Hubris is an undeniably beautiful VR adventure but it’s also very broken right now

Playing Hubris for this week’s episode of VR Corner (above) was nothing short of an emotional rollercoaster for me.

I quickly fell in love with this brand new VR survival adventure game thanks to its incredibly beautiful visuals and simple-to-grasp yet satisfyingly speedy movement schemes. Oh, and also the weirdly penis-y rope-bridge things that made me laugh until I cried. But then, after about 40 minutes of gameplay (roughly 18 minutes into the video), everything began to fall apart.

There’s a point in the game where you go from a linear action/puzzler experience to a crafting/survival section and it was here that the cracks in the game’s previously flawless facade started to show. First, an important part of the level geometry was bugged out and broken making crucial item discovery very hard. Then an enemy spawned in a position it shouldn’t have, which proceeded to kill me and rob me of 15 minutes worth of dull item scavenging.

This was followed by lines of dialogue appearing at the wrong time before finally, I was hit by one of the worst, most mind-boggling glitches I’ve ever experienced in a video game. Honestly, I’m rarely speechless but this game absolutely ruined me, and you can see the game (and my sanity) slowly unravel in this week’s VR Corner.

Here’s hoping there’s a patch for the game soon as I’m not the only VR content creator out there to have experienced issues, but until there is, I’m steering clear.

Unfortunately it’s not all sunshine and roses when the game does work either. The gorgeous visuals of the games’ opening section are soon replaced by standard, gloomy, sci-fi corridor interiors, and this robs the game of its ‘wow’ factor quite significantly. I’ve not played past the part where the game completely screwed me yet, but I could easily imagine that the jaw-dropping views from the first 10 minutes are just a case of smoke and mirrors and not a delicious hint at a larger, open world to explore later in the game.

The core gameplay can be rather simplistic and repetitive too, with big pacing issues appearing due to forced scavenger hunts and lenghty periods where you have to stand around and listen to other people talk. The gunplay is lacking too, with weapons feeling sluggish and weightless and there’s little impact to your attacks. I counted around six different enemies types in the two hours I played for, which is a good number, but the majority of these acted like mindless homing missiles while the few humanoid enemies I did fight seemed to be devoid of all but the most basic of AI.

I was really excited to try out Hubris based on the trailers I’d seen for the game so I can’t help feeling a little bit cheated by the final result. It really is a shame because there’s a lot of potential here for a great action adventure game, or even just a semi-decent one if all the bugs can be ironed out. Sadly though, at the time of writing this piece (Dec 7th, the game’s launch day), it feels like beauty truly is only skin deep when it comes to Hubris.