作者彙整: Hunter Wolfe

That Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son exists is an enigma. The 1993 film starring Bill Murray, who plays a character trapped in a one-day time loop, is beloved, and creating a sequel to that story more than two decades later – in the form of a video game, mind you – was no small feat, requiring a rare confluence between both the games industry and Hollywood. We got to chat with the teams creating the follow-up to that story about their vision for the game.

Groundhog Day VR is set about two decades after the 1993 film. Players take on the role of Phil Connors Jr., the son of the movie’s protagonist, who is stuck in a one-day time loop just like his father. Tequila Works, the developer behind games like Rime and The Invisible Hours, is helming the game’s production, and creative director Raúl Rubio knew early on he wanted to tell the story of the son instead of the father.

“We decided to tell Phil Jr.’s story, because Phil Sr. is kind of an amazing person,” Rubio says. “He’s loved by everyone. In his little universe, he’s God. For your children, that must be the worst experience ever, because you are growing up in the shadow of a perfect man. Phil Jr. has daddy issues.”

While Groundhog Day VR tells an original story, the team still intends to retain the film’s core themes. Tequila Works spent a lot of time early in production talking with Danny Rubin, one of the film’s writers, trying to understand the core of the original script.

“We asked all the fanboy questions we wanted to ask,” Rubio says.

When we asked what causes Connors Jr.’s time loops, the team was hush hush, but it did explain a little more of the game’s design.

Phil Jr. is an “a–hole” at the beginning of the game, according to Rubio. To break out of his time loop, which starts at 6 a.m. and resets at midnight, he has to explore the town of Punxsutawney, interacting with the residents to learn their dreams, goals, and fears, to ultimately help them solve their own problems. The team describes the game as a Metroidvania – interacting with the world each day teaches you new things that allows you to make progress during the next loop.

“We’re playing with the idea that the player is evolving as they learn about the world that they’re in,” says Jake Zim, the senior VP of virtual reality at Sony Pictures Entertainment who first identified the film as a good opportunity for a VR experience. “When we looked at Groundhog Day, we thought, ‘What is this about?’ It’s about this character’s evolution from being a piece of sh– to turning into someone who really cares about the world and people around him. There’s something fun about playing with the evolution of a player – how a player goes through a game, and learns new things, and solves puzzles, and becomes more aware of their world.”

There is a day/night cycle in Groundhog Day VR, but time only moves forward when players participate in certain scenes and setpieces. Your in-game phone tracks the time certain events take place and maintains records of the Punxsutawney denizens you interact with, so you too can reference new information in each time loop that follows. Scenes happen in real-time, too – Rubio says characters won’t wait around for you to do something, so you need to be mindful of how you spend your free time.

You can spend some of that free time learning new skills, like playing the piano. Rubio explains minigames aren’t menial and require actual skill. In the case of the piano, it will require players to actually learn and understand music.

We asked about potential returning cast members from the film that inspired the game, but the team was particularly tight-lipped on this topic. 

“There are obviously challenges with bringing cast [members] back to a certain degree. We’re really focused on the new cast and the new generation that we have here… all the kids,” Zim says. “There are callbacks, but the real focus is on driving forward this new cast. I don’t want to make any promises. We think we have a great game and a great cast, and everything is really packaged to be what we want it to be. But you never know…”

We also asked if I Got You Babe, the song that played on the radio every time Phil Connors woke up in Groundhog Day, would make it into the game. Tequila Works says there is a licensed song that plays every time you wake up, but wouldn’t reveal the title, except for that it’s part of Sony’s catalogue.

Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son is a strange fusion of games and film that we never would have predicted. While it plays on an established narrative trope – being stuck in a nightmarish time loop until the protagonist confronts their moral shortcomings – we’re excited to put on our headsets and explore Punxsutawney ourselves; to experience that trope in a way that hasn’t been explored before.

Groundhog Day VR will launch on PSVR, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift sometime in 2019. You can listen to our full interview with the team in this episode of The Game Informer Show. In the world of VR, there’s a new Angry Birds game for you to wreak havoc in. And hilariously, a VR game called Apex Construct is seeing a boost in sales thanks to players mistaking it for Apex Legends.

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Trials Rising might come to mind when thinking about biking games in 2019, but the upcoming Lonely Mountains: Downhill is taking a quieter approach to the genre. The third-person experience opts for pedal mountain biking rather than motorized power, forgoing Trials’ fireworks and bombastic setpieces. Instead, Lonely Mountains drops you at the top of stylized versions of real-world mountains, tasking you with a simple goal: reach the bottom.

The paths down each mountain are not straightforward – every slope offers branching paths that convene at checkpoints where you save your progress. If you crash, you restart at your last checkpoint at the time you initially reached it. You can take the clearly defined, safer routes where you’re less likely to crash, or try to find hidden shortcuts by prayerfully hopping down the sides of cliffs. Shortcuts aren’t always easy to discover and require some experimentation (a.k.a. crashing), but they significantly cut down the time it takes to reach each checkpoint. Lonely Mountains: Downhill will be a paradise for speedrunners who enjoy the challenge of finding fast routes.

Your main goal is always to reach the bottom of the mountain, but each location has an assortment of side objectives. Some are goal-based, like One-Life-Mode, which reduces you to one life; others are time-based, challenging you to race down the mountain as fast as possible. Completing these side objectives unlocks different bikes with varying stats. Some have lower stability and agility but offer higher shock absorption, which allows you to land trickier jumps when navigating shorter, off-the-beaten-path routes. Others can reach higher acceleration but have lower grip. 

Completing each mountain’s side objectives rewards you with new bike parts, and you also unlock outfits for your avatar, paint jobs for your bike, and new mountains to descend. We tested our mettle on a whitewashed Alps mountainside, in addition to a sun-soaked, rocky path in Redmoor Peaks, Colorado. Unlike the Trials series, Lonely Mountains’ environments are quiet spaces. There are no spectators – no camera flashes. There’s no music, either, which helps build the game’s sense of solitude.

For as many moments of meditative ambience we experienced in our hands-on time, there were as many moments of intensity: we’d cheer when our bikes survived drops down cliff faces, and our muscles would tense when, instead of hitting the brakes every few yards, we’d flirt with acceleration down paths that we should have crashed on. Several times, we burst into laughter after crashing into a cactus or tree we thought we could avoid. Crashing and having to restart at checkpoints never felt punishing, but since we only experienced the game’s first two mountains, we’re curious to see if the difficulty at other locations feels equally fair.

Lonely Mountains Downhill launches later this year for PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC, Mac, and Linux.

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The Occupation is an upcoming first-person thriller that puts players in the role of an investigative journalist in 1987 who has only four hours to crack the case of a terrorist bombing. The latest gameplay trailers walks players through a portion of the game, illustrating the branching paths players can take to gather leads for their exposé.

Time is your greatest threat in The Occupation – one hour in real-time equates to one in-game hour (which, in a way, reflects the nature of being a journalist under a deadline). In the new gameplay trailer, the protagonist learns that the head of the local news organization might be printing lies about the terrorist bombing, and proof might exist on a floppy disk that’s lost somewhere in the office.

The game evokes Dishonored in the way that players can approach a task in a variety of ways. The floppy disk might be hidden in a specific office, and players can sneak in through certain vents, spy from the shadows as an NPC puts in the office passcode, or locate a fuse box in order to shut down the security system completely.

Developer White Paper Games says players need to pay close attention to their surroundings. Later in the trailer, after players have obtained the floppy disk, the player walks through a security checkpoint and the magnetic sensors damage the drive. Apparently, this can be avoided by going another route, but now players have to use precious time finding a place to repair the drive.

The Occupation is out March 5 for Xbox One, PS4, and PC. It made our list of our 20 Most Anticipated Indie Games of 2019.

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Epic Games has a valentine for you, and it’s a free Fortnite Battle Pass.

While players wait for Season 8 to begin, they can complete 13 Overtime Challenges to nab next season’s Battle Pass for free. The Battle Pass gives players two Season 8 outfits instantly, with the potential to earn up to five more. Make sure to complete those challenges soon – the giveaway ends February 27.

Patch v7.40 also brings back gifting for a limited time, from now until February 22. As an extra Valentine’s Day bonus, players can send the Heartspan Glider to a friend for free until February 15 at 7 p.m. EST.

Players who are hungry for new game modes will enjoy the new limited time mode – Catch! — which removes guns from the game completely, restricting players to grenades and throwable objects like Port-a-Forts.

You can read the full patch notes on the official Fortnite blog here.

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