Crazy Oculus Game Has One Player Defuse A Bomb While Everyone Else Shouts Instructions

Aaaand in this weekend’s edition of “Crazy Games Made Possible By Virtual Reality”: here’s Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

The premise: you and everyone in the room are part of a bomb disposal team. You’ve found a bomb that is already ticking down, and you’re preparing to defuse it… but you need help.

One player, wearing an Oculus Rift, is responsible for interacting with the bomb. By bringing a Razer Hydra controller into the mix, the Oculus-wearing player is able to bring their hands into the game to emulate things like cutting wires, pushing buttons, and manipulating the bomb.

The catch? There’s no one way to defuse every bomb. The series of steps you need to follow (Cut the blue wire! Punch in “1987” on the keypad!) changes with each playthrough — and that’s where everyone else comes in.

Everyone not wearing a headset is responsible for tearing through a complicated manual full of instructions, and helping the headset-wearing player figure out what to do next. Does the bomb’s serial number end with an odd number? That means you have to cut a certain wire first. But wait! Is there an equal number of red and blue wires? That changes everything.

As the counter approaches zero, everyone gets…a little more shouty.

Is it something you’d want to play over and over again? Eh, maybe not. But it looks like a damned fun thing to play in a big group, and a solid way to introduce people to the crazy things possible in VR — and in the early days of this new wave of VR, those are going to be the games that sell headsets.

This game was built as part of a gamejam back at the end of January, and the team released the (Unity-based) project files on GitHub — you can find those here. While the team has been a bit quiet since, they were still working on it and demoing it at conferences as recently as the end of last month.

If you want more information if/when this game moves forward, they’ve got a signup page right over here.