Transference is a good sci-fi thriller trapped inside of a fairly forgettable adventure-puzzle game. Created by SpectreVision (co-founded by actor Elijah Wood) with support from Ubisoft Montreal, Transference is an intriguing example of the clash between traditional narratives and gameplay that the video game industry struggles with. On the one hand, the story and themes of Transference are quality enough to be their own short film. On the other hand, the gameplay is only occasionally inspired and doesn’t capitalize on the narrative’s themes or setting enough to support the experience for longer than an hour or so. In a sense, this is good enough because Transference only takes a couple hours to complete and mine for secrets, but at the cost of lacking lasting value or a compelling gameplay hook to justify its $25 price tag.

The premise of Transference is the player entering into a virtual world seemingly constructed from the minds of a scientist and his wife and son. The scientist, Raymond Hayes, discovered the secret to translating the human consciousness into a form that could be preserved in digital space. Naturally for a thriller, this comes with severe consequences that the player gradually discovers as they navigate the corrupted world Hayes and his family are now trapped within.

The greatest strength of Transference is contained within its premise. The idea of exploring a damaged virtual world that defies the laws of time and physics is ripe for creative storytelling and gameplay. Unfortunately, the player only gets to see a small amount of this potential as the exploration is mostly limited to a small number of rooms, and the narrative is delivered in such a way that the player’s presence in the world is superfluous to the story. Were it not for the added gimmick of being able to play it in VR Transference might be entirely unnoteworthy among similar adventure games.

Most of Transference is spent wandering through a small section of a virtual apartment building, with jarring visual distortions signalling where the program code is corrupted. The player solves a series of puzzles that bring the world back into its intended state, presumably to rescue the Hayes family, but there’s more to the story than this mission. The apartment has three main versions (“perspectives” is more appropriate), each representing the consciousness of one of the Hayes family members, and the player transfers between them by activating specific light switches. Raymond’s perspective is filled with equations and scattered notes to himself. His wife Katherine has a perspective that reflects her unhappiness and sense of entrapment in the virtual world through paintings and instruments. Their son Benjamin has a perspective where the walls are covered in doodles and scribblings that reveal his struggle to make sense of the rift that has formed between his parents as well as the decaying virtual world.

A few of the puzzles are quite clever. One of the first requires the player to read a musical scale on a welcome mat and recreate its notes using the apartment building’s door buzzers. Another particularly cool example requires collecting sand for a giant hourglass and then flipping the clock to stabilize a glitched room long enough to reach a disconnected section. These puzzles are linked together by the need to transfer oneself between the different versions of the world in order to bring back items from one character’s perspective into another’s. It’s a strong foundation to work from that carries most of the experience, even as the gameplay weakens through redundancy. Thematically, it makes sense that the Hayes’ virtual apartment looks mostly identical regardless of whose perspective the player is exploring. In gameplay, however, the player sees and experiences just about all there is within the first 20 minutes. The remaining hour or so it takes to solve the remaining puzzles involves flipping between the mostly unchanging world states.

The story involves itself more in the internal drama and troubled relationships between the members of the Hayes family. Raymond is brilliant but entirely distracted from his family at best while being manic and mentally unhinged at worst. Katherine is deeply depressed at having sacrificed her musical career and happiness trying to support her husband’s work and raise their son Benjamin mostly alone. Ben himself shows troublingly blunt awareness of his father’s absence to the extent that he imitates and mocks his dad’s detachment in personal videos. As an emotional core, these relationships and the story of how they came to be trapped in Raymond’s virtual world work very well due to their realistic portrayal of a stormy, dysfunctional family propelling towards tragedy. Most of this story is delivered through video messages and recordings that the player can discover as they progress through puzzles. Sometimes, the player will see a glitchy apparition of a family member addressing them directly from between the versions of the world, but the story mostly comes through examining live-action video logs and reading between the lines.

Transference’s biggest problem is its short length. It hinders both the narrative and the gameplay because neither is allowed to develop as much as they both deserve to. As a story, the video logs and acting are well executed, but are delivered in a disjointed manner for the sake of adding an exploration element to the game. This would be fine if the game weren’t so limited in its exploration to begin with. I’d prefer to watch Transference the film and dispense with the gameplay entirely, as it just slows down the story. A few of the puzzles are clever but most don’t develop beyond a “bring item X to location Y” or copying a number or image that’s easily discovered a couple steps from the puzzle’s location. Precious bits of interesting story are used to string the player along through mostly conventional puzzles, occasionally uplifted by a particularly inspired one that plays with the virtual world setting well.

Transference feels more like an extended demo than a full game. Perhaps it should be approached as an interactive experience akin to a theme park attraction rather than a game, but the problem of price still remains. Is Transference a one to two hour piece of entertainment that’s worth 25 USD? No, not when there are so many games, films, novels, and more out there in the world that you could enjoy for much longer and to greater depth for the same price or less.

6.5/10

Check Out the Transference Launch Trailer:

For further information about Transference, please visit:
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/transference/

Michael Schreiber

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I've been gaming for 22 years, ever since my mom picked up a secondhand NES, and I've played on just about every gaming platform out there since. I think video games are one of most innovative and artistic mediums in the world today, and I'm always curious how developers will surprise me next.

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