For a brief moment, you fly, and if the sweat has worn through the chalk on your hands, you fall. These moments are easily the most exciting, because they ask the player to hurl themselves headlong from the relative safety of the wall. It even requires you to leap off the rock, or dyno in climbing slang, to reach parts of the rock that are too far away to grab without doing so. Check the pitch, plan the route, and hold on tight. That, it turns out, is even harder than it sounds.Īpart from the physical fitness and required equipment, the game demands the same skills as free-climbing.
The climb vr touch free#
It just wants you to free climb a mountain. Crytek has something different in mind with its newest title, The Climb. Some games set out to tell a story, some games create vast worlds, and some games put you behind the wheel of a racecar. I’m playing Crytek’s new VR game The Climb. The glasses come off, and as if waking from a dream, I find myself standing in the middle of a hotel suite, holding an Xbox One controller. But my story, like theirs, ends in tragedy, and I plummet past trees and boulders to certain death in the ocean hundreds of feet below.
I leap from the beam to a small lip on the other side of the rock, already marked with streaks of chalk from previous climbers clawing for a grip. I tentatively lower myself down, pinching a couple of fingers around a small outcropping of rock before shifting my weight over to a wooden beam.Īs I reach further out on the beam, it begins to tip, dropping debris and leaves past my face, and it becomes clear my only chance of avoiding a deadly fall is to jump. It’s short-lived, however - the rock is calling my name once again. The worn, wooden platform underfoot is the first break my chalked, red hands have had in ten minutes.