Dungeons and Dragons and … jump scares? I didn’t expect fantasy adventure Vanishing Realms, in development for the HTC Vive, to send me jumping half a foot into the air —€” but that’s exactly what happened during my demo of the game at the 2016 Game Developers Conference.
The jump scare happened toward the end of my time with the VR title, which is otherwise familiar and a bit unspectacular. In fact, that I had this visceral reaction at all might stand out as the one true highlight of the Vive fantasy game.
Despite Vanishing Realms being made specifically for HTC’s hardware, which affords players both head and positional tracking so that they can stumble around their living rooms for greater immersion within games, it doesn’t feel especially different from a standard, non-virtual reality video game. Drawing inspiration from the fantastical world of Dungeons and Dragons, players assume the role of a knight as they unlock doors and discover items in a nondescript magical world.
As is common with Vive games, each of the controllers is used as a hand; players can wield a sword in their right while grabbing items with their left, or vice versa. The various buttons on the controllers are used for performing actions, which doesn’t quite feel intuitive. I repeatedly struggled to grab certain items properly or place them into assigned areas using the awkward buttons on the Vive’s peripherals.

Worse was using the D-pad to move around the castle that I explored in the demo. Vanishing Realms might be a Vive game, but it’s far easier —€” even recommended —€” for players to stand completely still; they can instead choose a spot in the environment to teleport toward, in lieu of actually moving their bodies around the room.
This helps Vanishing Realms feel more like a traditional game than the “experiences" common on VR hardware at this stage. But that raises the question:€” If Vanishing Realms is comfortable being a "traditional game," why use the Vive hardware at all?
I didn’t have an answer for this until I was nearly finished with our demo. After opening a door by clumsily inserting a key I’d scoured the castle to find, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a gigantic, sword-wielding skeleton monster. With the headset on, this skeleton appeared to be nearly 6 feet tall —€” and its weapon was swinging mere inches from my face.
With a yelp, I jumped up and backed away from the monster. Vanishing Realms’ developer, Kelly Bailey, a former Valve employee who worked on the Half-Life games, laughed at me through the headphones we could hear him with; he sat in the room with me, watching my playthrough.
when I won, I felt like an actual hero
"Time to go buy a sword!" he said. I didn’t have a sword yet; the game thus far had solely been about collecting items and solving simple puzzles in order to progress. Turning around — not just in the game, but within the room too —€” I found a selection of swords in another room. After buying and grabbing the cheapest one, I trudged back toward the skeleton monster with trepidation.
Unlike the rest of the demo, where it was possible to statically press buttons to pick up objects, I had to swing my arms to attack with my sword and protect myself from the skeleton’s counterattacks. It was exhilarating and scary and, when I won, it made me feel like an actual hero.
That short boss battle illustrated what the Vive does best. I felt like I’d physically accomplished something by warding off a monster that appeared taller than me. In finding the balance between conventional game and unconventional experience, I hope that when Vanishing Realms launches April 5, it offers more unique moments that fall closer to the latter.

This is pure magic Watch on YouTube | Subscribe to Polygon on YouTube
Tilt Brush is amazing. It’s magical. It’s a bunch of stuff that sounds like hyperbole when you write about it.
We created the above video to describe why it’s so special before more people are able to try it when the HTC Vive launches in April of this year.
For the video we used a combination of my own doodling, the built-in work from the showcase in the application and drawings from artists like Tipatat Chennavasin and the YouTube account of Emerald Activities to show off what’s possible in the program.
I hope this video helps explain why Tilt Brush is so special, but nothing prepares you for actually putting on the headset, picking up the controllers and walking around the creations of others or creating your own masterpieces in full 3D. It’s also easy to use; anyone can have fun making silly drawings while you can also learn how to create something as good as what we’ve shown above.
Tilt Brush is a free pack-in with pre-orders of the HTC Vive.

Nick Carter, Joey Fatone and a few other boy band members from the 1990s have found a new job: killing zombies.
Various members from the Backstreet Boys, ‘N Sync, 98 Degrees and O-Town have teamed up for SyFy’s made-for-TV movie, Dead 7. In the film, the guys play a “ragtag team of gunslingers," according to the press release, who must defend a small town in the Wild West from a zombie invasion in a post-apocalyptic world. Carter will star in the movie as Jack, a reluctant hero who gets the band of outlaws together to fight the horde of undead in the first place.
The film will also star the aforementioned mentioned Fatone alongside Backstreet Boys A.J. McLean and Howie Dorough. ‘N Sync’s Chris Kirkpatrick, 98 Degrees’ Jeff Timmons and O-Town’s Erik-Michael Estrada have also signed on to the project.
Created in partnership with SyFy and the team that worked on the Sharknado series, Dead 7 will premiere on April 1 at 8 p.m. ET. Unfortunately, there’s no word on whether the boys will sing.

The first half of Daredevil’s second season is underwhelming.
When season one launched a year ago, it did so in a significantly different environment in superhero film adaptations. Marvel’s only other television projects were Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter, an ensemble spy show and a period action drama respectively. Daredevil burst onto the scene as Marvel’s first television show about a superhero — the first addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe where the hero actually fights crime, not supervillains, conspiracies, magic or their own super-science messes — and one that was bleak, suspenseful and violent in a way that the company could never get away with on primetime ABC.
Daredevil season two isn’t bad, it’s just alright
But then, this past fall, Jessica Jones took the television scene by storm, proving that a superhero show could be a faithful adaptation full of sci-fi action, intrigue and derring do — and also one of the most candid and affecting examinations of rape, domestic abuse and trauma survival in modern television history. Even more recently, Deadpool’s weird mix of humor, violence, sex and (yes) emotional heart somehow seems to have only taught Hollywood that audiences want more sex and violence in their superhero stories, despite nobody actually asking for that.
This is the environment in which Daredevil’s second season has arrived, and it just feels like more of the same.

The most fitting criticism of the first season of Daredevil was that it was a bit familiar, a bit comic book-y: If you wanted to watch a slightly updated take on street-level comic book superheroes of the late ’80s, it was for you (and I include myself in that). That’s fine and good! A first season — especially one with an origin story — can be forgiven for laying out a platform of expectations from which to spring and subvert. But season two’s first half does precious little that’s new with those ideas.
And while I’m interested to see where things go in the second half, to get to that point the audience will have to sit through a lot of the sort of writing that the word “cliche" was invented for.

"In all my years as a cop I’ve never seen anything like this," and "We need to find Matt before this goes wide; tell him everything’s about to change," are lines delivered without a trace of irony.
The show’s fight scenes are still well crafted, surprising and brutal. They’re also significantly more violent in a way that feels like an attempt to up the ante but just comes off as gratuitous. I was not expecting to watch a man’s face take the brunt of a shotgun blast from point blank range or a man’s foot have a power drill put through it in this season, much less both of those in a single episode.
Punisher (Jon Bernthal) and Elektra (Elodie Yung) are interesting as antagonist and unreliable ally respectively, but they feel like they’re distracting Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) from his actual goals in a way that the show is slow to acknowledge. Punisher is killing entirely reprehensible criminals, which means that both he and his victims are folks with dirty records. Elektra is only ever in danger that she deliberately courts. Without innocents hanging in the balance of their actions, the stakes don’t feel particularly high.
The season’s seventh episode was the first to end with a cut to credits that left me wanting to hit play on the next one immediately. Unfortunately, it was also the last episode that Netflix made available to press in advance. A Netflix show can’t afford to wait until its fifth or sixth episode to get to the meat of a season.

Still, it’s meat that I’m looking forward to. Nelson & Murdock are taking on another make-or-break-the-firm court case, and Daredevil has finally uncovered a truly bizarre mystery in Hell’s Kitchen (although the answer, judging by hints so far and the upcoming slate of Marvel Netflix shows, looks like it’s going to be "dated Orientalist tropes"). Both of these plot lines feel like the show is finally getting some urgency and pulling the viewer back into real drama.
Daredevil season two (what was made available to press, anyway) isn’t bad, it’s just … alright. It feels like it’s trying a little when it should be trying hard. And in an increasingly competitive and saturated market of on-screen superheroes, not trying hard is something no superhero show can afford to do.

Pied Piper just can’t catch a break The first trailer for Silicon Valley’s third season is here, and the Pied Piper folks are getting ready for the fight of their lives.
Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) wants to retain ownership of his company, but the venture capitalist firm he’s working with would rather bring in a new CEO. This causes some friction between the new head honcho, Jack Barker (Stephen Tobolowsky), and Pied Piper’s spiritual commander, Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller).
While Richard and the crew figure out how to remain on top, Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) is still devising a plan to take their company down and create a better platform at Hooli. There are also quite a few instances of Jared Dunn (Zach Woods) doing something unbelievably embarrassing, including the promotion of a new company jacket which doesn’t jell with the rest of the team.
Silicon Valley returns to HBO April 24, following the season six premiere of Game of Thrones.