The 4 of you accidentally reading this. Welcome :)
You may know us from other seemingly confusing VR releases like:
Dark Ride: The Feline Fix and Dark Ride: Sweet Dreams (Early Access).
Interesting thing. The VR world is small enough that you might actually know about us. The games world in general is so large that it’s impossible for a small team to be discovered.
So if you are here — and you are — thanks. Your time and attention is literally apparently the most valuable commodity in the world. I know because I see a lot of ads and they must be there for a reason.Ok. Distractions and deviations aside. This Early Access project is the real deal Holyfield for us.To get here, those other projects were important. We had to answer two questions:Is anybody out there? Is this thing on?How easy is it to get heard in the VR space?Spoiler: it’s just as hard and just as easy as you would imagine.The real problem is that most of the social media venues Indies could share stuff on have died. That fragmentation and enshittification of messaging channels hurts.But with Feline Fix we proved that a few people would find us. And also that the team could actually ship something.
Thanks for riding... Are you feeling OK?
For a game about theme park rides — slow ones — motion sickness was a real worry for us.Even on our own team we have some with a more fragile disposition. No blown chunks yet... But there have been a few “I’ve gotta lay down for a bit”s. We honestly did not know what sort of feedback we would get about that sort of thing. So an Early Access for a single ride made sense.You know what we learned?Nothing.Just. Nothing really. No feedback.What do you think? No complaints means it was fine? Or... That nobody gives a sh*t about it? Former? Latter?Do you know the difference when someone asks? I personally think it was a little bit of both.But I think in general the code of the internet is that if even one person tried the demo and got sick off of it, WE WOULD have heard about it.So, good news I guess.We’re done with zero-feedback betas and marketing tests. Having exhaustively kicked all those tires for essentially no gain, we’re on to the main event.(Is this article starting to have a boxing theme? I didn’t want it. I didn’t expect it. But we’re here. It’s happening.)
Dark Ride: Early Access
This is the real thing we have been making all along.The game that holds the rides.That holds the lands.That holds the one-person-optimized, escape-room-style theme park experiences.A little bit of riding. A little window shopping. Some silly extras.And maybe...A little lore if you dig around.Everyone has thought it before — accidentally.We’re announcing, in this Early Access, Dark Ride.A game about slow-moving weird theme park rides, and about enjoying theme-park-y things like little games and experiences. Stories you can narrate just by looking in a store window. Clever(?) puns and dumb theme park cultural references.And, spoiler alert: Backstage, We’re super excited about it!This version has something we call Central Garden. It’s a welcome area where the story for the whole park begins. There’s not going to be much to do in there today. But in the coming releases, we’ll be opening access to the lands that branch off from here.So take a minute.Browse around.Be confused by it.Wonder where — or if — it’s leading to somewhere.The experience in “CG,” as the cool kids call it, is a lot about setting the stage for the lore of the park.It’s not as fun as the rides we have built and planned, but we’re very excited to let you in there :)Like all theme parks, there are stories inside of stories.The meta-story of how it got built in the real world, and then the story of the land and the things in the land (and sometimes a meta-meta-story about how the lands themselves came to be).We’re trying to go as deep as we can on all that.Wandering around CG, you’re going to see some of that.Some of it might feel a little heavy-handed if you read this first.But remember: we’re in Early Access now.You’ll be examining things in hyper-detail compared to the gate waiters who run right in and pass $30,000,000 of carefully orchestrated place-making and topiaries to walk-run to the back of the park where the E-tickets are.Those plebeians who only experience the game once it’s released.You’ll be stuck there on proverbial Main Street for a while before rope drop.It’s a pretty good place to be.Enjoy!
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