He talks all the time. Really all the time. Constant. The protagonist of the PSVR2-exclusive stick track based on the Killzone team’s acclaimed Horizon series suffers from severe, acute Mundiarrhoea and if he had at least talked about interesting things, fleshed out the story and mythology rather than just gagging about painfully obvious things I as a player had already seen, It would be a thing. But that is not the case. Instead, Ryas comments on everything he sees, as I’ve already seen, constantly stating the obvious and contributing enough tough exposition to choke a Lancehorn.
The story in Horizon: Call of the Mountain is nothing further, unfortunately. It all starts in that canoe that we’ve seen in various trailers since it was first announced. Ryas has betrayed his people and is sentenced to carry out a couple of suicide-scented missions all on his own in order to appease his tribe and hopefully avoid further punishment. Aloy shows up in the opening half hour of the game and is appropriately standoffish and grumpy, and if that wasn’t enough to make it clear that Ryas isn’t well-liked by his fellow humans, he comments on it about 131,000 times in the first two hours of this adventure.
For my own part, there is great value in letting parts of the story and above all the mythology of a fantasy or sci-fi world be told via the environments I, as a player, move in. This is done in most of my favorite games and perhaps best of all in, for example, The Last of Us, Halo or Half-Life. Firesprite Studios doesn’t master this but has instead let the main character act as the narrator and I wish I could turn off his constant babbling. Because when the voice actor doesn’t manage to sound believable or even particularly engaged for so much as a single measly second, it’s hard for me to get excited about him stating that “it’s hard to climb” or that “the enemy robots better not sees me”.
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And climbing, that’s what you’ll be doing here, more than anything else. Of course, the title already hinted at the announcement that the Carja Sundom mountain range would be the main scene here, and that is the case. Ryas also visit other places and the Nora tribe residence is a significant part of the adventure but mostly it’s about climbing. Very. Rya’s path through the mountains is at times remarkably reminiscent of a slightly slimmed-down, simplified version of Crytek’s popular climbing simulator The Climb with the significant difference that climbing reddish-brown rock massifs in Sony’s VR world just isn’t much fun.
You climb by holding down L or R and then moving your hands (with the VR Sense controls in each fist, of course) towards rocks, ledges and holes in the rock wall that are marked with white paint. In the beginning, it goes slowly as you as a player are afraid of falling down and the movements for your own part were fleetingly substantial and initially reminded of someone trying to hang laundry at a steady pace. However, it only took me about half an hour before I changed technique after getting so incredibly tired in the shoulders that I started “cheating” by climbing with small, small movements at a significantly, significantly faster pace. It’s perfectly fine to climb like a tiny little mink and perform what can best be described as plastic-based dog swimming up walls and cliffs, and that combined with Rya’s constant babbling means that large parts of this VR adventure mostly created irritation, for me .
I love Horizon. Both Zero Dawn and Forbidden West I rate as some of Sony’s finest first-party exclusives of all time and I was really looking forward to jumping into a lavish, atmospheric track via PSVR2 and taking part in a deepening and expansion of an already fantastically inviting game world. However, what is on offer in Call of the Mountain is not the experience I had hoped for and it is fundamentally not that launch game that is good enough to break new hardware. It’s nowhere near as memorable and grand as Forbidden West and nowhere near as mysterious, atmospheric and beautiful as Zero Dawn. Unfortunately.
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Because with me, for my own part, it is to the highest degree that vast, grand, open feeling of freedom to move where I want and to be able to do different tasks in the order I want and choose, which is a large part of the allure with Aloy’s Adventures. In VR, it’s apparently not possible, which has led to a far more linear and controlled adventure that’s more reminiscent of an old-fashioned rail-shooter with hopeless amounts of first-person climbing. The battles against Guerrilla’s well-sized collection of mechanical dinosaurs aren’t particularly exciting, Rya’s babbling incessantly about things I’ve already seen four seconds before he mentions (or already figured out three minutes before that) and it becomes monotonous and flat for long stretches. The mystery doesn’t really exist here. The atmosphere feels forcedly hollow and the characters are thin and hard to like. Compared to, say, Half-Life: Alyx, Firesprite’s hyped PSVR2 title isn’t much to hang on the Christmas tree.
