Ratchet & Clank creator Insomniac Games unveiled a new virtual reality title today called The Unspoken, which the studio describes as “an Oculus Touch‐enabled VR action game that pulls players into a hidden world of spellcasting and magician’s duels.”

Here is Insomniac’s synopsis of the game’s plot:

“Magic is real. Its practitioners lurk in backrooms across the city. Duels play out in concealed urban areas, each with different destructible features and spell‐enabling properties: it’s the physical action of a fighting game married to the dynamic battlefield of an arena shooter.”

“Spellcasters are bound by a code where dueling is everything, policed by an order so ancient and powerful that its name remains unspoken. Will you be corrupted by this world? Or will you learn its secrets and become an unrivaled arch‐mage?”

New medium, same old tricks

While The Unspoken certainly looks new and exciting, the stand-and-shoot gameplay will likely feel familiar for people who grew up in a time when game arcades were actually a thing.

The graphics may be flashier and the motion controls will likely add an interesting tactile element to the game, but at its core, The Unspoken seems to share many similarities with the arcade shooting games from the 1990s. In essence, the player remains stationary and shoots at things until they die.

The trailer also shows the player peaking out from behind cover to briefly fire at an enemy, which is a mechanic that has been present in many arcade shooters going back at least a couple of decades. This style of shooting was perhaps most famously used in Namco Ltd’s Time Crisis series.

There is nothing wrong with these mechanics, but in some ways, they show the young nature of VR, as many developers seem to be relying on old mechanics and control schemes that have already been in use in traditional gaming for decades. Looking at many of the first round of games coming to VR devices like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, it seems that it may take some time for developers to innovate new mechanics that are unique to virtual reality.

You can watch the full trailer for The Unspoken below:

Image courtesy of Insomniac Games