Get Your Thinking Cap On, ‘Taskmaster VR’ Is Out Today on Meta Quest
How good are you at escape rooms? Can you think quickly under pressure? Do you often watch reality shows or game shows and think you could do a way better job? Then you’re in luck, because Taskmaster VRlaunches today for the Meta Quest and will let you finally put your money where your mouth is.
Taskmaster VR from Scallywag Arcade, a Draw & Code studio, puts players like you directly onto the set of the popular mind bending critical thinking competition show and face-to-face with the Taskmaster and his assistant to find out if you have what it takes to solve these challenging puzzle scenarios. The show itself has aired over 150 episodes and is going as strong as ever to this day.
To learn more about Taskmaster VR and what it has in store for us, we caught up with Alex Horne, the show’s creator and the assistant to the Taskmaster himself.
Alex Horne:Taskmaster is a comedy show where five comedians do quite mundane tasks to try to impress a giant. The Giant is also a comedian, he just happens to be a giant. I come up with the tasks and the idea is that the five comedians all attempt the same thing in isolation and try to win. When they watch it back all together, they realize how stupid they’ve been or how clever they’ve been. There’s no script, there’s no warning of what’s going to happen, so we see comedians being themselves and improvising and being competitive.
AH: That’s exactly the logic. Although every series we have new comedians, so each series we have five comedians and it’s the same comedians for the whole season. And the first thing I say to them is, don’t try to be funny. You are funny, you will be funny. Don’t try to say funny things, because comedians always resort back to the jokes in their heads, but we just want them to be themselves, and we try to pick five different people who have different brains and who will approach things in different ways. It’s all about throwing away the script and improvising, like you say.
AH: Yeah, so there’s lots of similarities and there are some differences. When I heard about it, when it was pitched to me, I actually thought straight away, it’s perfect for VR rather than a normal computer game because you need to be hands-on. We have so many people asking to get in the house and have a go, but obviously you can’t let everyone do it. Whereas in this world, you can see.
What’s similar to the show is that you do get to open the thing. You read the thing for the first time and then the clock has started and you’ve got to explore the house, open doors, pick up objects, combine them however you want, and so on. Basically, doing things is the key for the show. In the TV show we don’t want people to be behind a desk anymore, we want them to actually do things, and it’s the same with this game. You’ve got to actually be on your feet. You’ve got to use your brain and your hands and make things.
The difference is, you’re not with four comedians and you haven’t got the TV audience laughing. Hopefully, it’s still funny because me and Greg [Davies] are still chipping away. And also, I think everyone is potentially funny, but it’s more about doing the thing than making people laugh. I’d also say that the tasks can be different as well. In the TV show, we have two types of tasks. We have ones which are quantifiable, so it’s whoever does it fastest or longest or tallest, that sort of thing. And we’ve also got ones which are like the best song or the most emotional speech.
And you can’t really do that in VR, because we haven’t got Greg actually judging you. So, we only have the types of tasks which are fastest and tallest, for example. I quite like that these are quantifiable. You’re kind of up against yourself and your fellow players if you’re going to play it with your friends and family.
AH: Well, I really love escape rooms. It’s solving a puzzle and lots of other tasks like that. In the show, sometimes the tasks are over in a minute. In Taskmaster VR, we want it to go on and on. I did one where you’ve got to try to feed the dog, you’ve got to find the dog, you’ve got to find the dog food, and you’re in a garage with none of these things. You realize you’re locked in, you’ve got to unlock the door, but where’s the key? So, you’re taken through these kinds of layered multitasks. You’ve got to go through lots of stages to get somewhere, or you could probably just burst your way out of this room. There are ways around it. We want people to find their own ways. There’s not just one way of solving the thing.
AH: Not really, I haven’t spent a lot of time, but I did find it to be quite a useful resource during lockdown to escape. I’m not a ‘gamer,’ but what I loved was the setup demo. When I first got the Quest, I just wanted to do that over and over again. I thought that was so well-pitched. And what I really enjoyed was putting the thing on my kids and on my wife and on my parents and them going, “Oh, my God,” the very first time they all tried it.
I’m hoping the Taskmaster world is a bit like that. When you’re first in the Taskmaster house, you do say to yourself, “Oh, wow, they’ve actually done it.” I like Beat Saberlike everyone else. I thought I was really cool when I was playing it. I like GOLF+, I actually play it using a little controller attachment that you put on the controller so you can swing it more like a real club. I like Star Wars. I’m a pretty basic guy. Oh, and Job Simulator, I really like that one. I’ve had enough experience to sort of know what works, what doesn’t for me, so I can comment on the VR game. I don’t have nearly enough experience to actually tell them what to do, though.
AH: We try to keep the physics of life in there, so we’ve still got things like gravity, because we want it to be the generally same limitations that you have in the show. I will say that there are three things you haven’t got here though. You haven’t got a camera crew. You can go anywhere in the room, whereas when we’re doing the TV show, you can’t go over there because there’s a camera filming you. And you also don’t ever have to wait because the cameras have to move to another room if you’ve gone to the kitchen. You also have no rain or darkness or planes flying overhead, so you’ve got complete freedom to do anything.
Another one is that we don’t like food waste, for example, in real life. We used to smash so many eggs and waste so much food, and we’ve realized that’s an awful thing to do. Whereas in this, we’ve got 100 watermelons ready to go, and you can hurl them at me and you can hurl them at Greg, and you can physically try to damage me, which you can’t do in the show. You can do anything in the VR world, but also you can’t do things that you couldn’t in theory do in real life, if that makes sense, because I think it’s got to be playable and there’s got to be limits, and you are stuck in that house.
AH: Exactly. But in the show, we have to tell people not to climb on the roof, which they ask to do every single series. Whereas in this, you can go wherever you want.
If you feel like you’ve got what it takes to think outside the box, you can download Taskmaster VR for yourself right now on the Quest platform and give it a try for yourself.
