The first thing you notice in Scavenger’s Odyssey is that you have a body. You notice this immediately because when the game starts you are looking at your hands, except they’re not “your” hands because they’re blue and only have three fingers and a thumb. You’re in someone else’s body and that feels like a huge revelation. Video games nearly always put us in control of another body but in VR the implications of occupying another form are immediately apparent.

One of the first VR experiences I ever tried was ABE VR, a short horror experience in which you are kidnapped and tortured by a psychotic robot surgeon. The first thing I noticed in that experience is that I was in a woman’s body. The gender (or in the case of Scavenger’s Odyssey the species) of the body isn’t important but what’s interesting is that in these experiences I was faced with the fact that the body I saw when I looked down was not my own. There is something jarring and also fascinating about these moments of realisation. They raise all kinds of questions, like “Who am I?”, “How did I get here?”, “Did I choose to be here or not?” and so on, questions that we should be asking as we start any interactive experience but we don’t because usually the cut scenes tell us what we need to know and that’s enough. There are cut scenes or narrative elements in VR too, but when you are looking down at the body you are inhabiting and asking those questions of yourself there’s a level of connection and engagement that traditional games simply don’t encourage.

Scavenger’s Odyssey adds another level to this sense of being someone else by connecting your head to the body. If you look down you see the torso the arms are connected to and if you lean forward as you look down the alien torso moves forward as well. For comparison, if you look down in Ocean Descent you see the base of the cage but you don’t see your own legs and that lack of a body does take you out of the experience slightly. The knowledge of your own physical form is particularly important in this experience because Scavenger’s Odyssey is all about connection.

As with Ocean Descent this VR experience uses an audio Guide to explain what is happening. In fact, the Guide here is very similar to the one in Ocean Descent – female, American, clearly your superior in this scenario. The first thing she does is connect you to the machine that you find yourself sitting in, which it transpires is a robotic, spider-like vehicle. There are now two levels of connection to another body, first you inside the alien body then the alien inside the machine, which now acts as the body. When you move the sticks on the controller both the alien hands and the scavenger vehicle move; the three separate bodies (player, alien and robot) move as one.

The story concerns a scavenger mission in an asteroid belt in which you are tasked with retrieving an important artefact from the wreckage of an abandoned starship. This involves navigating the wreckage by leaping from surface to surface, often changing direction in mid-air in truly motion-sickness-inducing manoeuvres. Along the way you have to blast alien insect creatures of varying size. None of this is all that interesting except for the motion sickness, which I feel is worth talking about.

Having clocked a handful of VR hours by this point without experiencing any kind of motion sickness I was optimistic in thinking it didn’t affect me. I’d even played Scavenger’s Odyssey briefly before without experiencing any adverse effects. However, on a full playthrough I definitely felt it and a brief search reveals I am not alone.

Motion sickness is thought to be caused when the brain senses two conflicting types of movement. For example, if you are below deck on a boat you appear visually to be static but your body is sensing the up and down movement of the boat on the water and this sensory conflict causes nausea (more comprehensive and accurate explanations of motion sickness are available online). In VR your brain is tricked into thinking it is moving when it is actually still, so naturally motion sickness can occur. This can be really off-putting in a game where you’re supposedly walking around when you’re actually standing still in your living room. However, in Scavenger’s Odyssey it’s not exactly that the VR body is moving and your real life body is static, it’s that your alien body is static and the robot body is moving. This is closer to being on a boat and feeling sea sick than just general VR motion sickness and therefore feels totally appropriate. This physical sensation of feeling sick adds to the immersion because the character you are inhabiting would no doubt feel the same thing.

This brings us back to levels of connection and there is another layer to this that is worth exploring. As mentioned above the game uses a Guide as with Ocean Descent. There is also a Tether, partly through communication again but we are also tethered to the Guide in that she controls the systems in the scavenger robot vehicle. From the little background information provided it is apparent that your species is treated as an underclass in this world and you are forced to go on these dangerous scavenger missions because you are presumably expendable. However, there is another voice. At key moments in the game a second Guide cuts communication with the first and then gives you a vision of the artefact you seek. This second Guide, also female but with a British accent, presumably for contrast, provides a back story about how your race is somehow connected to the beginning of all life in the universe, or something equally 2001. The second Guide establishes a new Tether, which the first then attempts to cut as the game progresses. This use of two Guides in conflict comes up a few times in VR and is a key part of the other major PSVR Worlds experience, The London Heist.

In comparison to the other PSVR Worlds experiences, Scavenger’s Odyssey gives you a huge amount of control with the ability to run, jump, shoot and move objects in the environment. However, in terms of the story the level of control is actually very limited and while I suspect the reasons for this were due to software limitations the consequence is that you feel entirely secondary to the narrative. The scavenger character is unable to truly influence the narrative and becomes almost like a pinball being bounced around a machine by two flippers, which both ultimately have the same goal. The narrative places the Guides in opposition, one instructing you to retrieve the artefact and the other urging you to protect it. In reality there is no decision to be made here and no autonomy. For example, at one point you are attacked by a giant space worm. The first Guide tells you to destroy it because it stands between you and the artefact. The second Guide at first defends the creature and tells you it is only trying to protect its young. Then she tells you that you have to protect the artefact from the creature. Whichever side you’re on you have to kill the space worm to progress and as a result any sense of agency in this world is taken away. Once again VR makes the player a captive spectator, this time with an illusion of control but ultimately unable to truly affect anything in the game world.

I recently completed Red Dead Redemption 2, and it could be argued that despite the open world and endless opportunities for procrastination in that world you are still bound to a set path. It could be argued that all games have a set narrative path of varying degrees. However, like noticing you are not in your own body there is something about being presented with a set path in VR that seems more stark. The worlds we explore in VR feel more real so our inability to change them feels even more hopeless.