Wraith: The Oblivion: Afterlife is a suitably
spooky horror game that struggles to make
the most of its VR DNA. It offers a relatively
interesting horror story and some tense,
evade-the-monster sequences in the vein
of Alien: Isolation. However, the experience
is undermined by tedious visual design and
a paucity of interactive opportunities.
You assume the role of a former
photographer named Ed Miller. ‘Former’
because you were recently killed during
a disastrous séance. Trapped inside the
sprawling Los Angeles mansion where
the séance took place, you must find a way
to escape your spiritual prison, while also
investigating what exactly happened to you
and the other participants.
Like most games in which you play as a
ghost, Wraith immediately struggles with this
premise. Indeed, you probably wouldn’t realiseyou were a ghost if you weren’t explicitly told
so, as you can pick up items in your hands and
throw them around, while your two main tools
for interacting with the environment are ‘ghost’
versions of your camera and its flash. You also
can’t walk through walls, although you do
eventually learn this ability later in the game.
The meat of Wraith involves exploring the
mansion’s many rooms and floors, solving
simple ‘fetch the item’ puzzles and avoiding
the menagerie of creepy spirits that prowl its
corridors. Wraith is certainly tense, although it’s
more atmospheric than terrifying.
Most of the hunt sequences are fairly well
telegraphed, while jump scares are few and
far between. Whether this is a positive or
a negative will largely come down to your
personal tolerance for horror, but for the most
part, it felt like the appropriate balance for a
game that puts you in the middle of the horror.
Wraith does exhibit some more problematic
issues, however. Chief among them is that
it looks quite drab. The mansion isn’t an
especially interesting environment, with
an extremely brown interior that’s sparsely
furnished and struggles to conceal the
hardware limitations of the Quest.
The story is interesting from a plot
perspective, but told in the worst possible
way for VR, with you being forced to stand
around and listen to lengthy conversations
between spectres.It’s also not the most interactive VR game.
This is partly understandable – you’re playing
a ghost after all. However, Wraith plays fast and
loose with this concept elsewhere, and some
more elaborate and tangible puzzles wouldn’t
have gone amiss. One neat mechanic is that
you locate new objectives by stretching out
your arm and pointing it like a compass, which
give you a neat sensation of literally feeling
out where you need to go. Unfortunately,
playing with your arm stretched out for long
periods of time is also quite tiring, so it’s less
fun in practice.
Wraith is by no means terrible. It’s
sufficiently spooky and the story is interesting,
if rather clumsily told. However, it needs more
verve in the environments and to make better
use of VR’s distinctive toolset. It’s not quite a
shadow of what it could be, but it does need
more life breathing into it.Rick Lane haunts a
virtual mansion and
considers the HTC Vive
Pro 2’s chances in his
latest VR roundup
OVERALL SCORE
67 %
VERDICT
Wraith: The Oblivion
Afterlife is a VR
ghost story that
bounces between
tension and tedium.WRAITH
+^ Spooky
+^ Decent story premise
+^ Couple of
interesting ideasWRATH-^ Drab environments
-^ Clumsy story delivery
-^ Lacking interactivity
WRAITH: THE OBLIVION: AFTERLIFE / £24.99 inc VAT
REVIEW
DEVELOPER Fast Travel Games / PUBLISHER Fast Travel GamesREALITY
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GAMES / VIRTUAL REALITY