I interviewed Richard Turco about One True Path, Part 1 on Tuesday, September 2, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.
Here is the story synopsis for One True Path, Part 1:
- “The viewer can travel through three fantastical worlds from author Jack Stevenson’s oldschool Fiendish Fates gamebook series, each featuring different themes and gameplay. With a magical sword in hand, the viewer can make their way through the necromantic Army of Evil, led by the demonic Grey Knight. In Butchers of Orion, they can use mind-powers and body-hopping abilities to escape the slaughterhouse spaceship of the lifesucking Lady Oriana. Moreover, it is possible to blast the corrupt guards of Sheriff Cassidy’s wasteland penitentiary with shock-hand and trusty cyber-shooter in Prisoner of the Cyberhounds. Exploiting interdimensional portals to cross between place, time, and gameplay styles, the viewer discovers clues, secrets, and personal notes to decipher the story behind the books and the true meaning of their journey through Jack’s fictional worlds.“
Here are the contextual domains that are explored:
- Adventure into speculative literary worlds [9] of a variety of different genres in order to investigate and solve [9] a mystery [12] of why the author was killed [8] as he created these worlds
Here is the Elemental Center of Gravity:
1st Center of Gravity of Fire Element / Active Presence: Gameplay Modalities in Different Genres – Mashing those up, uses the waypoint locomotion as a constraint. The most game-like exploration of different actions that are also mirroed in the worldbuilding and story that’s being told |
2nd Center of Gravity of Earth Element / Environmental and Embodied Presence: Embodied Actions that change depending upon the genre of game/literature being explored. These genres are blended in the culmination. There’s also the spatial context of the builetin board that helps spatially track where you are in the story. |
3rd Center of Gravity of Water Element / Emotional Presence: Context of a Mystery. But there’s a murder that’s happened within the base reality of this world, but then you go off onto these various speculative worlds based upon these different genres of interactive books. This overall experience is just the pilot, and so we don’t get to see the full arc of the story. So it’s sort of like watching the first episode of a longer series, which leaves it in a bit of a cliffhanger type of situation in terms of fully solving the murder mystery. |
4th Center of Gravity of Air Element / Mental and Social Presence: Very specific inspiration from literature, so it’s an adaptation of sorts. There’s cut scene contextualization at the beginning and end of each core gameplay loop cycle where you get a bit more dialogue. But it’s mostly a sort of puzzle like game, and so with the constrained locomotion, it puts more of an emphasis on strategy of teleportation movement rather than the brue force nature of FPS shooters. |
Archetypal Themes and Character Explored:
- Exploration, Adventure, Gameplay, Solve mystery
Artist Statement:
- “It’s a difficult moment for narrative driven VR games and the game industry in general. Despite this, we wanted to push the boundaries of storytelling and develop an ambitious universe, at a time where we don’t see lots of innovation in the VR market, especially on the narrative side. We’ve been developing this first part of the game for several months, with most of the final features included, and decided to release it on early access. Our character Jack has more cards in his sleeve and there will be many more secrets (and even worlds!) to discover. We consider it as a “pilot”, a first part to what will hopefully — with players’ help — become the complete narrative experience we’ve imagined.”
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Music: Fatality
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