Budget Cuts
A PC VR gem that shines best without a tether.
I remember being excited about this game when I got it on the Oculus Rift store in October of 2018. A lot of games that support room scale just end up letting you stand in one spot without adding anything to make you want to move around. This is a game that benefits well from full room scale VR. Lots of walking, ducking, crawling, etc. As excited as I was, I only played it for around 30 minutes before nearly yanking the PC off my desk with the cord that attached to the headset. I put it on my backlog with the hope that it would be released on the (then upcoming) Oculus Quest.
Here I am in 2022 and this is still not available on the Quest store but streaming it with Virtual Desktop was indistinguishable from any native Quest title. The game play was fun and engaging, making excellent use of a teleportation system as an actual game mechanic and not just another locomotion mode. There are also a ton of mutators that you can use to modify the game play. Want infinite weapons or tougher Supervisors? They have mutators for all of that and more.
The world building and writing also stand out. The team behind this made the world of Budget Cuts come alive largely though paper documents, signs, overheard conversation, taxes, and phone calls.
Visuals: Nothing could be closer to ideal for me than the 3D models and minimal use of textures used in this game. I love stylized worlds much more than anything photo-realistic. Many low-poly games only go part of the way. They do a decent job with environmental geometry, but then end up messing up the scale of objects inside that world. Many games also rely too much on flat shaded or colored models with no textures. Budget Cuts does a much better job than most games at using these art styles to better effect. They make use of simple diffuse textures without going over the edge to physically-based rendering. They also make skillful use of lighting to make these textures and models absorb the mood of the current scene or room. Here are a handful of my favorite photos from the game.
Overall, I really enjoyed this game and I’m glad I finally got to finish it. I’ll pick up Budget Cuts 2 at some point, but for now I’m heading back to the rest of my unfinished PC VR library.