"Now, just cut the red wire...!"
If you're a fan of spy movies, you've undoubtedly seen a trained secret agent disarm a bomb thanks to instructions from someone who can't actually see what they're working on. That premise — of cooperation despite everyone not having the same information — is the heart of experimental game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.
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The game tasks one player wearing an Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset with disarming the bomb. That player uses Razer Hydra motion controls to rotate the bomb, clip wires and press buttons.
However, he or she has no idea how to disarm the bomb; that information is in the hands of the other players, who must leaf through manuals to figure out how to disarm it. Since the bomb is randomly generated, players reading the instructions must determine the type of bomb before offering a solution to the Oculus Rift wearer.
The project was made for the 2014 Global Game Jam, a worldwide weekend event where teams spend a weekend building games based on various themes. Ben Kane, one of its creators, posted the video to the IndieGames subreddit. On the thread, Kane lists himself and three other developers as part of the team working to develop the game's next steps
Players who have an Oculus Rift — still only available to developers — and a Razer Hydra motion controller can download the Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes demo on the Global Game Jam page.
Despite the dynamic nature of the current version, Kane said in the Reddit thread that "more accessible options" might be in the game's future.
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