Escape Bloody Marry is a short escape the room VR game that follows the folklore legend, Bloody Marry. That folklore served as an inspiration for many movies, and now it's inspired Well Told Entertainment to create horror games based on it.
In the game, you find yourself in a bathroom and a mirror in front of you. There are some items laying around which you can interact with. By the way, it's so cool that you can see yourself in the mirror, I like that part, but of course, things are going to get much more horrific after you decide to lit up the four candles near the sink, looking in the mirror and dare to say her name three times.
After that point, that's where the whole horror experience starts to take place. The lights go out and then Bloody Marry tries to invade the room. From that point on you need to solve puzzles while being hunted by Bloody Marry that hunts you down to reclaim your soul.
The visuals are really nice, and there is a good use of lighting to create tension, including nice atmospheric sounds that help to enhance produce even more suspension into this supernatural VR experience. I love the fact that the game takes place in a very small space. First of all, it's very comfortable to play, because although it's a room-scale VR game that requires a small play area of 2.5x2 meters to play, and you are not moving a lot, nor does the scene in that matter. Second, the small room really makes the whole experience more intense - it's a more personal experience and feels more intense because you know that there is no way to run. The game solely focuses on sort of basic puzzle interactions, understanding what you need to do in order to prevent Bloody Marry to consume your soul.
For example, one of the interactions is to alway keep the four candles lit up using the matches which you can find in the bathroom. The object interaction and the whole atmospheric level design looks really nice. Ther puzzles aren't complicated, but I think that the intention of the developer was not to make the game based on puzzles that aren't necessarily hard to solve. The puzzle-solving is used to enhance your immersion and the horror experience while putting you in an intense situations that you need to quickly do some simple things while knowing that there is like a timer ticking in the background. If you don't do things in time, you are going to fail, or in this case, in the game, your soul will be consumed by this spirit.
It does remind me some scene in a horror movie that I saw a few years ago, where a guy had a key holder with a lot of keys. When a guy was running after him through the ally, he reached his house, but because he had so many keys, and because of the tension, he couldn't find the right key, and only at the last moment he was able to find the right key and open the door and evade the guy that was running after him. That was very intense scene, and I think Escape Bloody Marry uses the same elements. You are given a few simple puzzles to do, but it really possesses a strong emotional impact once you do things under pressure.
Not every VR game has to be long and challenging to be fun and immersive in VR. The Escape Bloody Marry game is a good example of a short but very enjoyable experience that really works well when played in room-scale virtual reality. For $4, you don't really need to think too much. That's the beauty of the VR medium, you have many games and experiences that are short, fun but also inexpensive. You come home, and you know that there are some really nice VR experiences that you can play without breaking your budget - Escape Bloody Marry is one of those games.
All said and done, I think that Escape Bloody Marry, despite bring relatively short, it's a really well-made and sweet little horror game. A game that you can also give your friends to play and let them see what makes VR games so amazingly immersive and fun to play. We are impressed as you can clearly see, and therefore Escape Bloody Marry, in our opinion, definitely deserves our Impressive Game award.
The game is out now for the HTC Vive on the Steam store.