Xperiment VR – Virtual Reality Lounge Review May 18, 2025
Posted by Maniac in Reviews.add a comment
I’ve become a Virtual Reality gamer over the past few years and have expanded my personal gaming tastes to include VR platforms such as the Meta Quest 3 and Vision Pro. However, I admit not everyone is as lucky as I am to have access to the newest and best gaming tech on the market, and even I admit there are some new games and applications I would like the chance to try out in person before deciding if I wanted to purchase it. Imagine my surprise to discover a new VR Lounge opened in my area called Xperiment VR and as you’d expect I was pretty interested in checking it out.
TECHNOLOGY, GAMES AND PRICES
The venue charged $49 US per person per hour. During your hour, you could use the equipment to play whichever VR games you wanted they had to offer. The HTC Vive headsets used by the store were connected to gaming PCs and clearly had access to Steam VR’s catalog. Because of that, if we wanted to, we could play many popular PCVR games including Creed. This is actually a nice addition, as I admit not a lot of gamers have made the plunge into VR just yet, and twenty years ago, it was not uncommon to preview and demo a LAN Center.
The venue also had a snack bar which sold t-shirts on top of various candies and sodas. I was disappointed their fridge just happened to be missing my definitive gaming soda, Bawls!
GAMEPLAY
Players who are not playing a driving simulator are assigned their own squared off space on the gaming floor. Xperiment VR has access to exclusive games that aren’t sold on existing VR platforms, and since I already had many of the games they offered on my personal Quest 3, we decided to play one of their exclusive Virtual Escape Rooms. For our first ever game, my wife and I chose to play a game simply known as Cyberpunk, and just like with traditional escape rooms, there was a one hour time limit for players to complete it that could not be extended.
Due to each player being assigned a predesignated square, we were not able to interact with each other, and our headsets did a pretty good job warning us if we were at risk of leaving our space or tangling ourselves up in any wires. Before we began, my wife and I were notified that the game would have a HARD difficulty, and that the venue host had seen teams made up of the maximum six players fail to complete it. Our game was set up similar to a network multiplayer game, where we spawned into a shared game space and moved our players around with just our controllers. The VR games we played had a point-to-point movement, in that you moved by choosing a space on the ground and teleporting to it. I will not spoil any aspects of the game in this review, but I can confirm the difficulty of the escape room matched the expectations impressed upon me by the technician. Regardless, my wife and I were able to successfully complete the game with nine minutes to spare.
We later attempted a second game, with a third friend. This time, we chose to play an escape game based upon Alice in Wonderland, titled Alice.
Both my wife and our friend were enormous fans of the original book, and leaped at the chance to enter Wonderland, even if it was just a virtual experience. We were notified the game was a bit easier than Cyberpunk, but still carried a high difficulty marker. Our friend had no VR experience, but she was VERY impressed by the game’s visuals, and enjoyed just chilling out in Wonderland while my wife and I worked our way through each setpiece. We were able to win this game as well, my wife was instrumental at solving one of the puzzles in the middle of the game, and I was able to defeat the final boss in just under the time limit.
Honestly, if these games were available on Quest or SteamVR I would probably buy them in a second, but since they were cooperative multiplayer focused, it made a lot of sense to host them at a venue like Xperiment VR, as you would need to set up multiple VR headsets, multiple gaming PCs, and have enough open space in your home to handle all the players moving around safely without colliding with each other. In the case of both games, my peers and I left the venue with our heads held high and tons of stories and tips we wanted to share about our experience!
CONCLUSION
Today’s VR lounges remind me more of the LAN Gaming Cafes I frequented in the mid 2000s, and that’s a really good thing. In both instances, the experiences are relatively close. It’s also a SOCIAL location, where VR gamers can hang out with their friends and meet other people interested in the hobby. You buy time on a machine, in this case, an hour per person, and in that hour you’re able to try out software or hardware that you wouldn’t normally have access to. All of that can be applied to Xperiment VR, Personally, I think the price per hour is just a little steep to make a trip to play more frequently than a special occasions. They do currently offer a date nite discount for two people on Fridays and Saturdays, but if they lowered their individual player price per hour, I would check it out more frequently. For now I consider it as a once in a while treat, and there is nothing wrong with that. In any case, Xperiment VR is a business I’m happy to have in my area!
Did Cyberpunk Return to Mainstream? May 18, 2025
Posted by Maniac in Editorials.add a comment
R. Talsorian Games, the publishers of the Tabletop Role Playing Game (TTRPG) Cyberpunk RED, which the video game Cyberpunk 2077 is based upon, were offering the Cyberpunk RED Core Rulebook (CR3001) and their Black Chrome expansion books on a discounted sale as part of a Spring 2025 promotion. The event was meant to take place over the course of several days, and RTG had high hopes they could make decent sales even at the offered discount. They quickly discovered the demand for their books were so high that all copies of BOTH books sold out in the first day. I’m not kidding, a PUBLISHER, which (theoretically) would have the largest stock of their books, sold EVERY copy of their book that they had in stock. Does this mean that a growing number of gamers are discovering (or rekindling) their interest in the Cyberpunk genre? Does that mean Cyberpunk is back?
I personally remember a time when characters wearing black leather trenchcoats, sunglasses, and a computer the size of your forearm was practically on the cover of every video game, comic book, and direct-to-video film. The Cyberpunk genre, originally created by author William Gibson for his legendary book Neuromancer, expected a future where corporations would take over but humans would find freedom interacting within advanced virtual computer systems, and the smartest among us would become the most capable of navigating the dangerous digital airwaves of the information superhighway. Some of the earliest Japanese anime to be imported to the west drew inspiration from it, including legendary films like Akira and Ghost in the Shell. It all culminated in the incredible 1999 film The Matrix. In that film, we learn that we are all living in a simulation, but our mental awareness of that simulation could grant us the power to break its rules and free humanity from their digital enslavement. After the release of the Matrix sequels in the early 00s, Cyberpunk got eclipsed when other genres such as Steampunk started to gain popularity by the late 00s to early 10s and games like Bioshock released to major critical fanfare. By 2012, new popular games were no longer embracing the cyberpunk style, and the future we saw depicted in major games looked more like the past.
I have been noticing over the past few months two major factors have been known: The first is that there was a huge interest in Cyberpunk media following the release of Cyberpunk 2077’s 2.1 update, and its Phantom Liberty expansion. Most people credit the release of this update and its expansion as the start of the time to finally give the game a look. The second was the 2022 release of the incredible Netflix miniseries Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, which I would recommend ALL Netflix subscribers check out (and for non-Netflix people, a Blu-Ray Disc release for it is coming later this year). All of these projects have been critical and commercial successes and, in my opinion, that success has seen a demand for more media to be released for the genre.Personally, I felt that playing the game and watching the show made me NEED MORE CYBERPUNK in my life. And now it looks like it is happening.
The year is now 2025, and not only is Cyberpunk back, it appears that the pieces are in place to literally CREATE an actual Cyberpunk world! I wasn’t able to get my first PC until I was twelve, and while I was the only person in my family who was capable of using it properly, I had to share that computer with my family. Nowadays it’s impossible to find any someone of ANY age who does not at least possess a personal smartphone or tablet capable of internet access, interpersonal communication, media consumption, and video gaming…and with ten years of experience they know how to use it. We also have Virtual Reality headsets capable of operating without the need of being connected to a high-end PC or console, and while the current offerings on the market are considered “too bulky” for some, they are the top wanted item of most young gamers’ wish lists. I’ve also been enjoying new standalone VR games like Human Within and Ghost Town! A decade ago, you would never have imagined being able to play virtual reality games without the help of a PC, now it’s become so common nobody bats an eye about it. Last year, when I took my Vision Pro to an Apple Store for repairs, someone waiting for their iPhone to be fixed asked me if I could go [virtually] to Europe with it. I told them, “Of course I can, it’s 2024.”
Is there a downside to society’s transition into a cyberpunk reality? Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the Cyberpunk Tabletop RPG books, credited his main inspiration for the game from the Regan years during the 80s. It was a time when corporate regulations were dissolving, and while it meant an opportunity to create great amounts of wealth in the short term, it allowed companies to do whatever they wanted without legal consequences, and without consequences their concerns about human or environmental safety fell to the wayside. Now, it seems that society failed to heed his concerns, and we are now suffering from the same consequences he predicted for that ignorance. It will likely take another generation before we can figure out a way to resolve our environmental issues and heal the damage humanity has done to the planet, if it can be done at all.
This site will continue to investigate on the ongoing trends of gaming culture. RTG has promised they will be reprinting all books which have sold out, and will restock them as soon as they are able to. It is possible your local neighborhood tabletop shop, or their distributor, may still have copies of Cyberpunk RED for sale. However, I can personally attest the entire series of books have been pretty hard to find in my area even before the Spring 2025 sale, and my ability to even find the books on shelves was a combination of persistence and a bit of luck.
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