A spy-themed escape-the-room puzzle game created specifically for virtual reality, I Expect You To Die is coming to PlayStation VR in December 2016, Schell Games announced today. The Oculus Touch version will be out on December 6, but a price wasn’t given for either version.
Although the objective in I Expect You To Die is to escape the room, dying is a big part of the game. There are more than 30 ways to die, with all of them fitting into six categories: explosion, fire, laser, gunshot, drowning, and suffocation. After you die, there will be a coroner’s report to remind you how you died. Then, as Design Director Shawn Patton explains, you’ll have to restart the mission:
[…] we thought long and hard on what happens when you die in the game. We wanted the player to be able to take a breath, process what happened, and then get back in. Early on we had considered checkpoints, but we found that sometimes players would get themselves in a bad state, or miss a clue that would help them complete the puzzle if they picked up midway through.
We decided that starting fresh each time was important, but armed with the knowledge you gained from the previous run, you’d be able to quickly progress to where you left off. That’s why we consciously avoided any long timing puzzles, like avoiding swiveling security cameras for instance. Puzzles like that are questionably fun the first time and can quickly become annoying on subsequent playthroughs. This focus on letting the player progress through the puzzle as fast as they can lets them get back to where they left off quickly and allowed us to make speed-run challenges.
To help keep I Expect You To Die from getting frustrating, Schell Games created two strict rules for each death: Always have at least one clue before a death trap, and make it clear why you died so you’d learn for the next playthrough.
“In fact, for each level we had three or more ways the game would try to kill you and three or more ways you could accidentally kill yourself,” Patton added. “When deciding on new venues for puzzles, we’d always make sure that there would be interesting ways to die that would be in theme.”
[Source: I Expect You to Die, PS Blog]
