What If… FMV Games Had Evolved With The Times? (REVIEW)

He’s watching me.

The Watcher. Uatu. At least I think it’s Uatu. I’m realizing as I write this that I don’t remember if we’ve established that the Watcher who watches the MCU’s What If…? animated series is the same who watches the comic books.

That doesn’t matter right now because this Watcher is watching me. He’s standing next to a shard of crystal that looks to be the size of a 60 inch flatscreen with a jagged bezel, his outline sketched against a star field with his eyes glowing light twin supernovas seen from centuries of distance. Said star field having faded into this very living room like demo room at Apple’s Culver City campus where media was invited to get a full run through of the new Marvel Studios/ILM Immersive collaboration.

This, the first major narrative immersive experience built for the Apple Vision Pro, is the closest we’ve come yet to the old 80’s dreams of television come to life. The experience switching organically between “lean back” watching and “lean forward” gaming all while delivering a story, an actual story, that could easily be slotted into a season of Marvel’s MCU related Disney+ animated series.

The basics: What If…? — An Immersive Story is a roughly hour long experience that finds the Watcher popping into your living room, or wherever you happen to have encountered an Apple Vision Pro in the wild, to enlist you on a mission to recover the Infinity Gems. Sure, it’s the MCU’s greatest hits, but this being What If…? everything gets to have a twist. You’ll square off against Thanos at one point, but he’s not the one you know. That’s the freedom the Multiverse gives writers & directors.

Each of the story’s acts divides up between a fully animated scene that you watch on the aforementioned giant crystal shard hovering in your space and an interactive sequence where you teleport into that scene to meddle with things mortals aren’t supposed to meddle with, upending the local timeline. Something the Watcher himself can’t do because, you know, he just watches. Rest assured that there will be no unintended consequences for any of this interference. That never happens in this kind of story.

This being an Apple Vision Pro experience there’s no controller. This being ILM Immersive, they figure out that the way to get gestural controls across is to have Wong, the Sorcerer Supreme, teach you some spells to collect the various gems and then unleash their powers. For the most part this works pretty well, with an on-screen, in world mystical hand appearing to show you what to do. The idea being that this demonstrates the gesture and then you follow its lead, with spell effects manifesting around your actual hands, something that the Vision Pro kit is very good at doing.

Sometimes the gesture doesn’t quite fire off right, and in my session the team watching me play thanks to an Airplay (I assume) connected iPad gave me some coaching tips on how to clean up my moves. Since What If…? is being released for free instead of lamenting this (gesture controls are always a tad wonky) I’m just going to share what I learned: the “pick up gem” gesture works better when you cup your hand as opposed to spreading out your fingers. Another gesture, which involved clapping to finish off a combo, worked best if I started with my hands further apart than I first thought. Everything else is damn near seamless, almost scarily so.

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ILM Immersive are no strangers to telling interactive stories inside the best known fictional worlds in existence. They’re the ones behind Vader Immortal, Ralph Breaks VR, and Avengers: Damage Control, after all. Each time the ILM Immersive team tackles a new piece of immersive kit they quickly set the bar and then we get to watch everyone else catch up. Even money on that being the case this time. Although as a free offering that means there’s loads more than can be done to mine the intersection where TV meets games.

The fact that this is based on the animated What If…? part of the MCU and not the films themselves means that the characters that are summoned into your space are the characters from the show. Visually there’s no difference, which means that ILM Immersive isn’t bound to try and create game engine approximations of photorealistic special effects. That allows the design team to work on the little touches that give mixed reality experiences their, well, reality.

So who is this for?

Well anyone who owns a Vision Pro, obviously, as its only cost is hard drive space. It probably won’t sell units, although this was my first time with one of the headsets and I found myself wanting to know a lot more as the experience is qualitatively different from a Quest, PSVR, or PCVR device. It’s also a must for experience designers to get their hands on — at least at the “get your friends to let you have a go” level — as you’ll want to see what the ILM Immersive team has managed to conjure and where the long legacy of full motion video games is today.

Not that there aren’t other lines of that legacy. You don’t have to go further than Alan Wake 2 to get a jaw dropping narrative that leans heavily on the form. Yet what’s at work here is a different angle, one that’s aiming to thread the needle between gamers and non-gamers, with the emphasis on the later. You won’t impress Helldivers 2 fans with the mechanics, but this isn’t for that. You also won’t get Apple’s target market for the Vision Pro playing Helldivers 2.

What we get is a very polished sketch of where mixed reality experiences delivered by a spatial computing device could go. Where our world and a fictional world are crossfaded with each other and existing series are given an added dimension for us being able to touch them. I know that I hadn’t picked up the gauntlet of What If…? season 2 despite enjoying the first one, and now I find myself wanting to go back and watch it.

Which is exactly how these kinds of tie-ins are supposed to work.

What If…? — An Immersive Story is available now as a free download for the Apple Vision Pro.

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