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In Death: Unchained — Purgatory Never Looked So Good
In Death’s dream kingdom, Heaven is abandoned. Among its crumbling ruins, forsaken souls, angelic creatures and demons alike have run amok. Only a courageous hero that dares to venture deep into the Afterlife will be able to restore Harmony. Updated 2020–07–23.
In 2018, indie studio Sólfar Studios released a virtual reality game on Steam simply named In Death. The rogue-like, procedurally generated levels loaded with clever enemies and snappy ranged attacks made Purgatory worth visiting over and over again.
The only thing that would have made In Death better would be to play it without wires.
Fast forward to July 2020 — and Superbright has taken the near-perfect game on PC VR and “unchained” us (get it?) from the shackles of wires and cables; bringing us what will surely be considered the definitive edition of the game.
The Basics
As with all rogue-like games, this is a “play until you die” sort of game. Advance, kill, maybe do a little shopping, wash-rinse-repeat.
But, it isn’t about the destination, my friends; it is about the journey.
The game opens with a remarkably decent tutorial that takes you through the basics of play. While tutorials seem like a “no brainer”, a lot of VR games do a rather poor job of it (if they do it at all).
There are three levels to explore in this game; two of them (Paradise Lost and The Abyss) are locked out until you meet certain progress criteria in the main game level (Purgatory — which was the entire game in the PC VR edition of In Death).
Once inside Purgatory, the door closes behind you and you’re committed to venture forward — looming citadels, bridges and buildings shrouded in mist span out in front of…
