Robinson: The Journey (PS4)
For PlayStation VR you are provided a headset and two wand-shaped Move controllers that can sense your movement, but some games do include the option to use a standard Dualshock controller instead. This can be a nice alternative for a more relaxing game where you can sit down and take things easy while the headset still gives you a sense of space as you can look around to explore the virtual world. Robinson: The Journey requires you to play with the headset and standard controller but not because it is a control method that matches the activities you’ll be engaged with, the actual implementation leading to a control method that will become an actual pain in the neck.
Robinson: The Journey comes out swinging with what sounds like a strong setting concept though, a young boy named Robin ejecting from the damaged space ship Esmeralda and landing on Tyson III, a planet teeming with life similar to what was once found on Earth. Right off the bat he finds himself in a T-Rex nest where a hatchling imprints on him, the rest of the planet populated with a mix of prehistoric creatures and more recognizable modern life. Using the advanced technology scavenged from the Esmeralda he needs to hold his own, and while an AI assistant called HIGS floats around trying to advise him to stay put and wait for rescue, he seems eager to learn if anyone else survived the Esmeralda’s crash.
Before we get to the pertinent problems with the controls, it should be first noted how the game squanders much of this premise. You’ll spend a lot more time on Tyson III finding things like cockroaches, butterflies, snakes, and oddly enough pangolins rather than many of the dinosaurs that make it an exciting location, although at least when you do encounter one it tends to steal the spotlight while it’s around. You’ll contend with some pterosaurs keen on stealing tech, need to hide from hungry raptors, and must make some large sauropods move out of your way, but Robin doesn’t feel like he’s in too much danger despite HIGS’s frequent protests, especially since Robin only really speaks up to defend his T-Rex pal Laika from HIGS’s frequent berating. HIGS is mostly a fine companion though, often explaining things so you know your goals and he could almost be viewed as a more polite and proper version of the Robot from Lost in Space known for saying “Danger, Will Robinson”. The plot itself unfortunately focuses on solving its central mysteries about Esmeralda but not really resolving them, the game ending after you have vital information about the fate of others but not working on any follow through. Robinson: The Journey is around four hours and perhaps an eventual sequel was intended, although it seems like developer Crytek has moved onto more promising projects instead.
One thing about exploring the planet that does make you pay a bit more attention even to the underwhelming or mundane wildlife though is the scanning mechanic. Robin carries around a wand-like object that looks a lot like a perfect stand-in for a PlayStation Move controller, and you can set it to scan the animals you encounter for small profiles explaining what they are. The scanning process is usually more straightforward the simpler the creature, the player needing to move their cursor around to suck in green dots while avoiding the red ones or the scan will reset. Animals can scamper away if you’re too close too so sometimes scanning is a bit more than just a quick idle activity to add some life to slowly walking around, and the profiles, while sometimes plainly written, will on occasion include interesting images like the small amphibian Diplocaulus poised to go bowling. You can scan creatures multiple times to fill out the profile, unlocking an animated version of the image, and since the areas you explore are almost more like a little bug safari than a challenge to navigate, it does sound like a nice way to occupy your time between puzzles. However, the scanning does rely on headset movement, and that’s where we move into Robinson: The Journey’s issues with how you interact with its world.
It is easy enough to move around in Robinson: The Journey and your wand that can be used for scanning is able to levitate nearby objects if you point its beam at them, but the controller-focus starts to let things down pretty quickly. One section at the tar pits for example focuses on building bridges over tar and to do so you need to levitate metal sheets to make bridges, but since you’re using control sticks and buttons it can be very awkward to get a metal chunk that’s only just the right size to rotate and rest in the right spot to make such bridges. Sometimes Robinson: The Journey understands to push things into the right spot if you’re close enough and at others it is very particular about how to line things up or you’ll need to keep futzing with it over and over. Thankfully proper levitation isn’t a common requirement for progress even if it does hinder some side activities like playing with Laika, although that already has some glitches impeding it like a game of hide and seek where Laika came charging out of her hiding spot when I started looking for her so it could not register as me finding her.
Climbing though is an unfortunately common activity despite it not technically being too hard most of the time. It is, however, hard on the neck, because to climb up the plentiful fungal shelves and mountainsides on Tyson III, you’ll need to do a lot of neck craning. Once close enough to the handholds, your hands appear in game, and you hold L2 and R2 to grab onto holds while releasing them so you can reach over to others. To move your hands though does not involve the control sticks and the reasonable hand facsimiles that are PlayStation Move controls are not implemented, so instead the game determines where you want to reach by you moving your head towards that hold. Like a giraffe reaching for leaves on a branch you need to move your head around to reach out towards spots to clasp, but since you aren’t using real arms, it can be difficult to determine their reach, leading to moments where you might need to awkwardly shimmy an inch over to reach a handhold that was not as close as it looked. Crytek was likely recycling its climbing elements from their previous VR game The Climb, but notably that was for Oculus Touch which has handheld motion sensing controllers to make the action actually feel natural and involved. Here, it’s just about stretching your neck all around to try and make the floating hand detect the spot you’re aiming for, and for much of the game, the climbing isn’t even difficult, it’s just a way of getting to higher places.
Robinson: The Journey seems really doomed to being an all around uncomfortable and bland VR experience in its first hours, not even able to whip up many puzzles of note. If Laika needs to be used for something beyond play, HIGS almost always gives it away so you aren’t able to figure it out, a problem with the first raptor sneaking section too as he tells you when it’s safe to move. There are circuit puzzles where you need to redirect electricity so the right amount reaches machines you interact with, but they start off so simple they can be brute forced even if you don’t understand them. As you go around collecting other damaged HIGS units for clues about the Esmeralda, the activities don’t do much to hold your interest, a few moment of marveling at virtual nature the best the game does at placating you until finally near the end of the game, suddenly things shift. For around the final hour of Robinson: The Journey’s short story, the game starts to realize things should be difficult and it shouldn’t give you so many hints that puzzles solve themselves. Climbing now has time sensitive handholds and even tense moments where you need to let go and snag onto a hold after a drop. Raptors must now be watched closely to sneak by and you determine when it’s safe to move. Even the circuits are now a bit more complicated so learning how they work is faster than brute forcing the right wiring. This final portion would work wonderfully as part of a larger experience, but instead it’s the climax of a game that felt like three hours of tutorial and kid gloves, getting you acclimated to the game’s systems only for one spot to really test them.
THE VERDICT: Robinson: The Journey feels like a VR game designed around the use of the PlayStation Move controllers and yet it doesn’t use them to its extreme detriment. Instead of climbing being an immersive experience you’re just stretching your neck around like a tortoise reaching for a leaf to bite on a windy day while levitating useful objects or scanning creatures is made fiddly by relying on buttons and joysticks instead of hands. While Tyson III can feel a bit like walking around an open zoo at times, exploring it often involves simple tasks or puzzles undermined by hints. However, a surprisingly solid final section in this short journey shows what the game should have been doing all along, but the actual interesting implementation of its mechanics comes too late in a game that wasted its early hours teaching instead of testing.
And so, I give Robinson: The Journey for PlayStation 4…
A BAD rating. Clip off that final section where finally the game asks you to figure things out on your own and Robinson: The Journey would have been an immense disappointment. Even once you come to terms with the fact most of the dinosaurs are there to be looked at rather than interacted with, you’d still hope Robin has a lot more to do during his journey of survival and discovery, and yet it keeps coming back to things like climbing that are let down incredibly by the unengaging controls. Even if you didn’t think about how much better the Move controllers would be at handling it, it’s surprising how long the game waits to really add anything of note to climbing for how frequently it appears, and unfortunately many early puzzles are just about moving things to the right spot. Robinson: The Journey could actually perhaps work better as just the final section where everything starts to click, learning on the fly not too difficult for most of the mechanics and even most important story details would still make sense. The final area of the game does still feel more like it would be found somewhere a bit early or near the middle of a more robust adventure, and at least one good thing that can be said about earlier areas is some visuals distract you enough they don’t feel as long as they take to complete unless something like the metal sheet bridges are being obnoxious.
It really feels too easy to just say the game needed Move controllers to be better, but it also needed to make sure it could challenge whatever control method it went with. The gameplay in Robinson: The Journey still starts off far too simple and where it is difficult it seems to derive from uninteresting issues like rotating levitated objects. Again, that final section works and would even still work with more responsive controls because it implements its ideas more strongly and without overbearing assistance, but Robinson: The Journey putters around in its early moments caring more about being a somewhat sparse virtual nature trail rather than a journey on a strange planet.