Review Rundown: The One With Fangs, Spacewalks, and Cults

The Rundown is back with LARPs, Zooms, and XRs. Okay. Okay. I wrote that to scare off the normies.

It’s a pretty dynamic crop this week, from prestige VR work to vampire shenanigans in NYC. Which means we are very on-brand for NoPro right now even if the whole team isn’t running around a certain spaceship drydocked in Orlando at the moment.

But just because you neither you nor we can get far, far away at the moment doesn’t mean there isn’t immersive fun to be had. Far from it! Lightspeed to the immersiverse!

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Bite Club! — Bits Before Crits
$25; New York, New York; Run Complete

Well, it appears that I am forced to break the first rule of Bite Club!… I have accepted my invitation from The Baron Szantovich to attend tonight’s commune of vampires, from all five tribes, and all the boroughs of New York City (except Staten island, but those guys really suck).

I will be playing the role of a vampire assigned to a tribe, in a mashup between LARP, game theater and the comedy stylings of What We Do in the Shadows. Everything is taken very seriously, which, of course, makes the humor of the evening rise from the dead. Upon arrival, we are handed packets of cards, our Boons and Powers for us to use and trade with our fellow vampires. These trading cards become the focus of gameplay, as we are encouraged to mingle with other eternal infernal rulers and to work together to meet the needs of the vampiric council who want to elect new positions to their tribunal.

The cards also act as a shorthand into the world of Vampire: The Masquerade, a long running RPG with its own lore and history. Those who come from this background are surely able to pick up on the language, spells, and styles on offer. While for me, as a total n00b, I was just able to follow along and try to trade my hand and play the game. (As another participant noted, it’s like being invited to church service, don’t worry about that the hymns are all sung in Latin, just join in where you can.) While I would have appreciated slightly more onboarding into the evening, I’m glad that even if I don’t fully understand everything, I am still able to jump into the light political gameplay. And the quippy flavor text on the cards helps with playful banter as trades are made: “Trust me, the Elmo blood from Times Square is particularly delicious at this time of year.”

While Madame X is a wonderfully atmospheric venue (a dripping red burlesque space), the sheer amount of undead creatures in the club made it very hard to spread my infernal wings. Rather than the salon-style seduction I feel the team had in mind, it felt like a crowded and rowdy bar as people pushed through each other to try to reach their companions and the NPCs needed to complete quests. It was still possible but the cramped space made quests feel more chore-like than fantastical moments.

That being said, it was wonderful to be around so many excited people who were ready to get stuck in and play. The costumes of the participants and NPCs were a wonder to behold. Many were hard core LARP-ers and Vampire players, who were eager to make the most of the invitation to engage, particularly after such a long hibernation/pandemic period. Overall, the evening was closer to game theatre rather than LARP, which, in and of itself, is totally fine, but the sense I got from many of my fellow players was that people were expecting something slightly more than what was on offer. It was a fun and entertaining evening with plenty of laughs but Bite Club! felt more like a vampiric appetizer than anything. And while it certainly didn’t suck, it did leave me wanting something more to get my fangs stuck into.

– Edward Mylechreest, New York City Correspondent

The Fleecing — Almanac Dance Circus Theatre
$10 to $100; Remote (Zoom); through March 5

It’s 2022! Crypto reigns! Hail Mammon, baby, and get that sweet, filthy lucre!

Okay, exclamations dealt with, I haven’t had much fun with the old standby of an immersive cult initiation in a long time. The Fleecing, the annual fundraiser for Almanac Dance Circus Theatre, flies high on wings of parody, performance art, and light puzzling to create a truly unique whole.

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The piece takes the form of a cult meeting to decide who will be the new host for the cult’s deity, the Bumblefish. As new acolytes in the Order of Mammon, audience members are urged to jump between a custom web platform and Zoom breakout rooms to watch and interact with performers (“devotees” of the Order, who vie for victory based on how many viewers they get), while solving a small puzzle trail to root out (or assist) traitors in the ranks.

The fact that the order of Mammon has such a fleshed out and persistent mythology, and that player actions radically shift the evening’s narratives gives The Fleecing an unexpected energy. The evening felt perfectly paced, with enough time to enjoy each performance, dive into rabbit holes in the lore, and try to score audience victory points. One sour note for some, may be the necessity to interact to get the most out of the event. A friend of mine, less versed in immersive theatre, found himself somewhat overwhelmed; a gentler onboarding process might be advisable.

All in all, The Fleecing is a spectacular evening’s entertainment for immersive fans ready to roll their sleeves up and play along. In a chaotic world, the opportunity to embody your worst possible self, if only for the night, is a cathartic riot I plan on keeping an annual tradition.

— Blake Weil, East Coast Curator at Large

SPACEWALKERS — Felix & Paul Studios
Free; Meta Quest VR headsets; Available Now

All I can hear is Jodie Foster in my head, repeating, “They should have sent a poet.” Her character from Contact is alive in my head even as tears well up in my eyes and a tightness forms my chest. But, in this case, we, the people of Earth, got supremely lucky because someone very smart decided to send Felix & Paul Studios up to the International Space Station.

SPACEWALKERS is the world’s first-ever spacewalk captured in 360 degrees outside the ISS. The project uses the first-ever cinematic VR camera designed specifically to operate in the vacuum of space. This short immersive film might be the best work I’ve ever seen from Felix & Paul Studios. And it is available for free, right now, from the Oculus TV app.

Felix & Paul have given us lots of other ISS content via the Space Explorers: The ISS Experience series but the team have simply outdone themselves this time around. The vistas are breathtaking, the music swells at just the right moments, and the vulnerability and camaraderie of these hard working astronauts underscores the smallness of humankind, particularly as you, the viewer, get to watch them work outside the ISS, set against a backdrop of vastness of space.

The SPACEWALKERS experience is simply spectacular; if you own a Meta Quest headset or have access to one, I implore you to stop what you’re doing and take in these 9 glorious, stunning minutes right now.

— Kathryn Yu, Executive Editor

Vajont — Iolanda Di Bonaventura
$5.99; Meta Quest 1 or 2 via App Lab; Available Now

This cinematic VR experience, which premiered at the 77th Venice International Film Festival, casts the audience into the role of a woman living in a village historically doomed to be destroyed by a dam failure in 1963. The evidence that something awful is going to happen mounting all around her, and, with a chance to leave in front of her, she must convince her husband to leave the house he was born in, abandon him, or face their fate.

Rendered entirely in game engine, Vajont is the equivalent of a unit set short play, with all the dramatic action unfolding in the couple’s kitchen and at their doorstep. A lightly branching path of dialogue choices can impact the way things unfold and the final fates of the characters. Multiple playthroughs revealed that while there might not be a lot of variation from branch to branch, some choices may truncate the potential length of the narrative.

There’s a gravitas here that is impressive and the real-life tragedy of the Vajont dam is one of those bits of history you don’t learn unless you are part of the culture they unfolded in. What makes this story relevant to the here and now is the way in which the husband character’s fear and reticence echoes those who are in denial about the global climate crisis. Yet, instead of demonizing him for not wanting to listen and accept that he is at risk, the script manages to make his point of view emotionally understandable while still situating it with the wisdom of hindsight.

While not terribly dynamic in terms of what it is asking from the game engine, and fairly deterministic in terms of pacing to a degree that is somewhat frustrating, there’s enough going on with the approach to mixing environmental storytelling and acting in Vajont to warrant a look from serious students of the form.

— Noah Nelson, Publisher and NoPro Podcast Host

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