I reach out to touch the wall and steady myself, but my hands are not my hands. They are robotic, complete with working tendons and empty sections that I can look through. I push myself off the wall and float in space, before twisting my body around and grabbing the corner of the wall on the other side of the room. My hand wraps around it, and I push off again to explore what it’s like to be in space.Lone Echo puts you inside what seems to be a sentient robot in deep space, and the entire movement system is based on grabbing walls and other structures and pulling yourself along, or using the jets on your wrists to get around. You see some gnarly things in the demo I played, including a stressful rescue mission and some moments out in deep space, but I never felt ill. It was like magic.“In space you get around with your hands. If you use your arm, you grab things and you move, and your head is aware that there’s a one-to-one relationship between where your hand is and where we’re then moving your head in opposition in virtual reality. It seems to think that’s correct,” Dana Jan, Lone Echo’s game director, told me. “We’ve cheated, essentially.”It’s a neat trick, and it works. Since my brain links the movement of my arm and hands with the movement of my entire body, it feels “right,” and natural, even though I’m in a virtual weightless environment that may make you a bit sick in real life.“Comfort is the highest priority of the game,” said Nathan Phail-Liff, Lone Echo’s art director. “There’s a lot of little tricks we constantly tweak to make sure comfort is at the forefront.”
