Odds are you spend most of your day online in one form or another — you’re reading this online, after all — but we don’t really get a chance to visit the Internet. Not physically, anyway. Not until now.

Ralph Breaks VR is one of the latest offerings from The VOID, the location based VR innovators who power Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire and other experiences. The VOID has expanded thanks to the backing of Disney, both in terms of number of locations and in the storyworlds that the budding company gets to play in.

This latest experience is the most game-like yet of the three I’ve had the pleasure of running through. (The other two being SW: SotE and Ghostbusters.) In it, Wreck-It Ralph and Vanellope Von Schweets — voiced here by John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman, just like the movies — sneak you into the Internet to play the latest and greatest game: “Pancakes and Milkshakes.”

As a big fan of Wreck-It Ralph who found the “Pancakes and Milkshakes” part of the Ralph Breaks The Internet trailer, and after-credits sequence, to be the funniest part of the new film, I was charmed as heck to get the chance to go play the game. Of course, this being a journey guided by Ralph and Penelope, things were bound to go wrong.

The story moves you through a series of puzzles and games your squad of up to four players must get through in order to play “Pancakes and Milkshakes.” The run-up puzzles are more frantic than anything in SW: SotE or Ghostbusters, fitting with the vibe of the Ralph franchise. Our team’s one major gripe was that a “shock” mechanic in one puzzle which caused your haptic vest to buzz was tuned to a point past “distracting” that went to “uncomfortable” for one of our party. Given that Ralph Breaks VR is probably the most family-friendly piece in The VOID’s catalogue, that tuning seems bizarre, and could have been a miscalibration of that set of vests at the Glendale location that day.

Once the initial challenges are through the squad finds a set of rifles that can switch their ammunition between pancakes and milkshakes, and it’s off to the diner set of the game.

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Then it is all bunnies and kitties and glorious chaos. For the time we were there I was in a little dream. More than any of the other experiences at The VOID, Ralph Breaks VR looks exactly like source material. It helps, of course, that the source material is computer generated in the first place. One wonders what it would be like to hang out in the world or Frozen, or better yet the Spider-Verse.

The wild thing about The VOID is that the players are running around a relatively small volume of space that can be reskinned to look like just about anything. Ralph Breaks VR follows SW: SotE and Ghostbusters in terms of basic formatting, which means that if you’ve experienced the others the types of interactions won’t be all that novel to you. The climatic moment in each is a shooting gallery filled with effects. However if you haven’t checked out The VOID and dig Ralph more than you do Star Wars or Ghostbusters, this is more than a good starting place.

As someone who has been through The VOID four times now (uh, I did Star Wars twice, naturally) I find myself being a little too aware of where I am on the virtual set as I’m going through the experience. Maybe it’s just me, but I bet there’s some more twists and turns that can be put into the mapping using The VOID’s innovative redirected walking tech. If anything I’m really, really interested in Nicodemus: Demon of Evanishment — an original story from The VOID’s Curtis Hickman and his father, the legendary Dungeons & Dragons writer Tracy Hickman — that would seem to use the platform in a different way than the licensed properties have so far.

I actually enjoyed Ralph Breaks VR more than I enjoyed Ralph Breaks The Internet, in part because of the whole “Pancakes and Milkshakes” thing. There’s some serious manic joy in the piece, although at roughly $30 a throw, this one feels lightweight in comparison to the other options. That, I think, can be chalked up to the stakes in the story, which are a lot lower than those in The VOID’s other experiences.

That said: I could play “Pancakes and Milkshakes” forever and ever.


Ralph Breaks VR plays on specific days at multiple locations of The VOID. Ticket price varies by location. Check website for dates and times.


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