17-Bit’s VR survival game takes us into the prehistoric wilds

Developer/ publisher 17-Bit

Format PSVR, Quest, Rift

Origin Japan 

Release Q3 2021

Jake Kazdal, CEO, 17-Bit

S ince picking up Oculus dev kits on day one, Jake Kazdal has been “blown away” by VR. So much so that when it was time to plan a new game after launching 2D shooter Galak-Z, 17-Bit was eager to pivot towards a medium that felt truly next-generation. “It’s been a long haul – we’ve really watched the beginning of all these different games coming out,” Kazdal says. “I really learned a lot about the differences between a videogame that’s got a lot of standards and templates and something that’s very unknown and different.”

His team had to adapt to COVID-19 conditions, making it difficult for this prehistoric-themed survival adventure to get wider feedback – 17-Bit would ordinarily have been demoing it to people at conventions. Nonetheless, Kazdal gamely does his best as he puts on a headset to walk us through the latest build. As a title co-funded by Sony and Oculus, the studio has had to accommodate the quirks of each VR platform, so there’s a wealth of locomotion options: roomscale, if you have an Oculus Quest (and unlimited space); stick movement; and a context-driven teleporting system that appears remarkably similar to the traversal in Half-Life: Alyx. “We actually had that in place before Alyx came out,” Kazdal says. “Alyx really justified a lot of our decisions, so we were all very excited. I have friends at Valve, so I was in there a couple of times to see some of the early dev stuff. They already established a good working knowledge on a lot of this.”