What would you do to save your dying father? If your answer is “anything” then you might be able to understand where Loading Human Chapter 1 is coming from. The game takes place in an Antarctic laboratory where you play as Prometheus. Your extremely old father, Dorian, wants to live for even longer than he already has, so he decides that the best thing to do is to send you off in to unexplored deep space. The plan is to have you retrieve something that could help him live a bit longer.
It’s not just you and your dying father at the laboratory though, there’s an A.I called Lucy that keeps you company and a fellow scientist by the name of Alice. It’s a small cast which is ideal for games that want to play on human interaction and stories like Loading Human Chapter 1 does. It does mean though that the delivery and script have to be on point. Unfortunately they’re not. There’s no real emotion drummed up to make you care about your dying father, meaning the whole mission feels a bit pointless anyway.
Why go in to space when your relationship with your father seems middling at best? Especially when a love interest begins to develop in your life. None of the voice actors put in a particularly bad performance, but the whole thing just seems void of any real emotion that the drama of this interactive story seems nonexistent.
This isn’t helped by the sound design being fairly flat for the most part. There’s plenty of items to interact with and the physics of throwing them about can be fun for a bit, but there isn’t that satisfying crash when a glass smashes to pieces or thud when something heavy lands. It’s a shame as the work done on the physics of objects seems spot on, but without the sounds your ears expect to hear, it just doesn’t have the right level of impact.
Picking things up and playing with the physics is mainly fun when using the Move controllers. On the DualShock 4, interacting with items just feels clumsy. The issue is on the Move controller moving about also feels clumsy. It fails to feel natural or look natural. Graphically the characters models look clunky and fall in to the uncanny valley world far too much. The landscapes and objects luckily help compensate for the character models slightly.
In between telling the story and throwing things about you’ll also have some puzzles to solve. Some of this will require finding an item and placing it somewhere. Annoyingly, if you pick something up before the game is ready to tell you what to do you can be left wandering aimlessly. It’s frustrating and the lack of any waypoint system in the game means you’ll quite often be left wandering aimlessly wondering what to do. There’s an interesting game somewhere in Loading Human Chapter 1. The concept is intriguing enough, but the execution falls massively short at every possible hurdle. With the game retailing at £35 it’s one of the more expensive PlayStation VR launch titles, but it also feels like one of the least polished. You’ll be able to complete it in around four to five hours, but it’s unlikely to keep your attention for that long.
P.S; At least you can make Prometheus dance in the mirror.