PlayStation VR Worlds: An action movie minigame collection

Over the past year at various press events, Sony’s London Studio has shown a handful of experiments it created for PlayStation VR.

There was The London Heist, where players participate in a freeway shootout, using one hand to load ammo while holding a gun in the other. There was Into the Deep, an underwater shark attack where you stand in a cage and watch a shark tear it up. And there was VR Luge, where you lie down and race along a street in California.

Today, Sony revealed that it is releasing all three of these together, along with two other short games, in a retail and downloadable package called PlayStation VR Worlds. Think of it like Wii Sports but with quick tastes of what it’s like to be in different action movies.

According to London Studio lead producer Tom Handley, while Sony has called these "tech demos" in the past, releasing them as a package was the plan all along. "It started absolutely as kind of a package, a desire to create a collection of bespoke experiences for VR, which we have then demoed bits of," he says.

The two newly-announced games are Scavenger’s Odyssey, an adventure game where you control a ship in space, and Danger Ball (seen above), a "futuristic sport" where you use your head to bat a ball back and forth, which Handley compares to Virtua Tennis.

Danger Ball, at least conceptually, seems like a bit of an odd fit amongst the four other experiences that put you into extreme scenarios. But Handley says that’s the point.

"What we’ve gone after is that variety," he says. "VR is this kind of brand new medium, this brand new way of playing games, so we wanted to showcase as best we could the different things that you can do in VR. So we have consciously picked five very different things — different themes and tones, different game mechanics, different ways to play."

Fitting with that concept, the five games span across all of Sony’s control schemes for PlayStation VR. The London Heist works with either the DualShock 4 or two PlayStation Move controllers. Scavenger’s Odyssey works with just the DualShock 4. And the other three all only use the tracking in the headset.

While Sony showed VR Worlds at a PlayStation VR press conference today, it didn’t show either Scavenger’s Odyssey or Danger Ball, so we’ll have to wait to get a more detailed look at those down the line.