u/Any-Win-4995 — reddlx

After 10 months of waiting for this update it finally came out and I have one question. Genuinely what were they doing for all this time?

The first thing I noticed upon launching the game was that it was way too bright. Even putting the brightness at the lowest setting possible made no difference as it was still identical to the game’s 100% brightness setting, there was no way to get this game as dark as the default was in flatmode.

Upon using the crank on the gate and advancing towards the Jackie section the Elephant costume that bursts out of the crate just didn’t appear at all. The door on the crate suddenly disappeared and nothing happened and I could simply just advance forward. Advancing to the room right after I opened up the present containing the Sharpay plushie and the crank made zero sound. 90% of the cranks I used in this port made no sound at all.

When I held the plush I realized that Arnold’s hands would just disappear and not use the holding pose from flatmode. Only some holdable items in this port use his hand models such as the Data Diver, Power Puzzle Discs, and the Starbrights in the basement areas. Every other prop just floats and makes your hand disappear. Staying on this tangent when I held the pieces used to rebuild Captain Springlock in the workshop I noticed Arnold’s hands were absent too but in the SteelWool teasers his hands did appear on Captain Springlock when holding him. Really weird stuff. Could they have sent out an earlier version on accident? I have no idea.

The items also felt weightless and snappy with zero smoothing unlike SteelWool’s other free roam project Hello Neighbor: Search and Rescue. Hello Neighbor VR unlike this game gave inertia to items and gave them some heft so they felt like you were actually carrying them around (only the Springlock parts and Starbrights did this in SotM for some reason.) Your hands had weight to them too and you could move your fingers on the controller to gesture your hands and hold them in fists and other poses. SotM doesn’t do this, it keeps your hands in this curved pose and you can’t move your fingers or do anything with them.

The Data-Diver has a few problems as well, it sits on an invisible belt at you waist with its wire directly connected to you, reeling itself in when dropped. (it’s actually pretty cool) The wire connected to the Data-Diver stays drooped to the ground so if you hold the thing in any other way than upright it clips right through the device. Using the Data-Diver on doors is also really finicky, if you move your hand just a tiny bit out of the ports radius it will immediately disconnect and close the terminal or whatever you put it in. The upgrade terminals buttons are off center from where the actual trigger area to make them click is, making the upgrade minigames ever so slightly more annoying. I had to point my hands directly to the ceiling and use my invisible wrists to click the buttons to reliably hit them everytime.

The game stops you from clipping into walls by putting this static screen over your view. That would be fine and dandy if this game didn’t have some insane collision boxes everywhere. Trying to get close to a mascot to appreciate its details? Static screen when you get a foot close to it. Simply just running around? Your head grazes the tip of a protruding shelf and your entire screen is engulfed in static. Even just turning around in a vent makes this static screen pop up like 4 times in a second

I had to even reload the game due to this static because once I got into Captain Springlock the game thought I was trying to clip into him so I had a giant wall of static covering my screen until I quit and reloaded the save. The cutscenes you’d expect to keep you locked in to a spot such as Dollie’s intro and the van sequences lack this static. You can just get up and walk around your room and see all the stuff in the cutscene you’re not supposed to. During the ending I just walked out of the van and watched the Mimic float 10 feet above it waiting to be called in for the animation of him climbing on your windshield.

Some more odd glitches and kinks I noticed were some hiding spots giving off a warped effect and going in front of your view pushing your hands behind them (this is hard to explain it’s in one of the images just look at that) The cutouts in the beginning wouldn’t work until 1am. Falling out of the vent with Jackie and waking up in the office lacked the fade transition and Arnold’s heavy breathing sounds. The jumpscares all take place in a dark void and you’re like 5 feet away from where you’re supposed to see so you can see the entire character model jumpscaring you from head to toe and the film transition comes like 2 seconds after and it’s just a flat pane ripped straight from the flatmode sitting in the void in front of you.

There are so many other issues I faced that I cannot even remember anymore so I’m just gonna wrap this rant up here. I swear SteelWool must’ve shipped out the wrong version of this game. The trailers released on YouTube showed off completely different lighting from the version I played most notably during the Jackie Office segment. The VR trailer features updated lighting making the room darker and a light from the generator hitting Jackie’s face to pull all your attention to her. My game just had the regular old bright fluorescent lighting it’s always had in that room. The trailers also featured actual hands on props such as the Captain’s head like I mentioned before and it was actually dark like the in the flatmode.

I know this is a really long and nitpicky post but after 10 months I expected a fully polished ready-to-ship product. I’m very dissapointed.

P.S There’s zero new content added to this update I went through the whole normal ending and nothing stuck out or was different to those who were wondering.