Could ‘Skydance’s BEHEMOTH’ Be VR’s Skyrim? (PREVIEW)

I’m standing amidst the icy ruins of a fort, minding my own business, when the Viking raider looking guy with a longbow takes a pot shot at me from the ramparts above.

Luckily for me, the shield I had picked up a couple of minutes earlier is still strapped to my arm and I’m quick enough on the draw that I block the incoming arrow. Unluckily for him, I’ve got a grapple shot on my wrist. Faster than you can say “I’m Batman” or “thwip” I’ve tagged him with it and am then physically yanking him down to my level. If the fall doesn’t kill him the wicked looking piece of steel strapped to my hip will.

Okay, you guessed it. I wasn’t minding my own business. I’m giant hunting, and these guys decided to be in my way. Which isn’t a great place to be when in this world I’m some kind of mystically ‘roided out barbarian infected by a curse and kitted out by Bruce Wayne’s armorer’s medieval ancestor. The quest: to kill the massive creatures tied to said curse and free myself and the land from it. Although I do wonder if the end of the curse means I won’t be able to wall crawl like a certain web slinger anymore.

All this is what I got out of a taste of Skydance’s BEHEMOTH, Skydance Games’ follow up to their very successful The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners VR game. That game has been a bona fide hit for the company, who are looking to turn that success into an opportunity to launch a new game world.

Not that long term gamers will feel out of sorts, as BEHEMOTH wears its influences on its sleeve: Skyrim, Dark Souls, The Batman: Arkham series, Shadow of the Colossus. They were all present in the vertical slice — that’s an industry term for set pieces strung together to give an impression of the kinds things you’ll do in the game — that Shawn Kittelsen, Vice President of Creative for Skydance’s BEHEMOTH, helped walk me through last month.

The preview demo I was able to play had the difficulty cranked down and had side quest puzzle towers walled off, but in the 45 of so minutes I was able to play on a PlayStation VR2 I found myself vibing with what was on offer. This is going to be a solo adventure game that’s drawing on the best of what that genre has become over the past couple of decades, executed in VR. The visuals in the slice placed me right into a snowy Skyrim-like environment, but Kittelsen noted that this won’t be the only biome that players will be able to explore.

Combat allows for creative player expression, whether you want to go with a classic sword and board, dual wield blades, or bust out a massive claymore you’ve strapped across your back. Enemies operate like Dark Souls’ fighting-game like encounters where blocks and parries matter, although here you’re actually blocking and parrying. At the pace I was playing at this felt more manageable than the controller based abstraction of Elden Ring and other From Soft games which I can never quite get the hang of.

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Here when a guy swings at your head he’s swinging at your head and bringing up your sword to block or ducking out of the way is totally natural. Some special moves require a mix of physical actions and button presses, and in a short demo that wasn’t always easy. They had cut down the number of enemies to make that a bit less punishing, but in the final game skill will be a factor. Luckily, there will also be difficulty settings, so the answer to a steep skill curve won’t be a dismissive “git gud.” (That’s “get good” if you don’t speak Reddit.)

My favorite mechanical flourish of the demo, which focused on gameplay with only hints of story, was how health worked. Like a Souls game you have a medicine pouch, in this case it dangles from your belt right about where your buckle would be. To use it you pull it out and mime drinking from it. It takes a moment, so you may have to run from enemies while you’re doing that. But the best part of it is when you hit a crafting station to recharge it with the herbs you pick along the way. To craft you drop a few into a pouch and then shake it up like you’re mixing a cocktail. It’s something I haven’t encountered yet in another VR game, and it’s just totally delightful.

Good chunks of the demo involved traversal puzzles, and there were more than one way to get through those sequences. I would have loved to have explored the puzzle tower, as I suspect that might have been really up my alley.

The finale of the demo was one of the boss battles, which normally would have taken a good chunk of time to get to, but here we got to blink forward in the story a bit. With a name like BEHEMOTH you probably are imagining that we’re dealing with a large guy, and you’d be right. In this case our quarry was a few stories high, and the fight will find you climbing and grappling and doing a lot of running away from in order to take him down. Even though I messed up and had to redo the first half of the fight — there’s challenge even in the demo — the whole thing was a blast and leaned into one of VR’s greatest strengths: an impossible sense of scale.

With the demo it’s clear to me that Skydance has delivered on compelling, visceral gameplay, complete with a move set drawn from a lot of my favorite action/adventure games of the last few decades. They’ve put a lot into making the fighting feel good, and for any given combat encounter to be rewarding. I do find myself somewhat nervous as to how frantic the action could get, but suspect that the team knows they need to build up the player’s actual skills and sensibilities before dropping an Arkham like mob on them.

If they can stick the landing with the story they have a real shot at releasing the best single player game in VR yet. I wouldn’t bet against them. And I’m looking forward to the next time I get to hunt a BEHEMOTH.

Skydance’s BEHEMOTH is scheduled to release this Fall for Meta Quest 2 and 3, PlayStation VR2 and PCVR. It will retail for $39.99 USD.

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