If you were going to make a game, what would you make? Would you make a sprawling world, full of life? Would you craft a meaningful story? Would you try and get the player's heart racing with electric gameplay?
Whatever you would do, it's always good to start with the basics.

That's what BONEWORKS is.

We all always knew that VR would have teething issues - it was a niche, fledgling technology that nobody really knew what to do with upon it's conception. To simply create a game at all is impressive, and many developers did just that. Early VR was a shambolic time; interaction with the worlds creative minds conceived was limited and often borked back then, and even to this day is pretty common: "rough around the edges", "awkward", and crucially, "prescriptive".
It's this problem, "prescriptivity", that was at the core of VR's early issues with player interaction. I want you to call back to other, perhaps older, VR titles like Arizona Sunshine and remember how you did a lot of things. To push a button, you might first highlight the button by pointing at it, push your A button, and watch the button press itself in-game. This is the problem I describe in action and it is almost antithetical to what VR stands for. VR promised to do away with the so-called 'window into another world' style of play and immerse you completely. The player-game boundary was promised to leak away into nothing. Yet, by creating a game that has these awkward interactions such that a player isn't physically interacting with the world, you are emphasising the very thing that making a VR game sought to nullify. This is something even Half-Life: Alyx sometimes gets wrong! The priorities are all wrong, the fundamentals are ordered bizarrely; it's all squiffy - dissonant, even. The basics, the very axiomatic platform of the early games, were not perfected.

Stress Level Zero recognised this, and rectified it. BONEWORKS got the basics right. It is no grand tragedy (although the plot raises some topics and themes that beget deeper analysis despite this), it is not a complex game, nor is it a sensory spectacle - but it is immersive. It has well thought out interaction. The player-game boundary is minimised as much as possible. It is descriptive, not prescriptive. The physics based engine is a perfect fit for VR gameplay as it allows the player to directly interact with every part of the world as you would if it were real. It's a coming of age for VR as a gaming platform, as it finally delivers upon what VR was promised to be. Because of this, BONEWORKS is a very refreshing experience, and one that I couldn't really put down once I had started, motion sickness and mental dissociation be damned.

BONEWORKS is, if you'll excuse the pun, oftentimes barebones, despite the developers' ongoing additions to the post-game (which are all excellent). Puzzles are little more than a time-waster and the final boss is downright daft, albeit entertaining. This game was never meant to be anything more though; it didn't need to be. All it needed was its physics sandbox.

And with that, it revolutionised VR.