Elsewhere Electric will challenge your tolerance as much as your relationships, and that’s something most games seldom strive for.
Screen time has turned into a kind of taboo in today’s society. Too many individuals frequently have their eyes glued to their phones, even while sharing a space with others, but a new Meta Quest title is promoting a distinctive way to utilize screen time that I’ve never encountered before.
Elsewhere Electric is an innovative asymmetric $25 Meta Quest title that assigns one player the role of wearing a VR headset to infiltrate a mysterious office, while a second cooperative player spends the entire session solving puzzles via a custom phone application of the same name.
These two participants collaborate in what can occasionally become a chaotic exchange, striving to decipher what you’re supposed to do, all while tackling intricate puzzles to progress to the next room.
The game radiates an atmosphere that I’ve seldom experienced outside the revered backrooms of Portal 2, where Cave Johnson’s narrative intertwines with buoyant moon physics goo. Similar to Portal, there’s no combat to be found here, yet the gadgets used make it equally thrilling, and the necessity for descriptive communication with your partner certainly evokes memories of when GLaDOS deceived me regarding cake.
Unleashing the potential
Titles like Split Fiction and It Takes Two have greatly popularized the “forced” co-op game sub-genre, but Elsewhere Electric takes a different route. Rather than playing on the same screen or even on the same platform, one player utilizes a smartphone app while the other is fully immersed through a Meta Quest headset.
Even though the VR player does “most” of the tasks, there are very few moments of downtime for the smartphone player. In VR, the game consistently starts in the desert just adjacent to the facility you are meant to enter. The player on the smartphone initiates the game by opening the van door for the VR player so they can charge their “power glove,” as I’ll refer to it.
While it somewhat resembles the NES Power Glove accessory, the glove you wear in VR contains a small amount of liquid electricity utilized to power the puzzles you encounter in the game. Once your glove is charged, you’ll turn around and proceed to the facility where the smartphone player will need to “hack” the elevator to send you below ground.
Most puzzles at the outset revolve around both players interpreting obscure symbols to activate some sort of station. The VR player observes each symbol at a station, while the smartphone player has multiple pages of symbols to reference. As the smartphone player never sees precisely what the VR player observes, it’s essential to cultivate your communication skills to correctly describe what you see.
Immediately, I noticed that most gamers I played this with were able to grasp how the game operates within minutes. The smartphone interface is the most challenging aspect to comprehend, since there’s no guidance on what to do. Exploring will uncover flashing icons that should be pressed from time to time, but this is never particularly clear.
I played the game with my son and a few other non-gamers, and they all expressed similar frustrations. Without my specific guidance on what to tap and where to navigate, they became annoyed enough to abandon the game before aiding me in solving more than a few puzzles. Developer Games by Stitch provides a helpful walkthrough for the initial floors in the YouTube video below, but it’s a lengthy video that could have been condensed to a few prompts in an introductory tutorial.
If you possess the patience to navigate through the first three or four floors, you’ll encounter one of the most remarkable co-op games I’ve ever experienced. The design of this game is entirely unique, in my view, and while it feels reminiscent at times, it never comes across as more than perhaps a tribute to something extraordinary.
The 1970s-style technology and decor scattered throughout the facility, along with the funky soundtrack, contribute to the already unusual and notably dense atmosphere. This setting feels unsettling yet somehow reassuring, akin to how the empty corridors of Severance feel on a pleasant office day.
That is, of course, until you encounter your first invisible adversary. Undoubtedly, the smartphone player will detect something unusual first, as a peculiar creature hiding behind the glass on the first floor remains invisible to the VR player. If the connections don’t come together by the second area of floor 2, your VR companion is at risk.
In this manner, Elsewhere Electric demands the patience akin to a game such as Dark Souls, as you’ll frequently die or fail in an area only to have to return and attempt it once more. Like any puzzle room game, you’ll navigate through the area more swiftly in subsequent tries. Thankfully, though, this isn’t rogue-like and you will never have to resolve the same room twice once you move beyond it. The elevator consistently takes you to the most recent floor.
I hesitate to divulge too many secrets of the game for fear of
