Polybius is a "ludic psychedelia" game for PlayStation VR based on an urban legend
Space Giraffe developer and Llamasoft founder Jeff Minter is bringing an urban legend to life with a new PlayStation VR game.
The game is named after the fictional Polybius arcade game, which supposedly caused psychological effects, seizures, amnesia, and men in black suits to show up at your door. Like the urban legend, the VR game from Minter has a ludic psychedelia feel to it.
On the PlayStation Blog, Minter said the game is based on him being brought to a "dingy-looking warehouse" to play an arcade game hidden beneath a sheet. He goes on to describe his experience playing the game saying it had the unfortunate side-effect of causing temporary amnesia and anxiety. Basically, he's trying to keep the urban legend alive with his story. Whether it actually happened or he's great story teller remains to be seen.
Anyway, Minter goes on to say that thanks to VR he is now able to re-capture the feelings he felt when playing the mysterious game in that dingy old warehouse so very long ago.
"I've been dabbling in ludic psychedelia for a while now, and maybe the time and the medium was right now for me to attempt a game to at least in part replicate the effects, if not the exact gameplay, of that old legend," he said. "Leaving out all the bad stuff, of course."
"We began building a framework within which to create such a thing. To accurately convey the sensation of speed-rush that so strongly permeated the original game it was necessary to build an engine that could deliver everything we needed at 120 FPS without possibility of frame drops, and at a very high internal resolution."
You should give the entire PS Blog entry a read, because there is a lot to comb through.
A release date for Polybius wasn't provided on the PS Blog post, but if you're heading to the Play Expo in Manchester this weekend, you can try it out for yourself.