2/5 ★ – stephenhill777's review of Paranormal Activity: The Lost Soul.

The main draw of VR has always been immersion, and few genres benefit from this more than horror. Resident Evil 7 was a masterclass in portraying how utterly terrifying virtual reality can be when handled well. Paranormal Activity on the other hand, has relatively solid design but fumbles constantly due to playing it overly safe and poor implementation of the hardware. Putting VR to one side for now, Paranormal Activity: The Lost Soul is not a terrible game. The graphics are very impressive, considering it's a game that released in 2017. The house in which the game takes place is well designed, with corridors that loop around in a maze-like manner. And the scares, while nowhere near the intensity of RE7, are still quite effective. It's clear to see that the developers were big fans of PT, even if they didn't fully understand what made that game work. The problem is, Paranormal Activity doesn't do anything new. The story is predictable, over far too quickly and none of the scares are particularly memorable. Provided you don't have any hardware issues (more on that later), you could easily finish the game in a single sitting. It's roughly two hours in length, all of it taking place inside a single location that doesn't even measure up to RE7's starting farmhouse. There is no combat and the only gameplay requires you to simply find items and very occasionally run away monsters. Or rather, monster, as the only enemy in the game is a non-descript shadow demon that looks like it never had a second draft. There are occasional moments of tension building that are quite satisfying. The discovery of a secret tunnel that leads underground is pretty dread-inducing, and the lighting in certain rooms is genuinely creepy. But the most memorable moment in the game for me was discovering I could pick up a severed appendage and throw it through a basketball hoop. This is something the developers clearly want you to do, as there's a trophy for managing it. And I say "manage" with great deliberation here. It is very possible that the set up in my living room may have contributed here, but I found Paranormal Activity to be a horrendous experience in VR.... and not in the way I wanted. Stuttering framerates made motion sickness practically a given, and occasional glitches would teleport me several feet in the opposite direction that I wanted to go. The Playstation Move controllers, usually pretty reliable, made opening doors a painfully awkward experience. And the convoluted button layout meant I was constantly switching items instead of turning around like I wanted to. These are all things I could forgive, but what I refuse to let slide are the maddening issues I had with crouching. Several times throughout the game, you need to pick items up off the floor and, for whatever reason, my camera simply would not allow me to reach down that far. I would be able to get centimetres within reach of a key or a note, only for an "Out of camera range" message to pop up at the last minute. No matter what way I changed the camera, I could never sit or stand fully upright, and reach the floor with the same set-up. And every time this happened, my goodwill towards the game slipped further away. Obviously, if you play without a VR helmet, you won't have this issue. But if you do that, you're just left with an incredibly short, incredibly mediocre horror game that will be over within an average movie's runtime. I will say one very backhanded thing in the games favour: The physics are absolutely fucked. On several occasions, I would pick up an item, set it down, and then watch as it flew wildly down the hallway at high speed. It's possible this is part of the paranormal experience, but several vibrating picture frames stuck in the wall suggests to me this is a technical issue. And while it certainly breaks the immersion, it's at least entertaining to watch. So to sum up, a bland, mediocre experience when viewed on a TV. In VR, it is at times hilarious, intensely creepy, maddening and dull, occasionally at the same time and often within seconds of each other.