Extra Dimensional Review: A Dark & Disturbing VR Adventure

EXD – Extra Dimensional is not the sort of game that I’d normally choose to play. Its world is grisly, doused in shadow and psychological grime. It relishes in making you squirm with environments, enemies, and gameplay that are all visceral and brutal.

Yet I can’t help but recognize craftsmanship when I see it, and Extra Dimensional is certainly a well-crafted game that knows exactly what it wants to be. Aside from a handful of shortcomings, it’s a mostly successful take on the grim fantasy combat genre.

Developed over four years by Lords of Illusion, a small Italian dev studio, EXD – Extra Dimensional is a narrative-driven fantasy adventure game with physics-based combat and light puzzle elements. You’ll stab, slash, shoot, and solve your way through a story told across approximately 7 hours of play.

EXD’s three pillars are its story, combat, and puzzles, and how effective it is at each of these facets is mixed. It doesn’t have the most original or engrossing story, nor is it told with total success, and its combat isn’t the most interesting or engaging, nor are its puzzles the cleverest I’ve ever solved. But EXD ends up being more than the sum of its parts, and much of this comes down to the game’s solid foundations and generally high level of presentation.

The Story

You play as Max Ventura, a middle-aged delivery driver working at the Megazon warehouse, balancing long shifts with being a good dad to your daughter, Julia.

The game opens on a morning like any other. You’re moving packages around the warehouse when a phone call from your daughter is suddenly interrupted by a calamity. Julia’s in trouble, but before you can react, an inter-dimensional portal rips through the fabric of reality and you’re pulled from your normal life into a nightmarish fantasy world of dragons, demons, zombies and monsters.

In this strange dimension, Megazon shipments have miraculously appeared for centuries, giving birth to a religious cult who worship a non-stick frying pan, an umbrella, a sneaker, and other everyday objects as sacred relics. This cult has long been tormented by a genocidal oppressor and sees your sudden arrival as a sign of their salvation. They call you The Chosen One, bestow upon you a sword, an energy drink, and a protein bar, and implore you to save their world. Easy peasy.

While some of the narrative’s offbeat details provide some original personality, the story is fundamentally familiar. An unlikely hero is pulled into a grand adventure against their will, and the only way out is forward. By the end, we’ll solve some mysteries and answer some questions, but ultimately, the tall tale is delivered without major innovation or novelty.

While some of the exposition comes through first-person cutscenes, which are fine despite the occasional poor line delivery, much of the lore and background are experienced through written notes scattered throughout the world. Again, this is fine, but nothing new. What’s worse, however, is that the story never really goes anywhere. No spoilers here, but if you’re playing EXD for its story, you’ll end up (at least temporarily) unfulfilled.

The Combat

It’s a similar story with the game’s combat. It’s serviceable but rarely thrilling, challenging, or interesting. The physics-based system gives weight to your weapons and there’s a massive variety of destructive tools available (swords, daggers, maces, axes, and giant hammers, for example), but using one weapon over another is somewhat meaningless and combat seldom requires any thought or strategy.

Additional tools like telekinesis and casting spells are neat, but you’ll quickly realize there’s no real need to use them when you have an axe or sword with which to settle every fight.

The crux of the problem is that enemy encounters never really evolve. Most fights, even endgame battles, boil down to an incredibly simple loop: smash or slash enemies until they fall over, then keep hitting them on the ground until they stop getting up. While certain powerful tools make things slightly more interesting (such as the object that slows time, or the elemental casting wands), there’s no avoiding the truth that EXD’s combat lacks depth.

You spend the final act of the game in part working your way through a gauntlet of enemies, which should feel intense and engaging. Instead, it feels repetitive. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that combat feels bad; it’s actually quite satisfying to smash a zombie or a dragon, for a little while. It just feels under-developed. Like much of EXD, it feels like we’re 80% of the way to a great game.

The Puzzles

Progression in EXD is often tied to environmental interaction, finding hidden switches, activating ancient mechanisms, and solving light puzzles. There are plenty of rewarding discoveries, plus optional areas that hide useful gear, collectibles, or powerful weapons. But the game’s puzzles fall short of feeling meaningful.

Many puzzles are just dead simple and there are very few “A-ha!” moments that leave you feeling clever. Instead, they feel more like simple chores you must perform to get to the next hallway or dungeon. Use your fire ability to shoot the button marked with a fire emblem, for example, or press a button before a spike trap skewers you, or use your telekinesis to move a stone or switch this way or that. The overall simplicity of the game’s puzzling moments doesn’t ruin the experience of playing EXD, but they don’t really elevate it either.

The only memorable puzzle, really, occurred in the final act. The game funnels you into a sort of subterranean central hub where you reroute power through conduits to unlock new sections and activate machinery. But by the standards of something like a Zelda game, even this, the most complicated puzzle in the game, is rudimentary.

The Horror

There were many moments during my playthrough of EXD that I made a mental note to ask my colleagues at Upload why they keep asking me to review spooky games. Because it’s scary. And this is the aspect of the game that is surely most effective.

The atmosphere is extremely oppressive, the dungeons dark and foreboding. Even in moments of relative calm, even in places where nothing is happening, it’s a deeply uncomfortable place to be. Places like the catacombs are claustrophobic, filled with fog and flickering candles emitting just enough light to let your imagination run wild. The prison area, with the distant and unrelenting screams of the tormented captives, left me legitimately unsettled.

The enemies are universally repulsive, too. Gooey, crunchy, and dripping with filth, they lurch at you from the shadows with grotesque snarls and glowing eyes. Everyone looks wet in the worst possible way.

And then there are the spiders. So hard does the game lean into these multi-legged menaces that there’s an arachnophobia warning at the outset. Indeed, a couple of set pieces starring the arachnids led to genuine distress, a testament to the effectiveness of EXD’s dev team, and the power of VR.

Though EXD – Extra Dimensional is a truly stunning showcase for VR graphics, and an amazing auditory experience in dread and fear, it’s also a game that doesn’t quite reach its full potential. The combat is fun but shallow, the puzzles are functional but far from inspired, and the story shows glimmers of greatness but ends up feeling incomplete. Nearly every major aspect of the game feels like it’s sitting at 80% completion.

And yet it works. EXD – Extra Dimensional is one of the most unique, engaging, and captivating games I’ve played this year in VR or not. The atmosphere is strong, the world is memorable, the voice acting, though stilted at times, is incredibly charming. It’s a visual and audible feast for the senses, even if the meal leaves you feeling shaky, scared, and hungry for more.

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