Remember when, for about ten seconds, gaming companies thought it might be neat to make games that were basically just “choose your own adventure” videos to get around those pesky ’90s graphics limitations? ABC Family’s Stitchers: Hack the Case uses modern smartphone and virtual reality tech to breathe new life into the concept and draw us into the world of the upcoming show.
The premise behind Stitchers is that “genius hacker Kirsten Clark is ‘stitched’ into the memories of the recently deceased in order to help solve their murders.” Hack the Case immerses you in that world by dropping you directly into these memories—presented as 360-degree videos—and letting you look around and do your own sleuthing.
That is, after some quick training, which involves memory exercises and cat videos—you know, all the important skills for a tech-savvy detective/hacker.
I can haz clues?
Once you’ve completed your training, the 360-degree videos allow you to choose what to look at and pay attention to while a preceding event to the crime plays out, effectively making you feel like you’re really stuck in someone else’s head, watching their memory. And that’s the really great thing about the game; being able to look around each video with full, 360-degree freedom as it plays adds a layer of interactivity and immersion that makes it so much more compelling than just staring at a fixed video and looking for clues—it finally makes playing a video-based game feel real.
To add to the feeling that you’re not just playing a game but in a memory, you turn your in-game head naturally by moving your smartphone to look around—even more effective if you happen to have a virtual reality viewer to drop it into. If you don’t have one, there’s a whole range of available VR viewers that use your phone as a screen at varying price points, all the way down to Google’s economical cardboard solution—really. ABC Family will also be holding VR viewer giveaways, as well as entering anyone who successfully uses their stitching-savvy to solve the in-game case into a drawing to win a trip to LA to get their own, personalized action figure made.
Hack the Case is available now for iOS, Android, and on the web, and you can catch Stitchers when it premieres on ABC Family on Tuesday, June 2 at 9/8c.
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Published: May 26, 2015 11:53 am