start to berate you for taking so long to do your tasks.

 

While it can’t whip up as many unusual situations as in the show, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality is at its strongest when it can stretch its legs a bit. At one point you enter a virtual simulation called Troy that is meant to let you live an entire lifetime, but since it’s a bootleg version of it you instead get to explore its little branching narrative and observe the ways that corners were cut or how a facsimile of such a concept was crudely cobbled together. Whenever you die, you’re plopped into Purgatory where a phone call has someone instructing you to press a button to revive, but whoever is speaking to you changes over time, there being some novelty when this idea is introduced but it soon touches on the game’s general issue with writing. At one point for example the person on the other end of the phone line is a pair of animators for the game and while they talk for a while about that role, it doesn’t go in any unexpected directions, the idea of the situation occurring meant to be the joke while the follow-through can often fumble to provide anything else to add to it. Since a good deal of this short 2 to 3 hour experience is just messing around in a space, it does sting sometimes that it leans heavily on presenting something unusual but not having much to add to it as you spend more time with it.

Naturally there is plenty to find for fans of the series, some of it rather well-known running gags like the unusual pink Plumbus device being found on a workbench while others are a bit more unexpected like a speak-and-say toy that features different alien races. Poking around to find familiar items to mess around with is likely part of what a fan would want from such a game, and there is a good deal of audio humor thanks to things like the cassette tapes you can find where recordings can play as you work. The references are plentiful and perhaps patch in a small hole in terms of the breadth of activities you can actually perform. Besides finding things around the garage to hold, throw, or attach to other things, there are few real tasks of substance to engage with. One of the more interesting items in terms of both providing something interesting to mess with freely or solve small puzzles on the plot path is an item mixer that creates a fusion between two items placed on top of it. Finding objects and seeing what they can become when scientifically fused into a new item is likely the game’s strongest idea, not only because it has a lot of unexpected creative mixes to find but even when something is necessary for progress, making that item isn’t always a straightforward process of combining one obvious item with another.

 

Not many items actually interact with each other save for the underutilized “Mr. Youseeks”, a version of the Mr. Meeseeks character who will imitate your movements while standing elsewhere. You can at least move into three different areas of the garage but only ever can stand in one spot when you do visit places like an alien world, but Mr. Youseeks extends your options while in the garage setting as you can have him appear where you can’t go to grab objects. It’s not a complex interaction, but it does at least have some interesting applications that make it more versatile than most things you can find. There is a bit of kindness programmed in to let you pick objects up should they fall, the item floating up into the air if your hand is positioned above it, but at the same time it can lead to the situation where you reach down to grab it, it floats up, you go to grab its floating form, and doing so leads to it dropping back down again. This can even happen with Mr. Youseeks, and since controlling him is a bit like navigating a mirrored version of yourself it only gets a bit more fiddly, although time pressure is rarely a thing thankfully and finagling such small interactions will eventually lead to things working out without too much strife.

 

There are a few other minigame-like scenarios such as a shooting section that is mostly just about pointing your arms and firing and then another section has you pressing buttons and pulling levers on on a console that becomes more demanding over time, but the extent of what can be done is fairly basic and often not very fleshed out unfortunately. The shooting and console segments aren’t often including much humor either, sometimes a fortunate truth as the sound effects can cover up spoken dialogue. What it comes down to though is that the game isn’t really trying to draw you in with the interactive elements too much so much as it is a game for fans of the show, although the writers were Owlchemy Labs instead of the team from the animated series as well and a large emphasis was put on familiar ideas rather than new material.

THE VERDICT: If you just want a few hours of Rick and Morty inspired humor then this VR experience does provide that without obstructing you too much, but Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality doesn’t seem to interested in providing new scenarios or material for its leads or the player to explore. The game leans on its references to the show while giving you very little to do with the items on hand, and while it has some more inspired moments like the Troy simulation or the item mixer, you’re not given too many interactions that go beyond basic handling. A clever idea can pop up from time to time and the comedy can elicit a few laughs even if the jokes are often stretched out a bit too long, but this VR experience is a fairly shallow game that leans mostly on brand familiarity rather than giving the player engaging activities to do.

 

And so, I give Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. I do enjoy the Rick and Morty television show and seen all of its available episodes, but there is something to be said about how the format influences how the humor can be presented. In this virtual reality experience things can’t really move along with ease and thus the writers opted to stretch out jokes to fill the time more, and since there is no emotional core to the experience with the family mostly putting in small appearances beyond Rick and Morty themselves, there’s not much of a plot to provide consistent new material. A new object or creature might crop up for a bit, but the game still feels like it needs to pad those moments with more meandering dialogue that tries to be funny through reiteration or the joke being that they’re still talking about the same subject. The game isn’t constantly whiffing every joke it tries to tell though so it can be a matter of tolerating the weaker stuff to get to the things that might amuse you, but the actual actions you take are even less substantial than what was seen in Owlchemy Labs’s Job Simulator. Over there the game felt it had to prove itself so it did try to keep iterating on an idea in new ways despite some limitations keeping it rather simple, but in Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality they’ll put a Plumbus on the table and hope that makes up for the fact the Plumbus can’t do anything. Rather than littering the area with references the game probably would have benefited more from things like the Mr. Youseeks, its applications small in the game’s current form but it does provide a new form of interaction that could be potentially expanded with more conducive items or ones with their own purpose and range of functions. The item mixer feels like the real star in terms of giving you something to mess with that has some legitimate range in how it can be used both for fun or for completing goals, so if Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality did want to stay the kind of VR experience where you just reach out and grab things to mess around with, ones with that level of unique outcomes feel like a better focus than weak attempts to carry you to the next bit of dialogue.

 

Some games are made just for fans to spend a little more time with characters and settings they enjoy, and that feels like what Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality tried to do while also not being able to capture the scope of what the show offers. The comedy and science fiction concepts are a big part of its appeal, but exploring the depths of them and tying them back to the central characters is where the show makes them much more interesting. The limited movement, “mess around with things” gameplay style seen here isn’t really able to capture that, especially with the story not focusing in much on Rick and Morty save when they’re standing around running a joke into the ground or calling you on your watch to give you instructions. Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality needs more room than just the garage to provide a more diverse experience and, perhaps more importantly, the story needs the space for the humor to grow and change as well. Most of the gameplay is still fairly easy and simple so a fan can likely get through it and not think much of it, but that shallowness is what makes it hard to recommend except to a major fan who craves more content related to the series regardless of how insubstantial it might be.