PAX attendees play Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes on Saturday. Chris Kohler/WIRED
SEATTLE — It’s a typical action-movie cliche. Someone has to disarm a bomb, but they know nothing about how to do it. Fortunately, they have a bomb-defusal expert—on the phone. Hijinks ensue as the expert tries to talk the newbie through the delicate process.
Admit it, you’ve always wanted to do this in real life. This new Oculus game gives you that chance.
On the show floor at Penny Arcade Expo, currently taking place in Seattle through Monday evening, a small table with easily-missable signage hosts the demo version of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes , currently in development for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. It’s so early in development that the team, three guys who met in the Ottawa game development scene, doesn’t even have a name yet. But they’ve got a corker of a proof-of-concept. It’s easily the most exciting new idea I found at PAX.
Keep Talking got its start when Ottawa area indie developers Allen Pestaluky, Ben Kane and Brian Fetter worked together on a Global Game Jam project in January of this year. The idea came from an episode of the animated show Archer that had a bomb-disarming bit, Pestaluky says. “They were trying to communicate back and forth, and all of these silly things came up when they were talking, trying to defuse the bomb.”
Within a week, a YouTube video of their Game Jam version, created over a single weekend, had racked up over 150,000 views, Pestaluky said. Since then, they’ve been working on the game full-time, and plan to release it on the day that the consumer version of the Oculus becomes available—whenever that is.
Screenshot of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes Keep Talking Team
Keep Talking consists of two separate but inextricable pieces: the Oculus Rift software, and a paper manual sitting on the demo table in a three-hole notebook. The bomb that players see on screen is composed of any number of different modules, each of which is a miniature puzzle: a series of colored wires, an array of lights, or maybe just a big red button that reads “PRESS.”
Each page of the manual relates to a different module. Only you don’t know which ones are on the bomb. So the player disarming the bomb first starts describing what the modules look like. The twist, which immediately becomes apparent, is that the player isn’t sure what information is useful and what is noise: Do you need to know the color of the wires? The orientation? The length? This is figured out by the reader of the manual, a dense wall of text that explains how to solve each puzzle.
The manual text is, deliberately, a bit scattershot and overwrought. “We’ve had a lot of interesting challenges regarding, how do you structure the rules in the manual so that they’re fair, but also challenging and interesting?” says Pestaluky. “As we’ve played with players, we’ve been feeling out how people are able to understand text. Kids are interesting. Kids will read line by line much better than adults, who kind of learn to skip.”
Once the reader wades through the blocks of text and figures out what action to take, they can tell the bomb-defuser to cut the correct wire, or press the button, or not press the button. Assuming they don’t explode, they can move on to the next module.
First-time players of the demo can choose a mode in which they have five minutes to disarm three modules, which are always the first three modules in the book. “Normal” mode uses half the book, roughly 10 pages. “Expert” mode uses the whole thing. The game will be distributed with a digital manual that can be printed or just viewed on a tablet or laptop.
If you want to step up the difficulty, you can customize the time limit and number of modules. “You can easily make it so that it’s not humanly possible,” Pestaluky says.
Keep Talking creates a wonderfully asymmetric challenge. The defusal expert can’t cheat and peek at the screen, and the player in the Rift can’t steal a glance at the manual either. From either side of the scenario, it’s a hell of a lot of fun to have to rely on only the words of the person next to you, with whom you can’t even make eye contact.
Playing the game tends to create an atmosphere that Pestaluky describes as “silly tense”: Nerve-wracking, but the sort of thing you can laugh about immediately following. But that’s not to say Keep Talking might not be responsible for a few fights.
“We’ve seen some married couples, and couples who [place] a strong importance on their communication skills,” says Pestaluky. “When they see their communication break down, it can sometimes invoke a whole bunch of negative emotions, which is kind of funny.”
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