From the earliest DK1 days of the Oculus Rift, people couldn't stop talking about the potential of VR for horror games. The inherent separation between you and the game world that's in effect when you're looking at it through a monitor somewhat dilutes the experience.
Removing that barrier, foisting the player helplessly into the game world works absolute wonders for the scare factor. Even mediocre horror games become terrifying, and really good ones become almost unbearable. Boogeyman started out as one of those mediocre games looking to coast by on the magic of VR, but has grown a lot since then.
The core gameplay involves vigilance. Peering around between four different possible points of entry that the Boogeyman can approach through. When you shine your flashlight on him, he retreats. It's quite like Five Nights at Freddy's in that respect. Audio cues will signal which entry point he's coming at you from, a handy addition.
You can, at any time, look under the bed to replenish your battery meter. However doing so makes you highly vulnerable, and there's a small chance each time that the Boogeyman will be waiting under the bed for you. That gamble makes it harrowing, and further motivates the player to use the flashlight only when absolutely necessary.
There are other weapons in your arsenal however, such as night vision goggles and glow sticks, which illuminate the various entry points for several minutes during which they are "off limits" to the Boogeyman. This allows you to concentrate on just the remaining points of ingress, reducing your burden.
There wasn't anything else to the game the last time I checked. But having purchased 3.0, it turns out that each time you survive a night, you're set free to explore the whole house. This serves to make the game world feel less limited, to add the scare factor of wandering dark hallways alone, and a chance to locate and collect more useful items.
It was while wandering the house that I first noticed there's a keypad lock on the door to your parents' room. This was terribly amusing to me. What sort of shitty parent has that level of security on their bedroom door? What kind of weird sex are they having in there, that they can't risk anybody walking in on it?
There's surprisingly little in the way of horror games available for the Rift at the moment. You can do worse than Boogeyman. Not a glowing recommendation, I know. What's there is well made. It's a solid concept that has been very well realized. Does it deliver the scares it promises? In spades. Even so, it still winds up feeling disappointingly limited.
There's another way to look at it though. It's narrowly focused on achieving what it set out to, without too much in the way of extraneous distractions. Many games have been ruined by such irrelevant distractions from their core gameplay, like that NiGHTS game for Wii, or any of the later Sonic games. Boogeyman is a game that knows what it is, and what it has set out to accomplish.
In that respect, it's a success. There are better horror games out there for Rift, like Dread Halls. But I'm still able to confidently recommend Boogeyman given how replayable it is, and the fact that the price is a reasonable $8. I would like to see it come down to $5 though. All told, I give Boogeyman a 7/10.
All images courtesy of Oculus and Barry McCabe.