I've talked a lot about how games tell stories recently, so I want to take a moment to talk about play, and particularly gameplay itself (as opposed to the more primordial form of play in general).

Beat Saber is my particular subject for today, because I've spent several hours on it recently and I feel the need to justify how I've spent my time (that's only half a joke).

I got Beat Saber for my VR headset (a Windows Mixed Reality Samsung HMD) a while back, and I've been impressed by how it's set up in terms of a play experience. I'm not particularly good at it (at least not yet), but it got me thinking about gameplay and skill.

Not pictured: Skill at Beat Saber. Sorry about that.

Beat Saber is really good, and understanding what gives it strength requires an analysis on a couple different levels.

Wish Fulfillment

VR games are often pretty heavily aligned toward the whole wish fulfillment thing, and swinging lightsabers around fulfills a fascination most of us have held since youth because of a certain space opera franchise about celestial conflicts.

Beat Saber doesn't pretend to be Star Wars, but it doesn't pretend not to be Star Wars. However, the strengths of Beat Saber answers are not related strictly to that fantasy.

A good comparison here is something like Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades, which is basically a fancy virtual shooting range with some minigames attached. It's fun, but part of the issue with it is that it's got something of a shallow experience. Not so shallow that I can't spend hours on it, mind you, but the mere wish fulfillment aspect of the game runs out quickly.

If Beat Saber's biggest strength isn't wish fulfillment, what is it?

Music Game Selling Points

I'm a fairly dedicated "music" game player, in the sense that I play games from the genre a fair amount (though not necessarily broadly). They tend to break down into three forms of game.

Social Experience

The ones that are the most famous are probably the "social experience" games; your Guitar Hero and your Rock Band, where you have an element of cooperation, competition, or just plain interaction with other people. Most games have at least a little of this element (e.g. Audiosurf's online score-boards), but the games that really capitalize on it are relatively rare.

Social experience makes a good purchase driver of a game, but not necessarily a good impetus for players to return to your game. I don't think I would ever care to pick up Guitar Hero (not that I ever personally owned a copy) and play by myself without someone watching.

The biggest flaw relying on social experience is that it requires dedication or a situation that is appropriate to the game. I used to be fairly competitive in Audiosurf, back when it was newer and the music I like was still fairly relevant on the platform, and I would go on every once in a while to push myself back up to the top of the (casual) scoreboards on songs I'd been kicked off of, and there was a system in place to inform players when that happened.

Screenshot of Audiosurf, from my own play
Then Audiosurf 2 came along, and the community dwindled, and people weren't playing the songs I was playing, and that social experience largely went away. I don't even have my old Audiosurf log-in linked to my account, so I don't even compete on the scoreboards now.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing from a game design perspective, since it pushes people to sequels, but what this fragmentation does is create an inconsistent experience. If going from a newer game to an older game feels like a step backward, you're relying on people not doing that (which is difficult with party games like Rock Band).
Likewise, heaven help you if the new game doesn't deliver the experience your older players like; I don't play the second Audiosurf as much as I do the first because I prefer the aesthetic and the classic Mono style over the newer (and much better in many objective categories) graphics and gameplay.

Screenshot of Audiosurf 2, from my own play

Beat Saber has leaderboards and a scoring system, but I don't really pay much attention to them. I'm so far off the bottom of those charts that it doesn't count, and I don't have more than one friend playing Beat Saber (I don't think Beat Saber would even let me compare scores with him), so the social element of play is rather absent for me. I've heard a lot of people say that it's a good party game, but I'm loathe to take my headset places and even more loathe to deal with a bunch of different peoples' sweat and grime gathering on it (I know you wipe it down, but I'm just a little compulsive about cleanliness).

All-in-all, I'd say that Beat Saber's social element is pretty heavily lacking, but as an in-development game on what is still essentially an in-development platform, that's forgivable. The important question here will be if it develops further, as the developers say it will, or if it sits in development hell forever.

Wow Factor

Which leads us to the second element of gameplay; experiential play (the "wow factor"). This is what Audiosurf primarily sold on, and it's the reason why I like Audioshield a lot.

To get back to Beat Saber, it really has this going for it because it blends a lot of things together. In VR, the lighting and scene is a lot more immersive, which causes some natural responses. Being "in" a scene is so different from looking at it on a display, and even where that's feasible it's still not nearly as immersive.

However, the real thing that sticks out in Beat Saber is that you "feel" the music, because you're moving along with it. This is something that Guitar Hero and Rock Band tried to capture with their controller peripherals, but they always fell a little flat because in trying to mimic but simplify reality they couldn't compete with actually holding an instrument. That's not to say it wasn't a good effort, but it lost its appeal fairly quick (I think after the first hour or so of Guitar Hero, I was pretty much done with the novelty of the controller).

Compare this to the Audiosurf games, which try to achieve the same effect through functioning essentially as a visualizer. They're good at that (I may be a little biased due to nostalgia), but even that doesn't necessarily hold out for a long time. This is what a lot of smaller games go for as well, especially the ones that offer the player a chance to explore their musical library.

What gets Beat Saber points is the combination of all of these things. By offering a very tangible experience (physical motion, plus the feedback of hitting blocks which is something that a lot of "dancing" games don't do), and mixing that with the intense light-show effect that most songs offer, you're pushing a very rich experience at the player.

The lighting is a really important part; a lot of third-party songs do really clever things with their lighting that make it feel more like a concert light show than a background you aren't going to pay attention to because there are other things going on.

From an experience standpoint, I have to say that I've really had probably some of my best VR gaming moments with Beat Saber (supplanting Audioshield or Skyrim VR, depending which metric you use), and possibly some of my best gaming moments overall.

Skill Challenges

The third real satisfying element of music games comes in their ability to provide a challenge and reward players for rising up to it. I'm not always very much into this–as I've alluded to earlier, I tend to play Audiosurf on the lowest difficulty. It's been a while since I've done Guitar Hero or Rock Band, but I didn't care much for their higher difficulty settings either.

Beat Saber, however, manages to have a fair amount of skill in how you play, and because it ties in heavily to the experiential element it definitely matters. I've risen to the point where I can beat all of the official songs on hard as well as most third-party songs I've tried on hard, though it leads me to one of my biggest sources of angst with Beat Saber.

Beat Saber allows you to develop skill in three different areas:

1. Reaction speed.
2. Knowledge and intuition of incoming blocks.
3. Physical motion and precision.

When you play a song on expert (which I'm able to do if I don't mind failing out more often than not), you get to practice all three of these things.

Then you wind up with situations where the game feels like it's trying to punish you.

The basic precepts of Beat Saber are simple: hit blocks with the appropriate saber and swing direction, and avoid things you don't want to hit.

There are a lot of common patterns and designs for the blocks you want to hit, and I find that particular part of the gameplay to be perfect. There's nothing better than mastering the rapid downward chops or the up-and-down motions required for a complex section of a song, and both the sections that rely on mastering the use of both sabers simultaneously and those that rely exclusively on one saber feel satisfying.

Things you don't want to hit come in two forms: mines (which you want to avoid with your saber), and giant boxes the game refers to as obstacles, and I refer to in terms unfit for print.

I find that mines add a good layer of depth to the experience, but obstacles can be really bad.

Let me make it clear; I'm not anti-obstacle. I think they're really cool when done well, and they convey a sense of forward momentum in a way that individual blocks don't always do.

However, third-party content especially doesn't use obstacles in a way that builds skill; overly large obstacles or "crouching" obstacles that last too long can cause the game to have issues with the controllers (as I'll talk about more later), and the lack of any real new actionable information being presented to the player doesn't feel like a fun limitation to test your expertise, like the solo sections where you have to use one hand on a lot of blocks really quickly, but just a pain in the neck.

They're also more difficult for us "standing room only" players, who can't necessarily take a full step out of the way.

Because these segments generally reduce the whole game to just one of the skills you can master, they aren't as satisfying as a lot of the other elements of the game.

With that said, I've found that pretty much all of the official tracks and a good number of the third-party tracks give tremendous opportunities to develop skill and expertise, and are rewarding but arm-numbingly difficult on their highest difficulties.

Content

Beat Saber features fewer than a dozen official songs (I think 10, but I'm just guessing; a couple seem to be remixes of each other, too) and four difficulty modes for each. It's unrealistic to assume that players will necessarily do the easy difficulty level of each, and it's not necessarily likely that people will go through the whole list on normal, either, but if you do each of the songs on hard you've got about an hour of unique content each.

The music selection is... not necessarily superb. I didn't find any of it bad, but I've got fairly broad tastes, and there were definitely a few songs that stood out more than others. There are also different skill levels based on the music style and genre, so some songs may simply be too easy for most players (easy mode in the official content is really easy).

The real question about whether or not it has enough content depends on your willingness to replay the songs and attempt perfect scores and whether or not you have the technical skill to import custom songs (not currently a supported feature, and one that requires some fiddling).

Without custom songs, I'd say I'd probably be able to put a good two or three hours in on the game, which is not the worst $20 I'd ever have spent.

Modding and Extension

Beat Saber really shines on PC, where the ability to add third-party content has been fantastic. I've only experimented with custom songs so far, and the results are a little hit or miss. Generally these options tend to be aimed at hardcore players, and it's clear that some of the designers have a "you're not hardcore unless you live hardcore" attitude and little effort has been made to help novices learn the game using their songs.

I am fairly savvy when it comes to game modding (I've been doing it since Morrowind, and even a little before that), but it took me a few tries to get the plugins needed to support unofficial songs working. I'm not quite sure what factored into this, but there were several unexpected occurrences in the process (including, for no reason, the plugin seeming to become uninstalled), so it's worth noting that it might be beyond a novice's comfort level.

VR Quality

As far as common VR drawbacks, I haven't really experienced too many with Beat Saber.

I don't have a room-space setup, and while I need to be standing to get the mobility needed, I don't need to move far. I place a chair in an "open" space and stand directly against it so that I have a frame of reference to return to, which has an added upside that I'll talk about in a moment.

As a Windows Mixed Reality user, I have inside-out tracking, meaning that I need to keep my controllers in front of my face or they get a little glitchy. This was an issue for a while early in my experience (I'd been on a little VR dry streak; it's very hot where I live), but by the time I'd spent about a half-hour getting re-acclimated to the setup tracking issues were few and far between.

I do have occasional instances where a saber hits an obstacle for too long and the vibration doesn't turn off until the end of the song, which is disconcerting since the haptic feedback when you successfully hit a block is important to your situational awareness of whether or not you hit blocks as they pass. This has only happened on third-party songs for me, though I haven't gone out of my way to test on the bundled songs.

Motion sickness is largely a non-issue, since things are coming at you rather than vice versa. There are definitely times where you experience a sort of illusion of forward momentum, but I don't know that anyone would be bothered by it. There's also no forced movement or odd perspectives (my biggest issue with games like Payday and Fallout in VR).

The one caveat I feel the need to provide is that Beat Saber requires a lot of motion, and for some reason third-party song creators have a thing for really large obstacles or required crouching for extended periods. The latter can be rather extreme; I have to hunch down in my chair to get through some sections of third-party songs, which is not a particularly pleasant experience. I'm fairly tall, so that may not apply to everyone.

Beat Saber performs well on my rig (which has a recent i7 and a GTX 1080, so that's not a huge surprise), and has a lot of options to customize graphics settings, including display mirroring.

Overall

Beat Saber is a unique and tremendous experience. It's definitely worth looking at as a case of how to combine a bunch of different elements (the social aspect, the wow factor, and the skill challenge) into a solid game, but it's still pretty immature as far as its development process goes, and it is essentially just an arcade mode at the moment.

I'd say that it's worth grabbing if you're a fan of music games, but there's another elephant in the room: the fact that it requires a VR headset. Right now you can get a quality headset for around $400, but that's a lot for an individual game.

Beat Saber isn't a killer app for VR, and it's actually not all that much more than a tech demo of what VR can do. It's still a great experience, and if you think you'll like it, you probably will. However, as with all early access titles you'd want to buy it based on the notion that it is going to never see future development.

If anything, it's a good case study for developers and game designers, especially as VR is still in its early stages of adoption, and I think it'll hold up well in the VR arena based on its intuitively simple control scheme and the nature of the experience it provides.

For an average, not very intense player, you do need to weigh the economics of the purchase. There are lots of games you can get for $20 that might offer more play-time, and the third-party content has some appeal, but requires technical skill to access and is typically aimed at people who spent a lot of time to get good at the game.

As with any VR experience, that has something to do with your physical condition as well. I've gotten in a lot better shape through diet and exercise over the past few months, but I still feel like there are parts of this game that are simply beyond me. I would have a hard time recommending this to anyone who has an impairment that impacts their mobility, and I can occasionally feel some of my old wrist injuries ache when I play Beat Saber.

The Rating

I give Beat Saber a 4/5. It's not perfect, but it's still in development, and there's a lot of potential there. I've spent two hours trying to pass a single song, and I can say that considering the next opportunity to return to Beat Saber fills me with excitement rather than angst over that.