Ocean Descent is, and was presumably designed to be, the perfect introduction to PlayStation VR. It consists of 3 stages that are essentially three parts of the same experience. All three place the player inside an underwater diving cage. In the first episode, Coral Reef, you watch as angel fish and turtles swim by. This is fundamentally a 360-degree video with little movement and certainly no sense of peril.

In the second, Wildlife Tour, the same thing happens except this time the cage descends into a cave where you encounter stingrays and glowing jellyfish. It’s a perfect visual analogy for how far you as the player are willing to go with VR. The second stage introduces the movement of the cage and as the cage descends there is a sense of potential danger lurking in the unknown darkness of the cave. There are also some light narrative elements here, just by virtue of the movement itself and also with a clever use of visual foreshadowing. If you look down through the floor of the cage you see the darkness of the cave below and within that darkness a single, glowing light. As you descend further the light is revealed to be a jellyfish and moments later you are surround by dozens of them. It’s a simple technique but what it achieves is that it focuses your attention. Once you’ve spotted the jellyfish you know it’s there and you know it’s coming so even if you look away you are aware of the jellyfish.

This notion of focusing attention can be a real issue in VR storytelling, which is why this single moment of the one jellyfish appearing before the others is so important. Immersive theatre productions face similar problems. I saw Punchdrunk’s production of Faust in London around 10 years ago, which took place over several maze-like floors of an abandoned archive building. Left to wander and discover the narrative at our own pace, I distinctly remember feeling that I was constantly missing something more interesting elsewhere. In VR you can choose where to look at all times and it can sometimes feel that you’re missing important parts of the experience by not looking at the right spot at the right time. The single jellyfish is an elegant solution to this problem.

The mild sense of peril established in Wildlife Tour sets us up perfectly for the third stage, Shark Encounter. In this stage the sequence repeats again only this time two remote-controlled drone subs are floating around outside the cage and the experience is accompanied by the voices of two technicians, presumably watching your progress from the ship above. The technicians explain that this is a salvage mission although no one seems sure what the object of that mission is. As the descent continues you discover a sunken nuclear sub and the drones retrieve a radioactive MacGuffin from inside. However, before the cage can ascend it is attacked by a large shark who rips off the front grill and tries his hardest to force his way in before the cage is thankfully hauled back up to safety.

This episode introduces a number of key elements of VR experiences, which I’ll cover individually below:

The Guide

The technicians communicating with the player act as a guide through the experience, setting the scene, enhancing the narrative and adding a further assist to the issue of focussing the attention of the player as mentioned above. The writing in Shark Encounter is actually quite effective and sets the scene efficiently without taking anything away from the experience. It also sets up an interesting premise, prompting me to wonder what was going to happen next in the story once the experience had finished. As a player it makes you feel included and part of the narrative rather than an observer, despite the fact that when you really think about it your involvement in the mission is fairly redundant. There is another aspect to the guide that I think carries through into other VR games and experiences. They act as a ringmaster. VR, more than any other gaming experience, is primarily concerned with spectacle and putting on a show. In the circus the ringmaster’s function is to introduce the acts in a way that builds expectation, and the same can certainly be said of the way the technicians foreshadow the appearance of the shark in this experience.

Atmosphere

Added to the visuals and the communication with the technicians above there are also a couple of key elements in Shark Encounter that help to create an atmosphere. There is dramatic music at key points in the story and there is also the sound of your own panicked breathing. Obviously, such techniques are not specific to VR, but the way they are used and the decision to use them does raise some questions. Firstly, music in VR could in theory take some of the realism away from the experience. We don’t go through life with a soundtrack so being in a first-person viewpoint with a soundtrack playing can seem a little disorientating at times. That said, the music in Ocean Descent is subtle enough to work for the narrative. The breathing is more interesting because suddenly you become aware of inhabiting a character. Sure, I may be breathing heavily in real life as I play but certainly not as dramatically as the sound implies. It’s an interesting choice because it both increases the immersion of the experience and distances us from it at the same time. If it’s not me in the cage, who am I?

In Shark Encounter the atmospheric elements are used to heighten the sense of excitement and dread and for all my concerns it does work, so much so that even on my third playthrough I still backed away from the shark as it came towards the cage. It’s interesting that what was intended to be the first VR experience for the majority of players turns from a tranquil, visual experiment to a full-on horror-themed roller-coaster by the end. Shark Encounter plays like a nightmare and like a nightmare if you die in VR you are mercifully fine in real life. If things do become a little too intense you can always press the PS button and instant transport yourself back to the home screen as if waking from a dream. Dread and horror come easily to VR, as the plethora or horror experiences available clearly demonstrate.

Limited Control

As an introduction to VR, Ocean Descent naturally limits the player’s input to the movement of the headset only. You can, as I discovered on my third playthrough, move around in the cage by walking around IRL. In fact, the cage is around the same size as the field of movement allowed by the PS4 camera. This changes the experience immensely as suddenly you can approach the front of the cage and lean over the railings to steal a closer look at the shark. It also means that this is no longer a 360-degree video. The simple experience of movement within the virtual world that so closely mirrors your own movement in the real world is thrilling and vastly increases the sense of immersion. That said, we are still simply witnesses in this experience. We have no weapons, no way of fending off the shark, no agency.

In VR there will always be limits to what the player can do in the VR world. I can move around the cage, for example, but once the shark has ripped off the front of the cage, I can’t make a break for it and swim to the surface. My interaction is limited and here the developers have used this to their advantage. There is a sense of helplessness in Shark Encounter that while created by limited control is also perfectly suited to the experience.

The Tether

Taking into account all of the above it’s interesting that the designers are able to maintain a balance between the fear and the limited control. They achieve this via a tether, another common feature of VR experiences. This tether takes two forms really, first the physical line between the cage and the boat above that pulls you up from the depths to escape the shark, mirrored by the physical wire that connects the headset to the PS4. More importantly and in some ways more calming is the social tether, the voices on the radio reminding you that you are not alone here. And yet even with this tether established the designers couldn’t resist cutting communications at a crucial moment. This teaches us another important lesson for anyone playing VR.

VR is not to be trusted.