Magic Gone Wrong, Done Right ‘Nicodemus: Demon of Evanishment’ Enthralls (The NoPro Review)

by Amanda Schuckman
Amanda Schuckman
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October 26, 2018
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6 min read

When I went to Glendale to try The VOID’s new offering, I did so with two companions. A staff member joined us to even the team out, as you are immediately separated upon entering the experience, and being all by your lonesome in a VR horror experience could be a bit much. While we stood waiting to be summoned into the first grey cubicle where we would put our visors down, we asked the staff member which of The VOID’s VR experiences — Secrets of the Empire (the supremely fun Star Wars experience), Ghostbusters: Dimension, or Nicodemus — was his favorite, and he told us, “Oh, this one. The other ones are fun, but this one really shows what we can do with the technology.”

He was not wrong.

The first insanely fun thing that happens when you arrive to check in for Nicodemus is watching the person with the weakest nerves in your group pull full-body flinches in response to the screams coming from the back of the game area. The second is, you get to select a character. Nothing so boring as a character select screen, there are actual stacks of beautifully illustrated trading cards sitting out, each with a visual of a character, a description of their backstory and motivation, and a scannable code. In the end I had to go with the tenacious reporter in head-to-toe red velvet and frankly spectacular plumed hat. There were multiple spectacular plumed hatted characters to choose from, so it’s fair to say you are spoiled with riches from the get go. After selecting your card, you are shown a video primer explaining the story in brief: three days before the close of the 1893 Chicago’s World Fair, “ a tragic demonstration in the Electro-Spiritualism Exhibit brought something terrible into our world.” Workmen refused to dismantle the exhibit, strange lights were seen emanating from it, and people kept disappearing into the evanishment room, which is sort of what you’d imagine they would do in an evanishment room, since evanishment literally just means “vanishing” but that’s 1893 for you. You, the player, are being tasked to return to the derelict site and seek out the demon Nicodemus, and ideally banish it, or die trying. There are degrees to how badly you can screw this up.

After watching the primer, you suit up into The VOID’s haptic jacket and helmet. A technician scans each jacket and the character card you selected, so they are paired. When they finally give you the go ahead to drop your visor, the result is startling and thrilling: Each of you appears, to yourself and to each other, as the character you swiped. The fabric of the clothing, the details of the faces, are stupidly mesmerizing. Everyone spends two minutes waving their hands in front of their faces and trying to high five or pretend to touch each other’s hats. This is a critical and awesome two minutes, DO NOT SKIP IT. As the set comes into focus around you, you realize you’re standing in an elevator. The elevator then breaks in two, and you watch the other half of your team disappear down a long, forebodingly darkened tunnel, until the floor starts moving and you, too, move along a track until the car lurches to a stop and the door opens, and you enter the first scene.

This is all not actually happening. All four of you are standing totally still, but each team sees the other team disappear first. This is completely bonkers and so effective as a way of creating and instant feeling of isolation and disorientation that it is straight up crazy town to think it is entirely product of The VOID’s clever use of tactile feedback combined with the insane VR visuals of Nicodemus.

And they are insane. One of the greatest let downs of most VR experiences are the bland graphics. In the Jack Ryan Experience at San Diego Comic Con, the graphics were about what you’d expect from a PS3 port of a massively complex PC game. They were so lacking in detail and not at all fleshed out that even when the experience was buggy and you couldn’t move, you didn’t even really have anything to look at. (Now, granted, if the movement and interactive elements in that experience had been as seamless as what The VOID is producing, you wouldn’t have cared about the graphics. You ziplined off a building, for crying out loud.) But The VOID has created the ideal VR experience: a real, tangible world around you, skinned in beautifully detailed, dynamic, visually arresting graphics.

The first room we entered had a mirror on the wall. In addition to being creepy, it immediately provided a moment for us to look into it and see ourselves — our 1893 selves. Another of The VOID’s more impressive and baffling tricks is the absense of any hand gear, but the ability to see and use your hands, the visual tracking of which is very close to perfect. Nicodemus introduces you to The VOID’s newst “WTF how” moment, because when you speak, your avatar’s lips move.

This is so far down the rabbit hole of “Thing I Wanted To Be Real When I Was Nine” it’s difficult to express in words. This is the first recognizeable step into any fantasy you’ve ever had of actually getting to be in a video game; of actually being immersed in a gaming experience. The obvious parallel is Ready Player One. This is Baby’s First Oasis, except better because everyone isn’t ruining it by branding themeselves with whatever commercialized nostalgia signifiers they can find. The game world is the game world, and everyone is in it, and the game world is awfully reminiscent of Bioshock. So obviously, I was instantly obsessed.

Nicodemus is a series of puzzle rooms, with timed events you have to respond to, and tasks you have to perform correctly to get through. Depending on how you do, Nicodemus makes various appearances and hurries you on your way. Depending on how well your teams do moving through the puzzle rooms, your end results will vary. You may all die, or you may barely escape, or you may even evanish Nicodemus and right the terrible rift in the world. There are numerous endings. I am already trying to schedule a return trip to do better.

Nicodemus is terrifying, by the way. The only person in our group who didn’t scream at least once was the staff member (who played as the plucky adventuress, bless his heart). Our scaredy-cat even loved it, in the end, asserting that it isn’t too much to get through even for those who don’t typically love haunts or immersive experiences with horror elements.

There are some great scares, here, to be sure. But what really stands out is the depth of the immersion, and what really tantalizes is how much further you could go with the experience. My partner and I both agreed, we would have happily spent twice as much time in the experience if it meant doing a deeper dive into the journals, posters, and science exhibits you encounter along the experience. The interaction isn’t at that stage, yet, but what’s there is great. As fun as shooting stormtroopers is, it is so much more rewarding to get your hands on pieces of the environment, and use them and manipulate them to change that environment and further your progress.

Get a group of four together and go do Nicodemus. It is a great Halloween adventure with the costumes-built in, and a thrilling look at where VR is going next.

Nicodemus: Demon of Evanishment is part of the repertory offerings at multiple locations of The Void. Check listings for details.

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