Paper Beast is Astounding – Review (PSVR)

The shaggy, dog-like creature I had taken to calling “Digger,” because he had dug me free me from a cave in which I had been buried alive, was awestruck by his own reflection. While watching my new friend jerk his head quizzically side to side in an attempt to understand the nature of his shadowy canine copycat, I found myself fighting back a fit of giggles. In this moment of emotional connection with a curmudgeonly creature that resembled a stack of shredded documents, I lost the distinction between the virtual reality of Paper Beast and my own. 

The unconventional PSVR adventure puzzle game from visionary game designer Eric Chahi (Out of This World, Heart of Darkness) and his team at PixelReef is an astounding achievement for VR storytelling. Despite a total lack of dialogue or even word prompts, Paper Beast moved me to tears by the end of the roughly six hours I spent playing its campaign to completion.

The game is a deeply immersive VR odyssey of imagination and discovery with gorgeously stylized visuals brought to life by animations bursting with character, mood setting electronic music that pulses and surges, and an oddball cast of delightful VR critters big and small. It wears its hard fought triumphs proudly like patches on a battle vest. A record of joys and sorrows written by the player as they naturally interact with and respond to the living, breathing digital world around them.  

Just as Digger’s reflection had once enchanted him, so too does Paper Beast bedazzle the player with a quirky roster of colorful and curious origami flora and fauna in which the player will recognize glimpses of our flesh and blood world. Pulling back the literal curtains (yes, really) on Paper Beast‘s painterly vistas reveals creatures at once alien and familiar.

Shy and unsteady quadrupeds gather at watering holes. Tiny bejeweled insectoid critters roll balls of sand in dark underground vaults illuminated only by bioluminescent airborne jellyfish plants. A majestic slow moving and gentle giant analogous to a dinosaur clears the way ahead crashing through rocky obstacles with ease. 

It’s an active, vibrant ecosystem with which the player is invited to engage via either two Move controllers or the DualShock. Either option will enable the player to yank away vines that ensnare a lumbering beast, pick up a ball of wadded up paper to offer to a deer like creature I would later find out are called Papyvorus, or pluck the seed from atop a yellow stalk and plant it in water rich soil to grow a new one.

The world is as beautiful to behold as it is treacherous. For every docile creature pliant to the player’s will and whims there is a stubborn, unruly, predator searching for prey. Some of these looks like rainbow speckled cougars, others giant desert reptiles. None of them are without purpose and each creature and plant has a role to play. Often it is left to the player to determine how best to utilize that role or whether to impede it in the case of hungry predators and the prey the player is charged with escorting to safety.

Some, like the large tortoises, alter the landscape; sprinkling fresh sand from below their shell to cover the sheer black rock beneath and spread soil for planting crops. Others, like the great purple or white trees that begin to appear with each new section, require the player to gather a herd of Papyvorus for a braying ritual that unlocks their secret potential. All of these environments, their inhabitants, and the tools provided to interact with them (such as heated rocks that melt ice and icy spiked balls that freeze water) are at the player’s disposal to use or abuse as they see fit. 

At its heart, Paper Beast is an intuitive game that rewards careful observation. How does the wind affect these creatures compared to these other ones? What happens when you put this one’s head in water versus sand? The player is encouraged to experiment with the game’s various physics systems and the animals’ reactions to them.

At times it can seem as if everything is a playground built for our amusement (literally in the case of the game’s additional Sandbox Mode which opens up freeform experimentation using all of Paper Beast’s characters and systems).  Let your gaze linger for a bit longer and you might just spy Digger struggling to write an ominous and desperate warning in the sand and find yourself asking, “what responsibility do we have to the world we inhabit, virtual or not?” 

It’s a fairly heavy message for a game which invites the player to gleefully yeet feather light paper critters sky high and muck with their environments to advance, but I found it a necessary part of the mythic journey to becoming a good caretaker. Through destructive trial and error, the player learns about how all of the planet’s systems and its inhabitants are connected as well as determine their role in this story.  What do the creatures want? And what does it have to do with a glitched music app and the tape recorded songs of Japanese punk mainstays, Tsushimamire (whose bangers play at several key moments during the game, –one of which is so strange and adorable that I stood up and clapped). 

I can’t tell you. I won’t. You have to enter the simulation and see, touch, toss, yank, roll, burn, freeze, tie, shackle, tap, plant, pull, spread, spray, fly, splat for yourself. The less you know the better.

Paper Beast is a must play for any owner of PSVR, young or old. In many ways it fulfills the early promise of the medium by creating a level of player immersion that blurs the line between the world behind the screen, and the one outside it. I came out of my experience caring deeply for its wildlife and satisfied that I had done my part in helping them to meet their destiny.

Also, who said it was a simulation?