The co-creator of Invisible Hours wants to remaster the modern headset of the VR Murder Mystery game, and interview Rob Yescombe for more information.
It’s been nearly eight years since invisible time first appeared in the scene, and it’s completely different from what we’ve seen before on Steam VR and PlayStation VR, providing detective mystery. Our 2017 review, which sets the island mansion during the storm and inspired by Agatha Christie’s work, considered it a “really seductive murder mystery” with “nearly mistaken” character drama.
The flat screen version later arrived both in steam and console. The quest version was confirmed in 2020, but it did not come to fruition in the end. However, last year, developer Tequila made the file work for bankruptcy, and the auction tracked the studio’s IP catalog rights in April. It’s here that Yescombe found the opportunity.
“When I got this opportunity again as an artist, I thought it was about owning what I made,” Yescombe said of recent video calls.
Yescombe’s history across VR began with Tilt Brush and later worked on the exclusive Far Points of PlayStation VR after being shown a vertical slice demo. His work has since been extended to Twilight Zone VR and Arizona Sunshine 2 alongside various film and flat-screen gaming projects, but invisible time is one of his previous efforts in VR.
Working as the original co-creator, writer and story director, VR hardware was really not established, but technology was on the way, and the development of invisible time began. Tequila worked, and Yescombe began exploring what he could do in VR that he couldn’t actively do in flat screen games.
“The answer to that was looking around. It was one thing anyone could do. I know that even if my grandmother puts on a VR headset, she can see from the left and right. She understands that.
Aiming for something structurally different from what is normally seen in game stories, invisible times allow you to explore different threads while arriving at fixed points. Instead of creating different stories based on the choices they chose, the team aimed to tell a story like real life, where all unfolded stories are perfectly synchronized.
What you witness depends on your location at a particular moment. The mansion has suspects investigating seven suspects, but you can technically clear the story in an hour. This means that within this hour there will be a seven-hour simultaneous story, with no instructions as to whom to follow. Spending time in one place means there is a lack of an event somewhere, and express different opinions on exactly what happened.
In the end, the original release didn’t sell as much as the studio had hoped for.
“When we started planning and budgeting, the third party, whose hardware sales data was to predict that PSVR would expect to run 5-6 million units that year, only half a million. So, even though the game was very well reviewed, there was no market to sell, despite the players having very highly reviewed.”
He points out that the VR market has changed quite a bit since then, with headset sales increasing in tens of millions of units since then. Pointing to the serious success of invisible time and the fact that the game is already being made, he is trying to find a publisher willing to bring this to a new audience again.
“The vision is that we want to remaster this. For a larger audience, it’s essentially a new product for them. And for the publishers who buy it, they essentially spend all their production on the price of the remaster.”
In addition to direct remastering, Yescombe is investigating screen adaptation. Which question asks, how do you adapt such unconventional narrative structures to more linear forms, such as film and television?
“Invisible time is written first and foremost in a way that can be experienced linearly. If you go through it completely with a straight line and follow another character, you still get a lot of revelation and plot. So you can make a straight adaptation. Of course there are other ideas. It’s a different character’s perspective, and it’s a miniseries where you can watch the episodes in any order you like.”
One of the early inspirations of the structure was the Reddit thread, where new parents were aware of the best order to show their children’s Star Wars movies. He points out your perspective on who Darth Vader is when he watches the prequel trilogy before the original trilogy.
Regarding screen adaptation, Yescombe doesn’t relate to many interactivity, but says, “I have something that allows people to have something that allows people to choose their experiences small and very occasionally. Which episode do you watch?”
It’s too early to see anything there, as many of the planned remaster details are likely to depend on the publisher, but it’s unlikely that you’ll see an expanded story. That also means Yescombe can’t check the platform yet, but he hopes to reach an invisible time.
“I’d love to see this finally come to the quest. I also think it’s natural for PS VR2. I also should talk about steam. But personally, as someone who uses Quest 3 every day, it’s great to have it there just for my convenience.”
We don’t know what’s coming next for this multimedia project yet, but we’re paying attention to further development. Until then, invisible time is still available on PC VR and PlayStation VR.
