VR Game Review - I Expect You to Die

VR Game Review: I Expect You to Die by Schell Games

Played with Oculus Quest 2.

UPDATE: WARNING: Some missions may be bugged. Some people have found some mission steps to be bugged for them. I personally encountered a bug in the misison "Seat of Power" where one mission-critical step could not be performed, so the mission could not be completed. Other people have reported different bugs.

It is not guaranteed that you will encounter a bug, but if it happens it will certainly be too late to refund on Steam.

I Expect You to Die is a sort of "escape room" type game where you figure out what to do with the things around you. The genre is a retro "Get Smart" secret agent versus villainous mastermind with outlandish gadgets, complete with title song and opening sequence reminiscent of a James Bond movie that is well done enough for you to watch in entirety (and thereby also read the various credits).

It is designed to be played from a comfortable sitting position and does not require a lot of room for your arms or body to move -- everything explained in an excellent tutorial before your first mission.

The game is quite fun primarily because the genre supports and encourages humourous gadgets and situations and the developers were careful to add unexpected twists and surprises. But it would be even more fun if they accounted for a broader range of intuitive solutions, and some unintuitive things are in fact part of the solution.

For example, in the first mission, "Friendly Skies", you need to get screwdrivers. They are outside the car in an area with poisonous gas. If you roll down the window or smash the window, you can get at the screwdriver but now you are exposed to the poisonous gas. To solution is to simply roll up the window after you have gotten the screwdriver. However this really makes no sense since you are already exposed to poisonous gas and that gas is now inside the car and there's no way to get rid of it. So you might try various ways to get rid of the gas outside only to realize from an online walkthrough you don't even need to do that.

A lot of non-VR puzzle games avoid this situation by simply not allowing you to try the action at all. Maybe still frustrating, but at least it wastes less time compared to redoing the scene all over.

That said, some situations do have alternate solutions, which is nice to discover and not that common in games (Arkane Studios being the industry standout). And overall, the situations are well crafted and fun to solve.

Another source of frustration are the clunky controls. When you flick a switch for example, it is easily flicked again if your virtual finger is too close. Manipulating objects can also be very clumsy, making some achievements unnecessarily hard. Trying to throw something out of the plane in mission one or the submarine in mission three is apparently a lot harder than it sounds.

As with most puzzle games, the game can have a lot of play time depending on how quickly you discover what they want you to do, but not a lot of replayability unless you are trying for various achievements. Nevertheless it has seven missions and a sequel, I Expect You to Die 2 so there's quite a lot of gameplay here, especially if you bought it as part of the incredible Humble Bundle's VR Voyager's Black Friday sale.