How a Virtual-Reality Skeptic Made the First Great Oculus Game

Wong is wearing a black hoodie, black trousers, black sneakers, black ear studs, and, in his black hair, pink dye. As a video game designer, Wong knows that the history of virtual reality has been one epic attempt to traverse the uncanny valley—to create worlds so convincing the gamer believes she’s really in, say, outer space, or Versailles, and not sitting on her couch with a thousand dollars of electronics attached to her face. So when Oculus, the VR division of Facebook, invited the company where Wong worked to make a game to coincide with the release of the Samsung Gear VR headset, he mostly sat out the project.

At the time, in May 2014, Wong was best known for his work as the lead designer on Monument Valley, a puzzle app of gemlike construction and impossible geometry. It won the Apple Design Award and iPad Game of the Year honors for Wong’s company, Ustwo, a digital design firm with offices in London, New York, Malmo, and Sydney. While Wong tended to side projects throughout 2014, his colleagues’ progress on the Oculus commission began to stall. Ustwo’s prototype, a game called Land’s End, was another maze set in a stark landscape, but it lacked Monument Valley’s sense of beauty and designed isolation. “The environments didn’t feel like they were telling a story,” says Dan Gray, the studio head of Ustwo Games. The team had technical talent, but no art director. “There wasn’t a voice on the team saying, ‘You’re going to encounter this beautiful moment, and here’s how we’re going to convey it,’ ” says Wong.

One day in January 2015, at Wong’s urging, the staff voted to kill the project. Ten minutes later, the designer reconsidered and asked the group to put him in charge of a salvage effort. (“We’re still figuring out how democracy works on creative teams,” says Wong. “It doesn’t,” says Gray.) Wong decided to retain Land’s End’s look and setting, an island with radiant energy and mysterious monoliths, as well as its core mechanic for motion. After strapping on a VR headset and earphones, blocking out all real-world light and sound, you never use your hands again. To move around the island, you simply look at a pulsing white dot in the distance and are slowly conveyed there, as if by tractor beam. But Wong was unsentimental about ditching what didn’t work, and in the end, at least 20 entire levels were discarded.

The process started him thinking about how game design is different in the realm of virtual reality. “Everything that you do in a video game, it feels stronger in VR,” says Wong. Waterfalls are waterfall-ier; a tower that reveals more of itself as you crane your neck skyward, feeling your vertebrae go crick, looms all the more ominously. Wong learned that he needed to moderate the game’s balance between realism and believability. Originally, he says, “we had way more fantastical levels, with floating chunks of rock in the air. But it actually was worse, because it just felt like you were in a computer game. We don’t want to remind you of that. We want to fool you just enough that you’re like, ‘Oh, this is real, but it’s the most fantastical real I’ve ever seen.’ ”

Maps were refined. “We found that people have a much poorer sense of space in VR than they do in real life,” Wong says. Since players’ bodies aren’t actually moving in reality, Wong theorizes that they’re not logging certain physiological clues. The rejuvenated Land’s End team reduced how much backtracking and free exploration were allowed while adding more landmarks and elements of “planned memorableness” to aid the easily lost. They fine-tuned colors and rates of acceleration to reduce the odds of motion sickness. The game shrank to a tight five levels, playable in about 45 minutes

The final major element Wong’s team introduced was one of the most striking: a new way to pick up and move monoliths in order to solve puzzles. Initially, the henges slid up and down, left and right, on a rigid geometry recognizable to players of Monument Valley. In the new method, players can levitate the stones just by fixing their gaze and turning their heads. The resulting mechanic, with a convincing inertial sway, feels like you're operating a Star Wars-like Force.

Ustwo released Land’s End in November 2015, more than a year after its original intended ship date, and it’s received glowing, thoughtful reviews. Whatever Wong does next, he says, it won’t be for Ustwo—and it won’t be in virtual reality. He left the company in February to start his own independent game studio, in his native Australia, and intends to work on something new in Melbourne. “I like life as a sample box of chocolates,” Wong says. “You get a little bit of everything. I’ve done PC, I’ve done console, I’ve done mobile, I’ve done episodic. I’ve had my taste of VR. I’m really happy with what I did. And I want to go and have another adventure now.”