Because I am a relatively sane human being, I hadn’t noticed the strange new alternate reality game that has apparently been teased in PlayStation Home for the past few weeks. That would have required me to play Home, a nightmarish exercise that no good person should have to experience more than once.
But these aren’t normal circumstances. This is Xi, Home’s first alternate reality game, which officially launched yesterday. Never mind that the point of ARGs is to take place in the real world, while Xi looks like it will take place primarily in Home: I didn’t re-enter Sony’s hellscape of marketing to argue semantics. I went in to figure out if you should chance it too.
Everyone knows the strategy of the average Home player goes thusly:
1. Find a female
2. Turn on bubble machine
3. Dance like an idiot until female leaves/turns into fat man.
Xi ups the ante on these players: now Home’s sexiest alpha tester has disappeared! So if you’re ever going to find her, to gloriously Charleston with her, you’ll need to figure out whatever crazy, cryptic thing she was doing, as well as the mysteries that lie in Home’s super-secret Alpha Zones.
On day one of Xi these mysteries took players to The Hub, a new tiny map that turns Home into a rudimentary adventure game engine. New to the Home experience are cutscenes, context-sensitive voice-over, and hotspots triggered by specific emotes. There’s also items to gather and puzzles to solve, but this stuff is particularly simple—there’s no inventory to manage, and challenges have so far been of the “figure out the password and type it into the keypad” variety. So it’s still not very interactive, but it’s just day one. Less forgivable was that by the start of day two, The Hub had replaced some of its flavor content with tips on what to do if you experience game-crippling bugs. A video of sexy alpha tester was provided (perhaps as penance) but this is not a good sign.
But Xi is still something to do in Home, which is a thing Home has lacked since it launched. It also expands the scope of Home enough to imply that there might be more to do in the service in the future. But Xi still has to play out over the course of weeks. Whether or not it’s worth following along as a player will probably not be answered until the very end of the game, when Miss Attractive Alpha Tester turns into (or doesn’t, in which case this will all have been for naught) Sweaty Alpha Fatso. I’ll keep on it, and let you know when it’s worth diving in.
Related Links:
Revisiting the Curious Case of Playstation Home
Playstation Home: All Your Worst Fears Realized
Home: Your Virtual World Sucks