One minute you’re innocently reeling in fish while your buddy Prompto takes photos on the sidelines. The next, you’re firing a crossbow at a massive sharp-toothed menace that crawls and flops towards you with unsettling speed.
Last year, Square Enix announced that it would be supplementing the release of Final Fantasy XV with a short, additional experience tailored to the Playstation VR headset. Players would fight their way through the mission from the Episode Duscae demo, in which Noctis, Ignis, Gladiolus, and Prompto battle a half-blind Behemoth called Dead-Eye. In the VR version, you play from Prompto’s point of view, using his dual pistols to help your friends take down the monster. Earlier this summer, Square Enix announced that this mini VR shooter had been canceled, and instead the development team would be focusing on another VR experience: Monster of the Deep.
Monster of the Deep is a first-person version of Final Fantasy XV’s fishing minigame. Using PlayStation Move controllers, you summon a sonar device to locate where in the pool before you fish may be lurking. Then, using the Move’s motion controls, you cast your rod and (hopefully) reel in your catch, moving the Move from side to side as the screen alerts you in order to not lose the fish.
This seems harmless enough, and for the most part it is. There’s something satisfying in wrangling in those fish, wrestling them on the end of your line and hearing Prompto’s congratulations as you lower it into your net. However, in the recent demo I played, everything went off the rails before I knew what was happening.
After catching three fish, the lagoon before me suddenly dimmed, the music ramped up to a frantic pace, and I suddenly saw myself staring into the fanged maw of a what looked like an overgrown angler fish. Its beady red eyes bored into me as it flapped its way towards me — and whipped its tail around to him me.
For those who are easily startled when playing VR games, this is the part where you’ll probably feel your heart race. For the easily startled in general, like myself, this was worth a very unbecoming shriek.
Having the monster so close to your face is definitely jarring. The goal is to keep it at bay and defeat it using a crossbow that has suddenly appeared in your hands. The shooting mechanic here didn’t work as well as I would have liked it to, and although I eventually took down the monster, it was a harrowing few minutes trying to keep it from getting into my face again.
Despite the terror of its later half, Monster of the Deep is an enjoyable footnote to the Final Fantasy XV universe. Fans who just can’t get enough of the world of Eos can fish for themselves on November 21.
