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Review: The Utility Room

The Utility Room is certainly a game that peaked my interest, with me liking the sort of artsy experiences that Virtual Reality can offer. With games like Paper Beast and Journey For Elysium being games in the past that have pushed more artistic design to the forefront of what the game does, showing how well this can be done.

Release Date: August 28th 2024
Developer: Lionel Marsden
Publisher: Binman Games
Price: US $18.99 / CA $25.49 / €16,99 / £13.99
Reviewed On:PlayStation VR2
* Access Provided For Review *

Behind The Scenes

The idea of this experience is you are going ‘behind the scenes’ of the Universe, this is where the maintenance and heavy lifting required to keep the existence stable and temporal takes place. Your are a tourist in these lands, and should not do anything foolish.

‘Erm’

The Utility Room is certainly best explained as an experience, as gameplay wise there really is not much to do or get physically involved in. Essentially you are walking and jumping through this area portraying the behind the scenes of Universe for the main part of the game.

With the jumping sections they feeling like a platform game, as you will be jumping to other ledges, up the scenery and across moving platforms. To do this you have your standard short jump which uses a button press, and then longer distance leaps that will require you to hold in the two grips and swing your arms. However, I found parts of the platforming came a bit tedious, especially with the landing seeming to have some sort of slide afterwards, leading to unnecessary deaths in these areas. This lead me to just doing the platforming with the teleport for ninety-nine percent of those sections – and as someone who avoids teleport at all costs, this takes a lot of doing. As well as the jumping the game does sometimes involve climbing but this is a very little amount, and in most cases seems like it wasn’t really required with the jumping.

Through this experience you will be going through caves, something that does become quite boring as you move between different areas. Then these normally will open up to much more open spaces with things like giant Easter Island heads moving about, massive sculptures and at one point a huge swinging pendulum in the distance. Which are are great to take in but, I feel your too busy thinking about what the experience is doing to really appreciate what you are looking at sometimes.

Parts of The Utility Room gave me a slight feeling of motion sickness, which is something I never suffer from. This was in some sections when riding on platforms, due to the speed they were travelling and wanting to look around to see what was actually going on in that area. Where this wasn’t enough discomfort that I needed to stop, with it giving someone who doesn’t suffer from motion sickness this feeling, if you do this is something you might want to take into account.

With these giant elements in the more open areas, what The Utility Room does well is the sense of scale. As these things really do look huge inside of the HMD and can leave you in awe at times. The other thing it does really well is, use what it offers to create the sense of being alone as you make your way through the world, and not knowing if you are actually ever in danger really adds a bit of dread as well.

The game comes with its main mode, which I would advise playing in Extended as the others will drop some of the already minimal gameplay elements and drop chapters in what is already a short experience. Outside of this it offers a mode called The Exhibition, which does what is says on the tin. This is basically an art Exhibition that uses photogrammetry, which seems to have gone very wrong.

Very Gray

When it comes to the visuals the game is very grayscale, and uses very little color until the later sections of the experience but, these are not overly used. Where it works with the idea of the experience, the aforementioned cave sections which make up the majority of the game all become a little generic and samey. Which is a shame because when these areas open up to more mountainous settings or in some sort of factory, it works really well.

With the grayscale design the OLED panels on the PSVR2 are perfect for getting those dark and black areas looking great. However, like the motion sickness there was something else with The Utility Room I don’t really notice and for some reason in this I did, and that was Mura. it really stood out in this game, maybe it is the color palette but it was really noticeable for all of this experience.

As previously mentioned one thing the game does well is build that sense of being alone, and this is feeling is doubled with use of the sound – which really impressed me. With the sound scope going from eerily silent, to low rumbles and an unsettling soundtrack. It really amplified the eery feeling that you should be having at points of the game, and again left you not knowing if you are actually in danger.

Comfort

The Verdict

I think the best way to explain The Utility Room is the word ‘erm’ as this is something I found myself saying quite often in the just over an hour playthrough on Extended mode. Where aforementioned arsty type of games had me leaving them with an understanding of what the developer was looking to achieve with the game, this one once again left me just thinking ‘erm’, like I wasn’t sure what was happening or what I just experienced – which can be good but, also be bad. The Utility Room does have an interesting premise which I think will appeal to some people but, I would recommend waiting for a sale before trying it out due to it’s length.