Ever have those dreams where you’re at the top of a vast height—like a skyscraper or a mountain—and you look down into the abyss below? At first you may be terrified, with vertigo kicking in as you absorb the daunting scene. But then you realise this is just a dream and that there is no danger, so you descend into the precipice and have the thrill ride of your life.
Sickway VR brings those adrenaline-inducing dreams to life, as you ride an electric vehicle along narrow walkways and precarious gantries between skyscrapers and towering construction sites. It brings up all those nervy excited feels, making you appreciate how Neo must have felt when he was escaping Agents on that skyscraper ledge way back at the beginning of The Matrix. Sickway VR takes all those thrilling moments, and puts them into the safety of your living room.
Developed by ALIEN Studio, a 3D animation and VFX studio specialised in photorealistic animation for advertising and film, Sickway VR looks incredible, shunning stripped-back visuals for highly detailed cityscapes. When you’re not hyper-focused on keeping your balance, you can look down to see cars driving through the streets hundreds of feet below, or look out over the city to see the impressive cranes and skyscrapers of your urban environment. Want to vary up the scenery? Then jump into the Track Editor and race down a track in the cosmos with the curvature of a planet—or one of the many other dazzling settings— as your backdrop. Not even the sky’s the limit!
There’s more to Sickway VR than keeping your fear of heights in check (the devs aren’t just out to torture you, after all). The game has plenty of puzzle elements that see you, for instance, using cranes to manoeuvre pieces of walkway into position, or using a crossbow to pop balloons in one of the many mini-games on offer. On your lofty journey you’ll come across graffiti, footballs, basketball hoops and other realistically interactive physics objects to goof around with, break up the experience, and potentially extend the time you have left to complete your ride.
Like all things, Sickway VR’s even better with friends. Bring up to three buddies (or strangers via online matchmaking) into the fold, and race each other around the painstakingly designed levels to see who’s the slickest, sickest segwayer of all. For thrill-seekers with a creative side, Sickway VR invites you to create your own tracks too. With a convenient interface that gives you access to all the jumps, walkways, and props you find in the game, you can come up with tracks as wild and inventive as your imagination allows.
Sickway VR is making its demo debut on Steam at Steam Next Fest. The demo version will be available October 14-21, and will feature one of the several mini-games that will be in the final version as well as a sample of the track editor, just to give you a taste of what’s to come at full launch (most likely late November).
So head over to the Steam Store page and wishlist Sickway VR now. You can also follow the action from ALIEN Studio’s labs on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, or join the communities on Discord and Reddit.