I’m always very happy when we discover good new VR games. I have a lot of fun playing and you seem to enjoy it too – it couldn’t be better. I’m also happy when games I like get sequels. In the case of “I Expect You To Die 3” we get both; So can this third part excite me as much as its predecessors? Let’s talk about it!
The game series “I Expect You To Die” has basically been with me for as long as I’ve been playing VR games. It was a recommendation from a friend when I started playing and I was immediately convinced. It combines two very practical features that make it very interesting for both beginners and veterans: on the one hand, you play while sitting in a fixed place all the time, which reduces motion sickness to the absolute minimum. On the other hand, it definitely uses all the possibilities that VR has to offer; Above all, the ability to look around freely and interact with practically the entire environment are features that make the experience feel real, and this is particularly effective in these games.
However, you don’t just sit there and enjoy life, you also experience an adventure. As a secret agent, you travel to various places and have to solve puzzles there in order to advance the story – no spoilers here though. However, I can say that the stories in all three parts are very well done and, above all, characterized by their witty and well-delivered humor. Mixed with atmospheric locations and each with its own Bond-like soundtrack, you definitely get the impression of a triple-A title here.
The approximately five to six hours of playing time per title are divided into five or six chapters, each of which takes place in a specific location. Sometimes you sit at a desk in an office, sometimes in a car or sometimes outside of a building, and you have to achieve certain goals. The puzzles can be solved almost like in a point & click adventure, only with some subtlety and thinking outside the box, and as the title suggests, failed attempts end in death and you have to start all over again. As soon as you have found the solution for a part of the puzzle, it is repeated very quickly, so that the frequent deaths do not cause any frustration – on the contrary, they even spurred me on personally, as I practically always had a new idea for the next attempt. This basically went through all the games and was only very rarely marred by actual frustration.
The graphic style of the game series is very bright and friendly throughout, it almost goes a bit in a cartoonish direction. There are a lot of objects to inspect and try out, so you often have several (often ridiculous) ways to achieve a goal. The games always worked very well from a technical point of view and never caused crashes or anything like that – I’m very pleased about that.
But while all of these points apply to the series as a whole, there are a few things I particularly want to focus on in part three. Essentially, these are points that struck me negatively – but that shouldn’t obscure the fact that I still love the game and the series as a whole. All of the positive points above more than make up for the few criticisms, but I wanted to mention them.
The first point concerns my earlier praise for preventing motion sickness. While the first and second parts completely refrained from moving the player (for example, in the first part you were in a car, but it was stationary) or only hinted at it very weakly, in the third part there were two situations which were uncomfortable even for me as someone who can tolerate it well. In one you control a moving car, in the second you ride a gondola through a mountain range. For me it was definitely manageable, but it was a negative surprise – I would have wished it to be different.
The second point concerns the puzzles. I thought those were absolutely great in the first part, and there was only one thing in the second part that I didn’t like – unfortunately it became more here. I had to read up on what the solution was several times because I couldn’t figure it out with the best of my abilities – I still think to this day that some solutions were a bit too complicated or required actions that would be unnatural if you were actually sitting there. I thought that was a shame because it takes you out of the immersion and is quite frustrating – I hope that future parts will find a better way to create puzzles again.
The third and final point is the composition of the scenes. As already said, you are stuck in one point and from there you can interact with everything and solve the puzzles – in theory. In this part I had several situations where I had to actively get up and look around a bit in order to be able to find and collect certain objects (sometimes after accidentially dropping them in a bad-to-reach place), or to be able to use certain things. This may seem like a very small problem at first, but my headset was wired and I just didn’t expect it – as a result, the cable length was often not enough and I had to unplug it. In addition, I didn’t expect to use that much space and now and then bumped into furniture that would never have been in the way in the other two parts – I thought that was a shame.
Overall, these three points weren’t too much of a bummer, but what bothers me -especially with points one and three – is that they came so unexpectedly after two other parts. I still think “I Expect You To Die 3” is a great game and well worth playing – but my favorite part will probably always be the first. I very much hope that more parts will come, because I find the principle and the visible attention to detail in almost all areas very nice and a welcome change from what other developers sometimes deliver. But I hope that the points I mentioned change directions and that the next part can excite me as much as the first part did.
What do you think? Did you find the game interesting, did you play it yourself or do you still plan to? It has my recommendation! If you are still missing points or have a different opinion on something, feel free to join the discussion on Discord!