The Journal, Page 97:
Erase All Of Reality, It Will Only Bring Us Pain
– VirtuaVerse

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PUBLISHED ON: April 25th 2024

Written By:

Blisscast

Edited By:

EmeraldDM8

⚠️ Spoiler Warning & Disclaimer ⚠️
Please keep in mind that this blog might contain spoilers for the themes in VirtuaVerse. Whilst these spoilers are not exactly harmful, they can potentially hinder your enjoyment of the story, so please ensure that you’re absolutely certain that you’re okay with this before continuing.

Hello everyone, and welcome back! We are sorry for what happened with the previous Page, but some technical difficulties (~~absolutely not because I had to rewrite bits and pieces of it~~) prevented us from being able to post it in time; hopefully, we’ll now be able to reach Page 100 with no more hiccups! 🥳

Before we dive into our usual business, I’d like to remind you that the latest entry in the GUI Wonderland series, Episode #2 about the Xerox Star and the Xerox Daybreak, has just been released here on the site; if you are interested in it, I recommend that you check it out here!

Talking about my week, I’ve managed to finish VirtuaVerse, and I’m now making a lot of progress in Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth; I feel they have massively improved the gameplay compared to the previous entry, which makes sense as it was the first one to be a JRPG instead of an ARPG; while I can’t say much yet, this all once again proves that Yakuza / Like a Dragon is a wonderful franchise, so please, check it out if you haven’t already; ~~and if you want a guide to know where to start, have a look at our handy Journal Page~~ ~~here~~~~, and let’s destroy the sad myth that says that no one ever looks at the Yakuza Pages on this site~~.

Moving on, I’ve also started collecting a few (~~ok, maybe not just “a few”, but saying it makes me feel less guilty~~) books that will help me in writing my GUI Wonderland series as, unexpectedly, it’s making me read a lot and it has made me realize that the books about what I love do exist, but they’re just quite well hidden.

Well, let’s leave everything aside now, as it’s time to dive into…

VirtuaVerse

This is a cyberpunk-themed old-school point-and-click adventure game developed by the (mostly) Italian group called Theta Division (its coding was done by Alessio Cosenza/Elder0010, its soundtrack by Vittorio d’Amore/Master Boot Record, and its pixel art by Ralph Meidl/Valenberg), which was released at first only for Windows (Steam and GOG), macOS, and Linux in 2020, then was also released on Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in 2021. As always, I played this game on my Steam Deck, where it’s both Verified and available natively (I’m not sure which version it installs, just know that it works perfectly).

Required Information:

Point-and-click game: A type of game in which you solve puzzles by using your cursor in order to interact with whatever is on the screen, picking up various items and using them for a certain purpose, usually for either finding information or advancing the storyline. We already covered one of these, Phantasmagoria, back in Page 26.

VirtuaVerse is set in a distant, dystopic future, where humanity depends on a groundbreaking technology called Augmented Virtual Reality; it is a hybrid between Augmented Reality, which displays holograms over your vision, and Virtual Reality, which allows you to enter new and exciting worlds, that are often very different from the outside world, through a computer and it lets you “feel them”. By using this technology, every place in the world has been “augmented”, and it now has features (which can even be entirely new and “tangible” objects!) that are only accessible using either an AVR headset or a special chip called “Permanent Reality”, a variant that is permanently installed in your brain and can’t be turned off; similarly to our current technology, everyone makes use of this new augmented reality, and it is such an important requirement for everyday life that it is heavily advertised and recommended for people to get their Permanent Reality chip installed. As a result, theoretically, if everyone were to install the Permanent Reality chip, the “old” reality would stop being perceived as existent, and it would almost be as if people left Earth behind and began to live in another world!

Moving on to the story, as soon as we start the game, we find ourselves in a dark flat, where our protagonist, Nathan, lives with his girlfriend, Joy; it would be yet another normal day for Nathan, though he suddenly notices that Joy has unexpectedly vanished, with the only clue of that having happened taking the form of a message written on their bathroom mirror. Thus, Nathan sets out on an adventure to find Joy, as he’s worried about her well-being; what Nathan doesn’t know is that, soon enough, he will get involved in a perilous quest to save people from nothing other than Permanent Reality itself! Will they make it? Or will they die trying?

Something that admittedly fascinated me about this story is that Nathan himself is not only someone who is against Permanent Reality (as he feels it is invasive to everyone’s privacy, and will alienate people), but he is also heavily interested in vintage technology and everything that relates to it in some way; as a fellow fan of this topic, I can’t help but feel a kinship with Nathan and his love for a technology that isn’t in use anymore. Plus, as a particularly young fan of retro technology (I’m in my early twenties), I constantly see the world around me moving on from what used to be new and exciting, and slowly forgetting and refusing to acknowledge all the things that aren’t new anymore, with several having already been completely left behind; while I do see and feel the excitement of future technological advancements, it saddens me how people are perfectly fine to relinquish all the wonders of the past without a single thought. Thus, seeing how Nathan, a person of the future who hasn’t “lived” in the age of floppy disks, personal computers, VHS, and video game consoles, can enjoy and respect them as if they were still in use, makes me feel like I’m not the only one.

This one I described is, ultimately, the feeling that accompanied me through the whole adventure; in fact, Nathan will often make use of this vintage technology to aid his quest because, as he says, media that is fully disconnected from the outside is the safest means to exchange information (I know that Internet communications are getting safer and safer, but when you have to save the world, you can never be so sure). As a result, you’ll be tasked with making various of these technologies work, such as computers with floppy disk drives or televisions with VHS players; regarding this aspect, something that makes it even more fascinating is that the game expects you to know how they work, making you feel like you’re one of Nathan’s group (or confusing you if you’re too young to know about them). While it isn’t anything too complicated, I feel that this is one of the several touches that make this game feel special.

Interesting Trivia:

One of the various devices you’ll use is a Master Glove Ultra, which is actually a reference to a project that Alessio Cosenza, the programmer, was working on just before starting VirtuaVerse!

Leaving the retro technology aspect aside for a bit, something else I particularly enjoyed about VirtuaVerse is its proficient use of the concepts of both Virtual and Augmented Reality; I find them to be utterly fascinating, and I thought it was particularly intriguing to see a world where they’re used so much that they eventually overlap reality itself, making you perceive distorted images as authentic. It’s truly as if you were constantly living in a distorted dream; you see places you consider real, though there is something off about them, and if you have the chip, you can’t even “wake up”! Imagine if you were walking down the street where your house is, and suddenly a road connected to it gets blocked off by a bizarre wall that wasn’t there before; maybe you’d just walk away and stop looking at it. Even so, if you removed your headset, you’d notice that the wall wasn’t even there to begin with, and that you can normally pass through it, as if the wall was never present; can you see how this can be both extremely terrifying and fascinating at the same time? Or maybe, your reality could be destroyed by a war, global warming, or simply the cruel passage of time, and you’d never know, because you’re living in a safe collective dream that will never decay. Thus, in a world where nothing is as it should be, we’ll slowly uncover the unexpected truth about these phenomena, and I assure you that it will be far different from what you expect.

Briefly talking about Nathan again, the game isn’t afraid to make you “ruin” someone else’s life in order to achieve what you want, which is honestly both unsettling (as we’re supposed to save the world) and still perfectly in line with the Cyberpunk themes (where even heroes are actually anti-heroes, and don’t really follow morals anymore); as a result, I feel it was the perfect choice for this game, and it makes the protagonist more unique and interesting to play as.

Moving on, let’s finally talk about its gameplay; as we anticipated before, this is an old-school point-and-click game, and as such, it plays just like those titles, with all their pros and cons. In fact, point-and-click games are almost all about the mystery-solving aspect, and will heavily test your wit and patience; sometimes, the answer will be easy to reach, while most of the other times it will be far from that, and you’ll have to act smart to obtain what you seek. Personally, I’m terrible at puzzles, in the sense that I can solve the ones that aren’t too far-fetched, but I struggle at the ones that seem outright disconnected from what they’re trying to achieve; unfortunately, this game is quite hard, and you’ll often have to do completely unrelated things in order to progress, and as someone put it in a Steam review I read, it’s easy to get “bottlenecked” (basically, one little thing stops you from progressing). Thus, I recommend you either use a walkthrough (like I did), or you can try the game’s Easy Mode (which apparently cuts some content, so I figured I should rather try the full version). Why is the game so hard, you might be asking? Well, it’s mostly because the game was purposely made for whoever enjoyed this kind of game when they were being released, and as such, is already used to how it all works; while they weren’t all difficult, some definitely were, and this game is meant to be similar to those specific ones. Thus, even its difficulty adds up to the aesthetic this title is going for, and it might certainly end up making people divisive about it; even so, some of these outright related things end up being extremely funny (without spoiling anything, my favorite was one related to an Internet Cafè), so they definitely end up adding both charm and comic-relief moments to the game.

Let’s now talk about all the other aspects that make this game unforgettable; first of all, VirtuaVerse is entirely in pixel art, and looks like it was made in the time period it wants to remind people of. I found this art to be extremely well-made and rich in details, and as a result, the entire world feels alive, and you would be brought to believe that people do actually live their everyday lives in that place. Plus, I think this kind of visual presentation does wonders for its cyberpunk setting, as it feels both vintage and futuristic at the same time, just like cyberpunk is (at least in its more “classic” and 80s-infused form); as a fan of this aesthetic, I can’t help but love how amazing it all looks (if you also enjoy neon-lit pixel art games, look no further than my beloved Narita Boy, covered in Page 12)!

Other than its art, what makes this game shine is its marvelous soundtrack; I admit it’s one of the reasons why I wanted to try it (similarly to what happened with Narita Boy), because this music is both chiptune and retro-infused, full of synths and sounds that remind you of a time long gone, where technology was even more new and exciting than it is now. Plus, it all perfectly compliments the game, and it’s such a crucial part of the atmosphere that VirtuaVerse wouldn’t be the same without it; I truly loved it so much that I had to buy it on Bandcamp as well (only to then find out I already had it on Steam, but it’s all money that hopefully helps the developers and the artist, so it’s okay). My personal favorite songs are the titular VirtuaVerse and Xenon, though I feel they are all wonderful and worthy of a listen; I’m certain I’ll listen to them so much that (just like what happened last year with Narita Boy’s Salvinsky) I bet my last.fm will definitely think my favorite artist is Master Boot Record (and no, I’m not joking, it’s ~~that~~ ~~good!)~~. My rainbows for it aside, it’s a really amazing example of its genre, so if you are a fan, I’d recommend you give it a listen.

Thus, should you play this game? … Wasn’t it already obvious enough…? Of course! Just keep its difficulty in mind (although you can easily deal with it like I did) and you’ll be in for a fantastic adventure that will make you think about the world you live in. A warning though, you might develop a desire to put a floppy disk drive into your PC, or to build an entire retro PC from scratch if you didn’t already have one, and we of the Blisscast Journal are not to be considered responsible for this, so we advise the maximum discretion in using this product.

Thanks for reading, and I hope I’ll see you in next Thursday’s Page, or anywhere around the site!

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