I Expect You to Die is an escape room puzzle game where you play as a secret agent tasked with escaping increasingly difficult situations.
The game’s graphics are quite good, the characters and environments look nice and detailed, just like in other VR games that use realistic graphics. The physics feel accurate, again just like other VR games that aim for realism.
For a VR game, I was surprised to see that the draw distance seemed quite high. In my playthrough, if any object could be seen from where I stood from a platform or area, it was rendered perfectly fine from that far away. This is good quality not just because you can see more in your current play space without having to move towards it, but also because you can see how far away items are from each other and plan accordingly.
The controls work quite well, using a teleportation mechanic where by looking at an area with your controller, holding the grip button then choosing a point to teleport to that they will snap into. Removing any of these steps would make for a very frustrating experience.
As a puzzle game, the puzzles start simple and get more difficult as you progress. They do a good job of introducing a new idea or concept before moving on to a combination of old ideas and new ideas. This lets you learn each new thing at your own pace instead of bombarding you with information all at once. The game is divided into “levels” and each level has a set of objectives to complete in order to get the final objective (which is where you escape through the teleporter)
Many levels also contain objects that cannot be interacted with until you find an item in another room. This encourages exploration and lets you test theories on how to use certain objects before you are actually required to.
The game’s difficulty curve is not very well implemented, however. I found that the first few levels were too easy to complete within a minute or two, while some of the later levels took me over an hour. This made it hard for me to see any meaningful progress as sometimes you would be stuck on one level for a very long time.
The sound design also leaves a lot to be desired, with many actions or events being represented by the same sounds or lack thereof. This makes it hard to judge how close you are getting to completing an objective, as well as making it harder for your mind to attach sounds to things in order for them to make sense. Item pickups are also very hard to hear, as they just play a quiet sound effect and the items themselves do not make noise.
Finally, I personally found that you can only teleport one square away from where you’re looking, which makes it difficult to plan some jumps and instils a sense of unfairness when moving about. Teleporting onto another square away could have you retain the same advantages while making it fairer for players.
The game has many hours of content, but because of its inconsistency in difficulty and audio design, I’d recommend waiting until either a sale or two free weekends happen before deciding if you want to buy it.