Thank you Wolf & Wood Interactive Ltd for sending us a copy of this game! (Now I wish they'd send me a spare pair of pants.)

The Exorcist VR: Legion - Chapter 1: First Rites is a VR horror experience that lives up to every word in this sentence. In other words, it's scary, it's about exorcisms, and it's more of an "experience" than a full-fledged game. I am sure that is mostly because the first chapter is meant more as a demo, teaser, and tutorial than as a full solo experience. Given that the entire thing can be completed in under an hour, the $5 price tag seems a little much to me for what you get. However, the experience you DO get is certainly tense and atmospheric.

In The Exorcist VR (which is what I will call the game throughout the rest of the review because its full title is too long and TEVR:L-C1:FR sounds like something Elon Musk would name his child), you play as a homicide detective in Boston who is tasked with investigating a murder in a Catholic church. You are given the task of testing out and fine-tuning the controls before you start the game proper, and there is actually a lot of thought put into giving the player as comfortable of an experience as possible. You can choose how you move (teleporting, walking, or both), how you turn, whether the screen fades to black or not when you turn, whether crouching is enabled, how far you turn when using the control stick, and how fast the camera moves and turns. I don't get as motion sick as many people do in VR, but I appreciate that the developers spent the time to cater to all of the primary methods of in-game movement VR typically takes.

Starting the game proper, you arrive on the scene to a grisly display: a statue of Mary with blood on her hands, overturned pews and chairs, and a murdered priest in a confessional with a severed pig's head hanging inside it. Your task is to find out what happened. In exploring the church, you will find an arsenal of tools to help ward off the demonic influences at work behind the scenes in this murder and Boston at large. Once all of the tools are collected, you have a scary cinematic encounter with the demon Legion before being knocked unconscious and the first chapter ends.

As far as moral elements, The Exorcist VR has most of what you'd expect, though surprisingly not all. The game is rife with demonic and anti-God imagery; the priest's research notes include references to Baal, Lilith, and several other named demons. When the demon begins scaring up the place, an upside-down bloody cross is placed over an image of Jesus on the cross, as well as blood pouring from the eyes of characters in other religious paintings around the church. One of the demons asks, "Why does your God associate with such swine?" At one point, someone uses the name of Jesus in vain. There is also a lot of blood, a dismembered pig, and the murdered priest (who has been stuffed in the confessional with his throat slit and covered in bugs). I was genuinely surprised at the general lack of foul language, given the themes The Exorcist VR contains.

In the end, The Exorcist VR: Legion - Chapter 1: First Rites certainly built up a tense atmosphere that ended with a bang, but ended too soon. Given the polish and care that went into making this experience, it's hard to say I wish it had been a free demo to entice players into buying the remaining four chapters, but I think it would have gone a long way towards excusing how quickly the ride is over. According to the Steam page for the full 5-chapter bundle, the entire game runs around 2 1/2 hours, meaning each subsequent chapter is just as short as this one. But if those chapters are just as atmospheric and well-polished as Chapter 1, the price may very well be worth it to those looking for a good VR scare.

-maestro_dana