Official ‘Jumaniji’ VR Experience Appears on Steam, Pulled After a Few Short Hours

Jumanji: The VR Adventure is an official VR experience created by Sony Pictures Virtual Reality and Madison Wells Media Immersive (formerly Reality One). Initially shown at VRX Networks kiosks across the US and UK in tandem with the release of the 2017 franchise reboot film starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, the app actually went live on Steam yesterday for a few hours before being pulled for no discernible reason.

The game centers around leading a miniature Dr. Bravestone (‘The Rock’) across Jumanji to dispatch various obstacles in effort to save the other stars of the film. A timer counts down overhead, putting pressure on as you make your way to the top of the statue to return the Jaguar’s Eye to its rightful place.

While the premise isn’t generally that unusual for VR film tie-ins, which by design give you a few minutes of interactivity to properly ‘engage with the brand’, what’s extremely odd about the whole thing is the basic level of polish on the $5 experience. At least that’s the way it appears from the official teaser and screenshots for the VR adventure; only the cached version of the Steam page remains to tell the tale.

There are two plausible explanations as it appears currently: the Steam version was either pulled because it was an absolute train wreck of a game, and was summarily abandoned as cooler heads prevailed, or someone just hit the button too soon, revealing a store page stocked with screenshots and video featuring placeholder assets. We’ve asked just about everyone publicly involved in the making of Jumanji: The VR Adventure to comment, but still haven’t heard back yet.

As of October 2017, there were plans to publish versions of the game on PlayStation VR, Viveport and the Oculus Store, according to a Variety report – meaning we’ll know the fate of the experience either way soon enough.

There are some video of the game in action though, revealing the game to be less reliant on stock Unity Store assets than previously seen in the teaser, although it’s all pretty sparse looking. Here, Twitch streamer XatomUK shows what the endgame looks like.

Whether Sony’s description of Jumanji: The VR Adventureas as “an exhilarating, immersive adventure that will take you deep into the jungle and never let go,” is actually apt remains to be seen. We haven’t played the game, so we can’t be sure. If the final product has anything in common with what we’ve seen so far though, we’ll just go back to playing the Jumanji Board Game for a little while longer.

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