Darth Vader becomes your boss in the terrifying Vader Immortal & # 39;

I find myself in one of those hexagonal Star Wars corridors on the planet Mustafar when the doors of the end open. Against a blinding light, the Sith Dark Lord makes another entrance into hell. Only this time, I'm not in the cinema audience. I am in the movie.

The black silhouette, illuminated only by the glow of the buttons of its green belt, fills my field of vision. He looks at me, hands me a carton and asks me how to open it. "Do not disappoint me," said Vader, the familiar growl of the baritone and the claustrophobic breathing breath of my iron lung filling my ears.

So no pressure then.

The pulse packs, the hands sweat, I dig into the box, pressing things randomly until a Kyber crystal sort. The new boss is happy and I have the job. What a concert, I'm not quite sure, but I'm immediately excited about the lightsaber training, with barely a moment to hand me over to the most terrifying job interview of all the time.

C & # 39; Vader Immortal: Episode I, a virtual reality game coming on the Oculus platform this spring. It was officially unveiled Friday during the celebration of Star Wars in Chicago, alongside the announcement of Maya Rudolph, your virtual droid, a droid called ZOE3.

Industrial Light and Magic, Lucasfilm's special effects experts, have been working there for more than three years, and it shows. Based on a few levels, I had a hands-on demonstration with, Vader Immortal – which will be launched this spring – may soon become the best reason to own an Oculus.

I have certainly never seen the tedious manual controls of the system used as simply and intuitively as when I stretched my arm at the red lightsaber.

The trailer, which also fell on Friday, above, does not really do justice to the game. You have to stand there, with Vader towering above you, making all the hairs stand on your neck, for you realize that the most iconic villain of the history of cinema is perfectly right.

ILMxLAB, the team behind the match, considered the exact height of Vader as a state secret, although they acknowledged that he appeared to be up to the size of Vader actor David Prowse (6 feet 7 inches in his black boots). They indeed revealed that the imposition level of the Sith Lord was only one of the details of the game that had been obsessively fine tuned until everything went well. (An option to make it so big that even 6-foot-7 people would see it from below was rejected.)

"Making him walk in virtual reality – not only with his mechanical breathing, but also to talk to you and talk to you directly – is, in my opinion, very useful for many fans," said director Ben Snow.

Yeah, no kidding.

If VR Vader sounds familiar to you, you may be thinking of Secrets of the Empire, a virtual reality experience set up in Disney's Anaheim and Orlando parks, which is also taking place on its planet. origin, Mustafar. Both were developed by ILMxLAB, but Snow told me that Vader Immortal came first – and that Secrets of the Empire was essentially a testing ground for the technology developed for the Oculus game.

Vader Immortal also seems to share a little bit of DNA with The raging force, a clbadic (and now non-canonical) game of 2008 in which you play the secret Sith apprentice of Vader, a character named Starkiller. This time, you are a smuggler who gets entangled in the Vader web when a trip to Mustafar goes wrong.

The team holds his cards against his chest in terms of intrigue, except to say that this happens in the Star Wars timeline between The revenge of the Sith and Thief A. but the "Episode I" in the title should indicate that this whole story is only the beginning: there will be a trilogy of Vader Immortal immersive tales.

You have a lot to learn about the power of the dark side – including the price of the game, which has not been announced yet.