Completing a drug-fuelled Escape Room is fun if done safely, as in Dark Trip

Art, in its most basic definition, has to be something that generates a feeling and, subsequently, a debate. It has to awaken something within us and encourage us to reflect on an idea. Cinema, literature, painting, music... all these artistic manifestations are what they are because of what they provoke in the receiver. In video games it happens in a similar way, although not all video games always seek this artistic exposure. Fortunately, for the medium, there are always authors who opt for unconventional ideas that can generate a curious debate. This is the case of the game Dark Trip, which we found at DevGAMM in Gdańsk, and event supported by InvestGDA, and which won the Game Roast award as the best of the event.

Dark Trip is a rather atypical VR puzzle-solving game, because the main hook of the game is that we have to complete an Escape Room using (or not) psychedelic drugs along the way, with very different effects. To get a good explanation of how it works, we spoke to the game's producer, Aleksander Nasonov, in an interview which you can watch below with English subtitles.

In particular, we were interested in the main reason why the team decided on this project, and the answer has a lot to do with the above definition of art and a sincere homage to the artists. "From an artistic perspective, from the director of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is Terry Gilliam, and also the whole room of our game is dedicated to the Tideland movie, about a girl and her drug addiction (...) And from a business point of view, we had to decide where we have to go when we make an Escape Room game, of which there are many, and we wanted to do something unique."

"Rest in peace, David Lynch (...) We're trying to uphold his banner, and that's how we act. So drugs, psychedelics, hallucinations, are something oppressive in the vast majority of art, while games are the part of the creative industry, so we had to choose our path, and we chose this path".

Their depiction of drugs are realised solely through pills called Denpa, inspired in part by Dr. Mengele's experiments in World War II. But they are not a prerequisite for completing the game. In fact, you can choose to go through all of Dark Trip sober.

"It's a mysterious Escape Room, and when you go through it, when you complete the game sober, you miss out on the evidence that can be found when you're hallucinating. As [the player] goes through the game, you lose the understanding of what is reality and what is hallucination, and in terms of metagame and replayability, once you complete the game sober or stoned, you only find half of the evidence, and that means you have to complete the game at least one more time to get all the clues, all the pictures, all the notebooks to understand what's going on."

Dark Trip is available in Early Access through the Meta Quest Store for Quest 2, Quest 3 and Quest 3 systems.