Room Escape Artist

Taskmaster VR is a VR game available on Steam developed by Scallywag Arcade and published by Draw & Code. It is a VR representation of the British comedy tv show Taskmaster created by Alex Horne with Greg Davies and the Taskmaster.

Format

Style of Play:

• VR

Who is it For?

• Taskmaster fans

Required Equipment: Oculus VR headset or Meta Quest

Recommended Team Size: 1

Play Time: Each task is individually timed, usually between 5 and 20 minutes. An episode can be paused and put down at any time.

Price: $24.99

Booking: purchase and play at your leisure

Description

It’s a recreation of the Taskmaster tv show in VR. Contestants play through a few “episodes” of Taskmaster, consisting of a series of tasks (3 house tasks and a studio task). After each task, Greg and Alex judge and score their attempts.

This is a VR physics sandbox game where you manipulate game objects to perform tasks. It is playable seated or standing.

Andrew Reynolds’ Reaction

I’ve watched a good amount of Taskmaster, and the show has made one thing very clear to me – I want to hang out at the Taskmaster house and perform silly and frustrating tasks, and then have Greg and Alex chide me for all of my missteps. Taskmaster VR allowed me to do exactly that.

Taskmaster is all about the tasks, and the tasks presented in the VR version felt very authentic to the show. For the most part, the creators did not go down a wild path, designing tasks that could only be accomplished in VR. Many of the tasks were aided by the medium, but felt like they could be reasonably represented in the show as well. They were creative, they allowed for an amount of creative problem solving, and back in the studio Greg and Alex let me know just how bad I was at whatever I was doing. Some of my poor task performance can be put on VR controls, which are still a bit finicky when it comes to making small changes to item placement. I am also apparently terrible at throwing objects in VR, and there was a surprising amount of that needed.

While attempting to complete the tasks was fun, Taskmaster VR didn’t quite make me feel like I was on the show. During judgment, you are just listening to the hosts; part of the joy of the show is the reactions of the contestants. The understandable lack of two-way banter and the camaraderie that develops when watching fellow participants have their own struggles or hero moments made the studio scenes feel empty compared to the show. However, that may be an unfair comparison. The things Greg and Alex said often did feel like genuine reactions to my specific task attempts, and I think we could all use an occasional humorous humbling from our venerated Taskmaster.

Brett Kuehner’s Reaction

I love Taskmaster. I’ve watched all of the UK, Australia, and NZ series, plus episodes from several other countries, and even the independent “Taskmaster: Minnesota.” I was excited when I heard Taskmaster VR was being released, and I really wanted to like this game. Sadly, I don’t. In fact, I couldn’t play enough of it to really tell how good or bad most of the tasks were.

Some of the core reasons:

• The VR tracking is nausea-inducing. The world has a tendency to bounce up and down at times, and pushing on some of the sets will move the whole world away from your viewpoint, which is very disorienting. I made sure I had the most recent update of the game, I turned on as many comfort settings as I could, and I still was queasy after 5 minutes.
• The first real task requires you to manipulate things with spatulas, which would be an amusing constraint if the physics of items was better. At different points I managed to embed a skillet in the stovetop, struggled to slide a slice of bread onto a plate, and constantly dropped things even when they should have been balanced.
• The first task makes you assemble a sandwich from a list of items that Alex is imagining, but the list is only available every minute or two, and you have to remember it. This wouldn’t be so bad, but some of the items in the list seemed to look different from the actual items available in the kitchen, so I was unable to complete a sandwich even after multiple restarts.
• There is no way I could find to skip a task. I was willing to push through the nausea to attempt the task, but after getting stuck 3 times with what appeared to be a correct sandwich and no feedback from Alex beyond “check the task,” I gave up. It would have been nice to be able to try a different task that might have worked better for me.

A couple of small positives:

• The practice task (moving cutouts of Alex and Greg) was simple enough, and the controls seemed ok for it.
• The audio is great, with actual music and voices from Alex and Greg.
• The models for the house seem to match the show, at least for the areas I was able to see.

Perhaps a future update will address some of the issues and I can try again… but for now? I’m done. I’m going to go watch a 2D episode of the show instead.

Ryan Brady’s Reaction

I have never watched Taskmaster beyond a few short clips that have been shared with me by others, so I had few expectations going in. My broad reaction is that the format is interesting, the hosts are entertaining, and the British humor is only occasionally bad. So, congratulations! Taskmaster VR, you have sold me on Taskmaster. Unfortunately, the assigned task was primarily to make a fun puzzle game, and in this respect the game has earned far fewer points.

Fundamentally, Taskmasker VR is a physics puzzle game, but the physics simply aren’t very good. This led to annoying experiences where in many cases I knew what the game wanted me to do, but could not get the game objects to cooperate because they are often only casually acquainted with the concepts of friction, collision, and gravity. For me the tasks were about an even split between ones that were fun and ones that were frustrating. There were a lot of ways in which the game felt half-baked, and I think with some more time in the oven it could’ve been much improved.

As it is though, I can only recommend this game to fans of the series, for whom what I assume are myriad references may be enough to overcome the shortcomings of the game portion.