HyperBody
Release date: Mar 28, 2024
Developers: Pete Jiadong Qiang
Publishers: FSCHOOL
Genres: Adventure, Indie, Simulation, Free To Play
Categories: Single-player, Tracked Controller Support, VR Only
Supported languages: English

Welcome to HyperBody dungeons, an experimental open-world VR game space with six intense gameplay levels: Pinkray, Seventeen/Sixty-One, Vampire Squid, Stratholme.GoStop, Typhoon Lionrock, and Garden Portal. Immerse yourself in an aesthetised trance world that showcases the anime, comics, games, and novels of European and Asian fandoms. The VR experience is 'passive', requiring only basic movements such as walking, flying, rotating, and touching. It will help if you search for the portal with a shining eye shape that will take you to a new level. The experiment encourages players to use their entire bodies to explore the VR space and provide feedback on its aesthetics, movement, and overall feelings! Are you ready to embark on this psychedelic, rhythm-fueled adventure and imagine an alternative VR cosmos? PLAYER INSTRUCTIONS For HyperBody's experimental nature, please check system requirements first, view the quick reference and start playing. If you are interested, browse the manual and join our Discord community! LEVEL 1: PINKRAY Pinkray is a result of a collaborative effort that celebrates queer 'tuning' through vidding, shipping, interviews, and architectural mods. It showcases a new 'game-fandom' that constantly emerges as 'intra-actions'. It features non-collision NPCs, architectural ruins, visual novels with 3D animated texts, and affective NPC dialogues! LEVEL 2: SEVENTEEN/SIXTY-ONE Seventeen/Sixty-One is co-created through research and interviews with Chinese science fiction writer Tang Fei. It offers an alternative vision of queer, feminine, and technology in the Chinese science fiction world. It features 2D illustrations, animations and 3D texts as interactive paths, accompanied by various soundscapes and atmospheric objects. LEVEL 3: VAMPIRE SQUID Vilem Flusser's book of the same name inspires the abstract cosmos of Vampire Squid. Explore multiple worlds created by remixing 3D scans of spaces, cartographies, and surfaces from London and Berlin. This complex spatial autoethnographic archive showcases Flusser's ideas on skin, space, and sexuality. It features non-collision 3D-scanned architectural ruins on a cosmic scale and surreal NPCs. LEVEL 4: STRATHOLME.GOSTOP Stratholme.GoStop presents a unique combination of physical and virtual elements based on my best childhood friend, Boxiao's short novel. It has modding and crossover elements between a Chinese post-industrial ordnance factory welfare zone and the Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne universe. It features visual novels based on dodecahedron objects and various Chinese urban space 3D-scanned ruins. LEVEL 5: TYPHOON LIONROCK Typhoon Lionrock is highly speculative about a VR game space's movement, direction, scale, and soundscape. Very difficult and for hard-core players, this level is a tribute to my time killed at the Run Run Shaw Library, City University of Hong Kong. Be careful not to get dizzy and nauseous from the multiple abstract scenes referenced in Hong Kong, Dunhuang, and Chongqing. LEVEL 6: GARDEN PORTAL Garden Portal is based on Chinese immortality cultivation. Explore a non-linear audio-visual space through the primal VR experience with intentionally incomplete and imperfect sound and architectural design. It features numerous NPCs to be found and touched with multiple hidden tokens and architectural ruins. SUPPORTED BY Hyperbody utilises the Wwise sound engine (academic license) for an immersive soundscape. The game's development benefited from valuable feedback received during various evaluation workshops at Goldsmiths Computing Department. 

Press reviews: “Your VR game Queer Maximalism HyperBody, for me, is a performative declaration of being unapologetically queer, maximalist, and body-centric.” Rhizome “A performative practice that creates new forms of intra-action of culture, technology, and queerness, resulting in new modes of intimacy, affect, and subjectivity.” CURA. “In HyperBody Qiang develops a strategy for revitalisation in order to create discourse around resistance and the rebuilding of worlds — a needed political gesture within our present political moment.” transmediale