System: Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: Free
Comfort Rating: Yellow
Genre: Interactive Experience
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: 15+
VR Shop Score 1/100: 20
Description: DeathTolls Experience is a journey through data in virtual reality that aims to re-sensitize the user to the casualties of the terrorist attacks in Europe, refugee deaths in the Mediterranean Sea, and the human cost of the Syrian civil war. The project challenges the lack of concern that results from the frequency of such news on the mass media. By walking the user through hundreds of thousands of dead bodies in photorealistic CGI scenes, the creator Ali Eslami aims to inspire an active awareness towards big data that represents massive deaths, and compassion for the people behind those numbers.
On the basis of a virtual journey through the history of European bloodbaths, an ocean filled with body bags containing recently drowned Syrian refugees, and casualties of the Syrian civil war, DeathTolls Experience immerses us in the meaning of these figures, opening up an emotional perspective on this suffering and terror.
Review: DeathTolls Experience is an on-rails cinematic experience in which you will see the number of bodies from various events laid out in a way that is supposed to represent the horrible scale of deaths from those said events. But this is a one-sided, non-descriptive experience that doesn’t show the whole story. So if you want to remain ignorant about the reasons for these deaths this might be worth a look, but for someone like myself who tries to understand the reasons of these events and conflicts, this does nothing for me. I’m sure someone will like this, but that person wasn’t me.
