Seeker My Shadow

Now that the PlayStation VR2 has seen the light of day, all sorts of content has started to appear on it. Among the projects with big budgets, indie developers naturally build their own applications with variations in quality. Finnish game company Jestercraft is making its debut for PS VR2 with Seeker My Shadow, which earlier debuted on PC VR. In a nutshell, the idea is to solve puzzles in a family-friendly environment.

Seeker My Shadow's story is a mystery. The book in the menu asks the player to turn its pages with the virtual hands but when you try to press the assumed activation button, the menu just disappears and the game starts without any explanation. A small restricted area appears in front of the player's eyes, viewed from an isometric perspective. Different platforms, buildings, accessories, and characters are scattered throughout the area. A character looking like an old sailor tells the key objectives of your goal and after that, it's up to the player to guess and try to reach the given destination. Mostly it feels like the game starts in the middle of the story and a lot of questions emerge like why is there a dog jumping out from an Easter egg and why is that same dog coloured purple?

The concept in Seeker My Shadow is basically pretty neat. The player needs to solve physical puzzles by utilising the purple dog character in the level and virtual hands that are outside the level. The dog controlled with the stick can, for example, push boxes and trigger pressure plates to open doors and activate mechanisms. With the virtual hands, the player can view the area from different angles by rotating the platform by tapping the stick. The player can also, for example, push found buttons or rotate cranks from outside of the area to get needed changes for the dog to travel to the assigned location so that the level can be completed.

Excluding the difficult mechanism to spin the play area, the game's controls work smoothly. Unfortunately, the new PS VR2 features have not been used, which feels like a wasted potential to deepen the gaming experience. The mild vagueness of the character's identity and the unclear reasons for resolving the puzzles makes the experience feel shallow and superficial. Even though solving the puzzles is rather easy and you make good progress in the game, as a so-called small game, everything that Seeker My Shadow can offer is quickly discovered and interest starts to fade pretty fast.

The visual aspect of Seeker My Shadow is disturbingly conflicted and systematically incoherent. The game area in its simplicity is pleasantly stylised down to structures and characters. Pastel colouring is used in a controlled way within the level, apart from a few odd overreactions using the same colour. For example, The player-controlled purple dog looks unfinished without any details and is designed using only one colour. Transferring from one area to another is always done by fading the screen to black, which interrupts the immersion and is irritating especially while playing with VR. The book in the menu is copied straight from the Moss games but it's missing the page-turning mechanics and other cool details (or at least I didn't find a way to activate them). The game's visual potential is drowned under too many separate elements since there is no clear direction. But at least the game runs smoothly with PS VR2.

Even the sounds in the game are more of an annoyance than an atmosphere strengthening element. Those few used sound effects don't really stand up except for one artificial and annoyingly repeatable dog barking sound. The music is decent enough to carry out a relaxed and positive mood for the game.

Seeker My Shadow lacks direction and general focus, which cripples the fun core idea into a confusing game that quickly turns uninteresting. Sure the game can be intriguing for a while but since all the PS VR2 features are ignored and the same kind of ideas are already used in better ways in other games there's no need to spend too much time on this.