I was legally obligated to love this game, but somehow I just couldn't.
When I saw this game pop up on the Discord channel that myself and my friends frequent to organize game sessions for titles such as Population: ONE, Walkabout Mini-Golf, Rec Room, Blaston (another relatively new title worth writing about, I think), and so many others, I was convinced that it couldn't possibly fail to entertain us for a portion of our regular Saturday get-together in the weird world of Virtual Reality. But somehow it did, and now I am having an existential crisis.
Here's the short story of my first experience with the Early Access release of Gorilla Tag using my Samsung Odyssey 2, Windows Mixed Reality. I played this game on February 27th, 2021.
Let me start off here with a disclaimer: when I talk about games like this, I like to be brutally honest about my experiences. I leave nothing out. The good, the bad, the ugly, all of it. But do not think for a second that I do not understand at least a little bit about the circumstances of this game's development. This is being made by one person. Most of the things offered up by my own portfolio are fundamentally unfinished, and I have yet to create and support a full game and bring it to market on my own. So what I say here is for the benefit of the game's future development, and for the enjoyment of the reader. It represents the game only at a particular point in time. By the time that you read these words, the entire experience will likely be drastically different. This was just the first experience that myself and a small group of my friends had with the title.
Of the five people who were in my Discord call when we decided to fire up this hilarious-looking game that promised us an escape from humanity, I was the first to boot into the game properly. I spawned into a stone environment with low-resolution textures and tried to move. I pressed all of my buttons. I flailed my monke arms around. I figured out the basics of moving around on a flat surface relatively quickly! The early promise of the game was uplifting... until I hit a wall. Literally.
I forget what exactly my friends were talking about at the time, but I remember that I interrupted their conversation somewhat with my involuntary sounds of "oh... oh God no..." as I realized how climbing and wall-running was going to work. In games like Population: ONE, you can press and hold a button with one or both hands pressed to a wall to move your VR character controller around as though you are climbing up the surface. You can climb up anything, no matter the type of surface. It's fun, it's intuitive, and it's simple. In Gorilla Tag, unless I misunderstood something or there was something horrifically wrong with my controller mapping... you needed to claw at the walls with only a single precious moment of friction to frantically and unreliably fling yourself in a direction at the whims of game engine physics.
I had flashbacks to my time with Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, and my conscious mind reeled with panic as I realized the horrible truth: this was going to be a rage game.
By the time the second person in our group was hitting the same point in the baked-in tutorial, I had only just scaled the wall and moved on. I tried to keep myself optimistic, but one by one I heard all of my friends -- using various VR systems, such as the HTC Vive and Oculus Quest 2 -- having the same kind of bad time with the game's controls.
My experience with this game was a while ago now, almost a month as of the time of this writing. It all feels like a fever dream. The next thing I recall doing was flinging myself out of a hole in the wall of the tutorial area and into a much more open space full of trees, tree houses, obstacles, and all of that fun stuff. And also, children. So. Many. Children. It was as though I had jumped through a window in my house and face-planted into an elementary school playground.
The moment I hit the ground, it was absolute pandemonium.
Now look, I don't hate kids. I knew going into this that this was a game capitalizing on a meme about rejecting humanity. It's tag. There were obviously going to be a lot of younger people playing this game. That's fine, but I did not agree to joining an online session! I did not indicate to the game in any way shape or form that I wanted to join Ms. Frizzle's Funtime Recess Lobby and run around the playground like an absolute creep!
It was the second major discourtesy done to my friends and myself by this game and its design thus far, with more soon to come. I had to stop all conversation on the Discord call yet again to warn everyone that they needed to abort the game immediately to avoid being instantly dropped into all of their traumatic childhood memories. I could have just left it there. We had other games on the list for our weekly rotation of fun VR games. There was so much good stuff from which to choose but... I wanted to become monke. This game had so much promise as a concept, and I desperately wanted it to work. So I told the group that I would boot it up again to see what would happen. Maybe something different would happen next time. Maybe we could try again.
They would soon regret letting me do that.
The second time that I booted up Gorilla Tag, I found myself inside of a cozy tree house. I was pleasantly surprised, and for a moment I had hope that my friends and I could, indeed, become monke. That was when I noticed that for some strange reason, this tree house had a computer in it. I monke-shuffled my way up to the computer and had my first interaction with this game's concept of a user interface. That, and its almost sarcastic level of disrespect for the player's time.
To perform various functions in this game that one would normally expect to be found in menus, the player needed to (when we played it, note that the game is in active development) interact with physical objects in the world to tweak settings, start private lobbies, set the player's name and color, and all of that jazz. In the tree house, there was a keyboard in front of that lonely fire hazard of a computer. It had small buttons on it that, in order to interact with the settings that were available on the computer, needed to be carefully pushed with one's own weird monke fingers.
Turning so many elements of the game into pure VR interactions appeared to be a part of the game's design, and one that apparently hasn't gone over too poorly with the game's growing audience. But for my friends and myself, it was just infuriating. The best VR games that I own respect the player's time and get to the point in a quick and orderly fashion. We were promised a game where we could be gorillas and play tag, and to be stopped in our tracks prematurely by a system like this that just didn't need to be based on physical action put a damper on all of our moods.
Look, bear with me here. I need to replay this game to get screenshots. In the meantime, have what I assume is a picture of the developer looking at the game's sales numbers.
In spite of this, we created a private lobby for ourselves and meandered outside of the tree house to do... something. We didn't really get to play any form of tag. There were additional settings available in the open area to which we emerged on what I vaguely remember was an enormous whiteboard. There were buttons on the whiteboard. Buttons that you would need to press to change important settings. Buttons that the player may not be able to reach from the ground.
To solve this problem, the game had a brilliant solution: a set of makeshift steps upon which a player would need to clamber to reach the unreachable buttons. I watched with profound sadness as my friends had to pull themselves with their monke paws up the steps, reach out for the buttons, and fall off of the steps just as the buttons that they needed to push remained tantalizingly out of their reach. I tried this myself. It was deeply, excruciatingly.... enraging. I couldn't be sure if this was my fault, or the game's fault, or what. Perhaps we were becoming monke, but not in a good way.
Meanwhile, one of my friends was getting physically sick from the nature of the movement controls, another one of them was having an awful time getting up a mild slope, and a third was lamenting their lack of an ability to swing from tree branches or really do anything at all that apes can do. We just couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. I couldn't become monke. We moved on from that game in disappointment, saying to one another that the idea had promise but they can't all be winners. We didn't think that this game would catch on. There was just no way.
The sentient universe heard these words and told its friend Cthulhu, "Hold my beer."
A couple weeks after our time bumbling in and out of this game, I saw a new message on our Discord channel. Gorilla Tag was exploding in popularity, hailed as an example of an excellent VR title, fun for all! Reviews wouldn't be without some criticism, certainly, but I was convinced that this thing would be a Steam Early Access flop! What was wrong with me? What is wrong with me? What could I not see, or do, or understand? Has the game changed? Did we play some incredibly rough early draft? If I return now, could I finally, at long last, become monke?
I soon intend to find out. I'll be diving back into this again, and if indeed I can become monke, perhaps my VR group and I will give this one more shot. If possible, I will get it on video and feature it on this site, along with a blog post. It'll take a while-- I'm currently on vacation as of the time of this writing but will be returning to my normal day-to-day next week. If you don't see anything after this, it means that I never became monke.
But that's okay, I suppose. In spite of the rough experience that I had, thousands of players are currently becoming monke as we speak. As a supporter of independent game developers and fun, unique gameplay concepts, I'm happy to see this game find its audience! It may not be for everyone, and it may not be for me, but it's something incredible to its dedicated base of players. In this modern age of safe, predictable, and somewhat-boring AAA games, it's the kind of thing that I love to see.
Gorilla Tag is available now on Steam Early Access. It's a fun concept, however rough around the edges it may still be. Check it out for yourself if you want, and perhaps you can achieve the glorious status of true monke!
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