This VR horror game is only as scary as your heart can handle

A horrifying experience On July 13, game developer Red Meat Games released its fifth virtual reality (VR) project, Bring to Light. It was particularly appropriate to release it on Friday the 13th, since the developers designed the VR horror game to quite literally push players to their terror limits with the help of a biometric sensor.

Pump up the terror In Bring to Light, a player must navigate a creepy abandoned subway tunnel as the sole survivor in a crash. In addition to wearing VR goggles, they also have the option to wear a heart rate monitor. This monitor relays the data to a custom AI that adjusts the gameplay depending on the player’s heart rate.

“When [the heart rate is] low, that’s when we know we can… dial up the creep factor and have jump scares and have things that crawl and slither, or doors shaking when you walk past them,” Red Meat Games owner Keith Makse told CBC. “It will actually reflect in your heart rate very quickly.”

The player will need to buy the monitor on their own — the VR horror game doesn’t come with one. For now, they can choose between two options: the Scosche Rhythm and the Polar H10.

The future of VR Bring to Light may be the first VR game to use biometric feedback to affect gameplay, but it’s unlikely to be the last. “I do think that using biometric feedback will eventually become an option for games and other apps out there,” Makse told Digital Trends. “More biometric devices are released every day, and constant improvements are being made.”

Bring to Light is now available for purchase on the gaming platform Steam for $20 and is playable on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, or PC (without a VR headset).