Scanner Sombre - Review

Regaining consciousness you smell the damp. Opening your eyes you see the stone walls of the chamber flickering by the light of the fire[…]. […] You notice the beginnings of a passage. After a few steps the darkness consumes you. Returning to the safely of the fire you see a LIDAR scanner on the floor – a trigger press results in a faint glow coming from inside the helmet. You put the helmet on, adjust the beam-width and proceed into the abyss…
From the product description

About the Experience

At VR Voyaging, we don’t usually cover games, but if they are compelling enough (and not full of enemies and timers) we may include them anyway. Scanner Sombre is a cave exploring simulator/game with a very cool gameplay mechanic. Instead of just walking around a cave, you are challenged by not being able to see anything. The only way to look around is by using your trusty LiDAR scanner and exploring the point cloud that results. You can walk around and explore the cave using this tool without any (well, hardly any) game pressure. It’s an interesting experience and we thought our readers would think so too!

The basic story is a bit light on details. You start out in a tent with boxes of supplies near you. You can teleport around the confined space. There’s an open flap you can peek out of and see some light in the distance. As you emerge from the tent, you realize that other than that light, it’s all darkness around you. Once you make your way to that spot, you see an item. Pick it up to learn how to use your shiny new LiDAR scanner to see in this darkness.

The story, such as it is, is revealed through on-screen text. One line at a time. It could definitely be improved by a faster crawl, or at least being able to hit a button to skip to the next line. Briefly, you are looking for the ruins of some ancient civilization that has been hidden deep in the earth. As you progress, there will be passages, intersections, and remains to look at. Since what you see is only as detailed as the point cloud (as you scan), the points can be very sparse, or more detailed. It’s possible to go right past things without seeing them, so you’ll want to look around for features that need more detail.

As you game continues, you also see scenes relating to witch trials and miners. Beyond the general theme of death tying these together, it’s not a typical narrative. By the time you reach the end though, it becomes a bit more poignant, but never very detailed.

Note: Though it’s mostly not a game, there are just a few things to be aware of that some folks may want to avoid (these may also be considered spoilers, so beware!). There are sections involving an underground lake. Stepping into the lake seems unavoidable, but more than a few seconds may result in your demise. Also, if you click the wrong spot for teleport, you may suffer a fatal fall. The few times this happened, it was because I didn’t notice that my target wasn’t quite on the ledge, and rather had overshot into a chasm. A little annoying, but avoidable. Note also, that if you die, you come back in a few seconds only backed up a bit from where it happened to try again. No lives to count.

Graphics and Sound

The whole point of this experience is to see through your scanner. As such, there will be points representing where the LiDAR beam recorded a signal bounced back (the time it takes determines how far away the point is). When you hold down the trigger, it keeps building up the scene, so you want to point it up, down, and all around. As things progress, you get some new features to scan in more detail or more quickly. Having played with point clouds before, it’s fun seeing them used as a game mechanic this way.

It’s also worth pointing out that the soundtrack is very high quality. It’s a beautiful, haunting soundtrack worth listening to on its own! The music fits with the things you discover and is really just lovely. There are also ambient sound effects for stepping, echos, your scanner, and the occasional screams. It’s not really scary, although some people (or kids) might find it a bit much at times.

Information Content

Not applicable as this is fictional.

Navigation and Interactivity

You can walk around your play space or use the teleport mechanic. There are some settings for how snap turn works, but no smooth locomotion option. There are no interactive elements, although later on there are some switches. You don’t need to explicitly poke them or click anything. When you are in place, they activate.

After a few “upgrades” to your scanner, you will gain the ability to see everything you’ve scanned in a zoomed out map view. You can scale it and pan around it to see different areas. I really like this.

Updates and Support

I had actually bought this on sale some time ago, but it always crashed upon startup. I had given up on it when I saw an update to it this month. It’s been out since 2017, but the problem was apparently that it wouldn’t work on Intel processors newer than 10th generation. With this fix, it finally works!

Summary

It’s not a super long experience (probably under an hour for most people), but it’s pretty low priced so I thought it was fine. It also goes on sale for deep discounts sometimes. If you want to explore a cave using a point cloud in VR, I haven’t seen anything else like it. I recommend it!