One has me navigating a club with security cameras that’ll kick me out if I’m not partying near them. Some clever gameplay twists make Avore’s fictional Atari games fun in their own right too. It’s so authentic and immersive that I quite literally get a jump scare the first time a coworker walks over to my desk - for a second, I genuinely thought a stranger had walked into my apartment. Like previous games that have used a similar formula, it’s an ingenious juggling act that feels true to life. As I try to play through original 2D adventure games by using a perfect recreation of the Atari 2600’s joystick, I need to pause to answer a constantly ringing phone, stamp contracts, and deal with chatty colleagues. Of the two halves, the Bug sections are the standouts here, which largely see the developer testing games at her desk on a small monitor while coworkers distract her. It’s a clever narrative trick that has players jumping between an authentic recreation of an Atari office and a 3D adaptation of 2600’s worlds. Their goals align, as changes Dot makes in her world help debug issues in Bug’s games. Through video game magic, Dot syncs up with Bug. It tells two intersecting stories: One is the tale of a digital hero named Dot fighting a war against a cyber goblin inside a digital world, and the other is that of a workaholic game developer named Bug working at Atari. Throwback eraįollowing up the success of the excellent Pixel Ripped 1995, the 70s-themes threequel expands on developer Arvore’s winning formula.

More than previous entries in the series, Pixel Ripped 1978 finds itself at the intersection of sincere reverence for video game history and accidental propaganda. Honest moments like that make the third entry of the standout VR series another easy charmer, though not all of its historical representation feels quite so genuine. My PlayStation VR2 became a literal time machine as I played rounds of Breakout on Atari’s classic Video Pinball console, all while my digital older brother rudely blocked the screen. So I couldn’t help but feel a warm nostalgia wash over me when I found myself sitting in an authentic simulation of almost that exact experience in Pixel Ripped 1978.

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