16 Minutes of ‘Red Matter’ Gameplay Revealed – a Charming Soviet Retrofuture Adventure

Ahead of its launch later this month, we got a chance to dive into the beginning of Red Matter, an upcoming VR adventure puzzle exclusively for Oculus Rift that puts you in a wonderfully weird Soviet-style retrofuturistic world.

With launch quickly approaching, Spain-based developers Vertical Robot gave us the green light to show off a respectable chunk of the game’s beginning, which places you in the boots of an astronaut—Agent Epsilon of the vaguely American-sounding Atlantic Union.

Because we were only allowed to show so much in the press preview of the game, which let us experience the very beginning—a botched landing on a suspiciously Slavic-sounding Volgravian test site on Rhea, Saturn’s second-largest moon—we had to cut off right as we got deeper into the search for some key documents that would help us unravel the truth behind the test site.

We had a pretty similar experience jumping into Red Matter at its debut at Oculus Connect 4 last year, but one of the caveats at the time was we weren’t allowed to show anything but the vetted press images to go along with our written impressions. You can check out our hands-on here, which covers basically everything up until we hit the elevator, which in the OC4 demo was replaced with a mysteriously glowing substance. That’s gone (I think. I haven’t played past the preview’s cutoff).

At Red Matter‘s Oculus Connect debut, Design Director Tatiana Delgado told Road to VR the game’s Volgravian setting was a “cross between the encroaching surveillance of George Orwell’s dystopian societies and Kafka’s absurd bureaucracy.”

From what we’ve seen, Red Matter is shaping up to be a highly polished experience with plenty of intrigue to boot. A good measure of retro CRTs, propaganda posters, handy translator guns, and manipulator claws all make ridiculously charming experience thus far.

Delgado told me at the time that Red Matter was aiming for a 2.5-3 hour gameplay length. We’ll have our full review here at the game’s launch, which is slated for May 24th.

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