Robinson: The Journey

My honest first reaction to Robinson: The Journey was the same one most VR showcase games produce: genuine awe followed by a slow creeping awareness that there isn't much of a game underneath the spectacle. Crytek turned CRYENGINE loose on a prehistoric alien planet, and Tyson III is genuinely stunning, one of those environments you'll sweep your head around like a tourist rather than a player. Then the gameplay loop asserts itself, and things get more complicated. You play as Robin, a boy who survives a colony ship crash and ends up marooned on a planet populated by dinosaurs. Your companions are HIGS, a floating AI orb that chatters at you and nudges objectives, and Laika, a baby T-Rex you hatch early on and direct around using a laser pointer. The dynamic between the cautious HIGS and the adopted dinosaur is the game's best character writing, carrying more charm than the story itself ever quite manages. Mechanically, the bulk of your time is split between slow exploration on foot, climbing sequences along clearly marked orange handholds, light object-manipulation puzzles using a multi-tool gravity gun, and scanning creatures and HIGS unit wrecks to uncover what really happened to the Esmeralda. There's also a brief stealth section toward the end where you avoid raptors, but it barely registers as a distinct mode. The scanning and creature-cataloging side content can push your playtime past the core three-to-five-hour campaign if you're the completionist type. The problems are real and consistent with the critical consensus this game landed on. Objectives are vague enough that you'll spend stretches just wandering, waiting for the next trigger to fire. The climbing has no physics weight to it, grab points glow obviously orange, and the object manipulation with the multi-tool doesn't let you rotate items, which makes certain puzzles more tedious than intended. Motion sickness sensitivity varies wildly depending on rotation settings, so VR newcomers should start with the comfort defaults. The Steam user score sits at a mixed 56 percent, and that split feels accurate: people who primarily want a VR environment to inhabit come away satisfied, people who want a proper game come away underwhelmed. What Robinson does genuinely well is scale. Standing next to a full-grown brachiosaurus, watching a herd react to your presence, or catching an aerial overview of the terrain are moments that land hard in VR in a way flat-screen screenshots simply cannot communicate. The voice performances for both HIGS and Robin are solid, and the world's sci-fi-meets-Cretaceous visual design is coherent and atmospheric throughout. If you own a SteamVR-compatible headset and want something that feels like a self-contained adventure rather than a tech demo, this is a step above most of the short-form VR content that was being released around the same period. Just go in knowing it's closer to a three-hour theme park experience than a meaty game, and buy at a discount rather than full price.

Alex · Scout Team

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