Have Mercy is the project of students at the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweeden, for an academic course at Advanced Graphics and Interaction. In it, you traverse different mazes chasing for a checkpoint, either by running in place, for real, or doing a similar motion with your body, you just need your phone’s sensors to pick it.

Your opponent can sit idly, as he’ll use his mobile do draw walls and obstacles, create fake checkpoints, hide the real ones, and generally making your life impossible in any way they can imagine.

The best way to describe the feeling is imagining spending a whole night yelling the game’s title with a smartphone strapped on your head as your friends’ laughter and the smell of pizza grows stronger in the background.

Looking at the price tags of high-end devices like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive (USD600 and 800 on Amazon, as of this writing), anyone would be tempted to think the dream isn’t real just yet – virtual reality is here, sure, if you are willing to spend a the equivalent of a new desktop computer for an experimental videogame console.

But projects like Google Cardboard, while looking like “jokes” and maybe even cash-grabs, are perfectly fine alternatives when the developers focus on fun rather than power.

More importantly, Have Mercy an interesting, simple game made in Unity that proves a lot of things about VR: despite the futuristic ideal we have about it, it’s still about playing (and getting creative) with reality, and even the simplest of real life games can take advantage of this technology.

While we are all still waiting for more hyper-realistic, jaw-dropping simulations a la Elite Dangerous…

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Have Mercy shows you really don’t need high-end power (not in the hardware, not in the game itself) before you can have fun, heres place for less serious endeavors in the world of virtual reality

Indeed, it would be really hard to play this kind of physical game with all the cords and whistles attached to the Oculus or HTC Vive, so that’s a niche where the “cheap”, less cumbersome alternatives might have an advantage after all.

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