DON’T MOVE Review (PC VR)

“If only it were that simple,” I obnoxiously splurged. “As if I’d be able to clench my entire body and stand through an entire parade of abnormalities. What am I — a King’s Guard?” I wasn’t a King’s Guard; I was an idiot with a virtual reality headset glued to the temple and a grimaced expression of carelessness. Temper tantrum forgiving, that was all that DON’T MOVE asked of me — to keep perfectly still and mirror a crash test dummy whilst maintaining a rigid posture. It didn’t need me to do much more than that. But, weirdly, I almost wished that it would have requested more of me, for I was willing to give more effort to justify the price tag.

Standing still was a novelty—a comical endurance test, at that. But it didn’t take long for that to wear off. After ten minutes, in fact, I pretty much stopped and started to ponder the purpose of it all. I couldn’t figure it out. Strange, that.

DON’T MOVE isn’t a game that needs a formal review; it’s a game that we could, in all honesty, summarize in a few sentences. But I’ll bite. To give credit where it’s due, I will make an effort to delve a little deeper into the details and touch base on its dormant fixtures.

In case you’re unfamiliar with DON’T MOVE, then here’s what you need to know before taking to the stand: moving is bad, and stillness is good. The rest, as you can imagine, is irrelevant. It is, in short, a VR game about standing still and enduring whatever obstacles that barrel towards you like a bat out of hell, be it a swarm of spiders, a fleshy mannequin, or a ravenous shark. Is there more to it than that? Not really, no.

A Standing Ovation for Idling

I could spend the next five minutes reflecting on the mechanics and the concept as a whole, but honestly, it would be a bit of a wasted investment. I say that with love, because even though it does make an effort to fill its tank and corridors with all sorts of ominous dangers, the experience is, for lack of a better description, devoid of any real purpose other than to have its sentient dummies gawping at a null point whilst various scenes unfold. By scenes I mean, things that are prone to invoke a certain sense of fear—a corridor exfoliating a concerning amount of flood water; an army of oversized arachnids fleeting down a room at depressing speeds; and a tentacled foe who, for some reason, wishes only to wrap its slender legs around your neck.

The idea is simple. It’s so simple, in fact, that you don’t need to concern yourself with any important details before jumping in to don the headset. It is, if anything, an endurance sport—a “party” activity that primarily consists of maintaining a static position, and watching peculiar events take shape whilst the scene works up towards some form of anticlimactic curtain pull. That’s it. And yes, it is a video game—a rather barebones video game that doesn’t lean much on the usual trappings of a fundamental fantasy, no less. Yet we digress.

The No Flinching Rule

In DON’T MOVE, you don’t embody a human; you take to the rigid joints of a test dummy—a crash mat that’s more or less designed with the ability to remain consistently stable during various experiments. As said dummy, your mission is written in black and white: don’t flinch, no matter the situation — even if, say, it’s a distressing experience or one that’s been purposely built to make you feel uncomfortable. Like I said, there are sharks, tight spaces, spiders, and, for the sake of eliminating the need to sketch the entire catalog, a treasure trove of creatures and anomalies that are designed to derail your composure.

I’ll be honest, DON’T MOVE isn’t all that difficult. Sure enough, it does contain its tender moments, as well as branching points that require a lot of extra effort and psychological work. But the game itself is relatively straightforward, as are most of the things that flesh out its borders, including its visual effects, sound design, and chapter selection screen.

Suffice it to say that, DON’T MOVE is a novel idea. It is, with all due respect, a game that you could quite easily sit and enjoy for twenty minutes or so without feeling the urge to fling back to an alternate universe. But that’s just it, unfortunately. Like a lot of games that wear a gimmick like an iron cross, it almost loses that edge not long after making its formal debut. Is it fun? For a while, yes. But time, sadly, isn’t on its side.

Verdict

While DON’T MOVE doesn’t offer a great deal of interactive gameplay for you to enjoy, it does find comfort in its niche concept as an idler thriller. Is it a game that you’ll likely grow tired of after just a few hours? Absolutely. Is it a game that you would still choose to bring to a party to test the wits and patience of your closest friends? Eh — maybe, though I’d say that it largely depends on who you’re putting to the test, and whether or not they could care less about the idea of standing still to watch a shark stalking its prey. A bit of a hit and miss conundrum, that.

On the one hand, I could say that DON’T MOVE would be far better off with a few more scenarios to choose from, or that it would be thrice as good if it made the jump into a more competitive market. But on the other hand, I don’t think that this is a concept that needs any further revision; it’s a one-and-done sort of venture—a game that you would no doubt pick up to remediate the boredom and experience the once, and then ultimately forget about until something popped up to remind you about it several months later.

If you’ve a few dollars to spare and a room full of fairly competitive people to hack the gauntlet with, then sure, I’d say that DON’T MOVE might just scratch that collective itch. That being said, if you’re hoping to find more to this experience than it initially lets on, then I hate to say it, but it doesn’t contain anything more than what it openly reveals on its vanilla sleeve. Either way, if you love fidgeting, then you’ll hate DON’T MOVE. Take from that what you will.