To Save ‘Jumanji’ this Line Rehearse: Get to The VOID and ‘Reverse The Curse’ (The NoPro Review)
The latest hyperreality experience is a whole new game
Fun fact: I’ve never seen a Jumanji.
Not the original, which starred the late, great Robin Williams. Not the update that features The Rock. I’m sure I’d probably LIKE it, I’ve just never been in the demographic for these movies.
I say that because I want you to know that I had no attachment to Jumanji as a thing when I stepped into The VOID in Santa Monica last week for Jumanji: Reverse The Curse. Which is, hands down, my favorite of all the offerings I’ve had the privilege of checking out. That means it’s better than Star Wars, Avengers, Wreck It Ralph, and Ghostbusters. All of which are franchises I have affection for. But Jumanji? Jumanji is a great leap forward for The Void.
(Note: I still haven’t checked out Nicodemus, their original creation, which is an increasingly glaring gap I need to remedy.)
So far The VOID has avoided video game mechanics like fail states with limited lives, but because the current incarnation of the franchise revolves around a video game version of the board game. In other words: it would be somewhat weird to avoid game mechanics, so The Void dives right in to great effect.
Each of the characters has their own strengths and weaknesses — I’ll get back to the later in a moment — and that manifests by having characters able to see and hear things that each other can’t, even as they share the same playing space. This kind of secret knowledge is something that is unique to a group VR experience, and it means that teams have to work together in order to avoid traps and solve puzzles.
I mentioned “each of the characters,” and because this is Jumanji we’re dealing with the avatars from the movie. When I portaled into the game I saw that my teammate had taken on the role of Smoulder Bravestone. Yes. My teammate was The Rock. I looked in the mirror and found that I was Mouse Finbar: Kevin Hart. It was, in short, a total trip. I could have just as easily have been looking over to see myself as Jack Black or Karen Gillan.
Mouse’s ability is to talk to animals, and he also has a backpack. Which manifests as an 8-bit style menu screen at key points so you can stash a useful item or be tempted to take a slice of cake: his weakness. Dear reader, to my shame I never succumbed to the cake — which I suspected was a lie. But I so desperately wanted to see if The VOID was shelling out for cake slices, even if it would have cost me a life.
It’s probably for the best, as my teammate and I managed to get through the game with just one life left a piece.
Many of the game challenges manifest themselves as traversal puzzles or one kind or another. The whole of the adventure felt like I was in the world’s biggest escape room or playing Survivor: Jumanji. There’s still something freaky about trying to balance on a narrow beam in VR — when you’re actually just standing on a floor — and it’s even more intense when deadly crocodiles are snapping at you and your friends.
There is, of course, a whole story here. The “evil Haka’ar has stolen the Scepter of Se’payu containing the Red Jewel of Jumanji” and you need to steal it back. It’s not exactly deep — it is supposed to feel like a video game based on a board game, after all — but there’s enough in the design to make the world feel lived in. Enough that by the end of the game I thought: “Maybe I should watch these Jumanji movies?”
Splitting the roles up so that they have different powers and weaknesses also adds a level of replayability to Jumanji: Reverse The Curse that many of the other experiences at The VOID lack. (Nicodemus, on the other hand, has multiple endings.) The idea that different roles actually see and hear different things is one of the most exciting, and in retrospect glaringly obvious, tools to be added to the kit here. I implore the game and experience designers I know to start daydreaming around this notion, and poke around at some of the existential possibilities it raises.
Jumanji: Reverse The Curse, along with the recent releases for the Oculus Quest, the announcement of a new Half-Life VR game, and the developers of Beat Saber being acquired by Facebook all add up to a feeling that VR is finally getting its second wind. It only took some really compelling content for that to happen.
Who would have thought that, and not a whiz-bang piece of hardware, would be the answer?
Jumanji: Reverse The Curse opens today at multiple locations of The VOID in the U.S. and Canada. Prices vary by location.
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