Golem

Highwire Games’ Golem follows the tale of a child who uses magic to navigate the ruins of the Endless City. The actual combat, which is 1:1 with player reaction in terms of blocking and attacking, and movement look interesting. However, it’s the talent involved, namely former Bungie composer Martin O’Donnell and designer Jaime Griesemer along with former Valve artist Travis Brady, that has us interested. Golem has recently been delayed but we’re looking forward to how it turns out.

• 1. Development
• 2. Story
• 3. Gameplay
• 4. Characters

Development

Highwire games was founded in 2015 by numerous industry veterans such as Martin O’Donnell, Travis Brady, and Jaimie Griesemer. When it came time for the team to figure out what they were going to do once they had created Highwire, they realized that their biggest accomplishments and what they had the most fun with was when they would define something new, or a new platform, with examples given such as Halo: Combat Evolved and inFamous: Second Son as showcases for their respective systems.

The team’s taste for figuring out how to solve problems on new hardware led to their plans to work on a Virtual Reality title, which has been infamous for key problems such as how to tackle movement within VR without tacky trips.

The team wanted to find a solution to movement in VR that played to the immersive strengths of the platform, and was intuitive enough that a player would not need complicated tutorials.

Highwire worked specifically with Epic Seattle on optimizing the Unreal 4 Engine to get the game running and looking just right, in the service of both creating an immersive title as well as combatting motion sickness by allowing the game to run at a locked 90 frames per second in both eyes.

Golem is the result of all of their efforts in this space, utilizing subtle movements of the PlayStation move headset to facilitate movement. The game was introduced to the public with a concept trailer during PlayStation Experience in 2015, with little else revealed about the game since. Though exclusive to PlayStation VR and funded in part by Sony, Highwire Games will be self publishing.

Story

There’s very little to outline the story of Golem beyond the basic premise. The player is a young, bedridden boy who finds the power to control different golems and explore the world around him, as well as the larger outside world his body cannot explore. The boy, and the player sees through the eyes of the golems he builds and directs them as they explore different environments, from the boy’s room to an abandoned city as he grows in power and is able to create larger golems. There is a combat element but there is no information on how it ties into the story.

Gameplay

There are two known mechanics to Golem, exploration of the environment driven by the PlayStation VR Headset’s tracking and melee based combat which uses the PlayStation Move motion controllers against other golems.

As the central mechanic that Highwire games set out to nail, movement in Golem is supposed to be natural and intuitive. The player can lean and turn their head to control their movement in an approximation to real movement. By having the player move along with their character in the game, Highwire hoped to avoid motion sickness while providing a more natural movement method.

Combat in the game is driven by PlayStation Move motion controllers and sees the player swing their sword to combat other golems, with a focus on hitting their light-up weak points to damage them. Any growth to the combat or other systems have not been explored.

Characters

There is no information on characters within Golem available at present, only that the developers describe the bedridden boy that players control as “adventurous”. Please look forward to when Gamingbolt updates this wiki in the future.

Note: This wiki will be updated once we have more information about the game.

Sigh.

Sony devoted a significant portion of the PlayStation Experience keynote to PlayStation VR, its upcoming VR headset for the PS4. As it stands, games like Golem did a fairly okay job in convincing you to check the hardware out. Eagle Flight didn’t look terrible and Rez Infinite is, well, Rez in VR. So that counts for something positive.

Unfortunately, Sony also chose this as the right time to shovel other VR offerings on to the masses, regardless of their quality. Job Simulator isn’t the first game we think of when wanting to experience VR; 100 Ft Robot Golf seems like a joke that would stop getting funny awfully fast; and the Modern Zombie Taxi Co…really, do you need any more evidence that SCE Santa Monica has followed Rare’s career trajectory and completely lost its way? Now we can await the eagerly anticipated Santa Monica Replay to relive the glory days of the God of War developer.

But I digress. What did you think of Sony’s VR offerings? Let us know in the comments below.