There’s this sim in Second Life I’d been hearing a lot about recently called REC. It’s produced by a Japanese company for a Spanish POV-zombie film of the same name, and since I’m a sucker for gritty apartment buildings, I decided to check it out.

You start off in a kind of “waiting room” filled with a bunch of posters containing instructions in Japanese on how to navigate the sim. Alas, my Japanese is pretty useless but I did manage to figure out that they wanted me to pick up the camera on the ground and attach it to my HUD, giving the black bars and flashing REC image. The really interesting thing is that this HUD object seemed to act as a ‘camera glue’ in certain locations, giving you fixed camera in certain places as you explored around the apartment block. You can always free look in SL, of course, but the fixed camera made walking around the sim feel more like playing — oh, say, just at random — something like Silent Hill.

Actually, the whole place was fairly Silent Hill-ish which I’m not going to be complaining about being, a) a fan of said series, and b) having ripped off the aesthetic myself in the past.

The apartment block was also filled with odd little sparkles floating over various objects. Being an old adventure gamer, it was not at all surprisingly to find that clicking on these would cause your character to interact with objects in the environment. This was a cool touch, I thought (and done much nicer than the ’standard’ SL trope of a floating ball with the action name written above it), though it also kinda disappointed the gamer in me who was, well, kinda hoping for more. The actions didn’t seem linked to anything in any way. Like, in the building’s foyer you can smash the glass on a booth thing… but that’s it. Smashing the glass doesn’t seem to get you anywhere (and it respawns a couple of seconds later). Like, there are a bunch of files in the booth and the gamer in me wants to pick them up and get LOLZSTORY but alas, they’re static. Same with the one letter hanging out of the row of letterboxes.

There were a couple of other cool game-style touches. At one point, Loki seemed to react with shock to a loud voice-over, and in another room gasped when a computer monitor was thrown off a desk (q.v. screenshot above). The coolness of this latter scene was ruined somewhat by the fact that the computer-toss seemed to be on a very, very short loop and constantly kept throwing itself at me the whole time I was in the room.

There’s been a bit of talk recently about using SL as a gaming platform. It’s one of those things that — if it worked — would be really cool; instead of playing The Character you could walk your avatar into a game sim and just… start playing. It’s like the ultimate immersion in a lot of ways, but I’m not honestly sure if the tech behind SL can support this. I know that there are quite a few combat sims — because you can buy mobs for users to attack — but I keep thinking about that constantly-looping thrown computer. Because what would be really cool was if it were possible to put the computer on some kind of proximity trigger, so that it only jumped when someone entered the room, and only despawned when there was no-one to view it.

Like, there was another location in the game where you had to pick up a mallet in order to break down a door. The instructions being all in Japanese aside (necessitating a lot of guessing), I thought this was a nice touch.

So, yeah. I guess after visiting this sim I have sort of mixed feelings. It certainly looked nice, and kudos to the developers for what they were trying to do… but. Something about the whole experience left me feeling kind of… bereft. I wanted more; more interaction, more story, more something.

On the other hand, as a piece of viral marketing I’d say REC is pretty damn successful, so kudos to you, Spanish filmmakers.

Long live the new flesh.

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