GAME REVIEW: Supernatural (Oculus Quest 2)

(Who Says? - John Mayer)

Video games and fitness have been a dream combination for a long time now but up until recently, that's all they've been: a dream.  The advent of affordable VR platforms changed all of that.  Overnight, an entirely new genre of games appeared along with, unsurprisingly, an entirely new branch of medical science.  What the doctors, scientists, and researchers found has changed the lives of thousands, myself included:

Finally, FINALLY, it was possible to play a video game -AND- exercise at the same time.

Games like Pistol Whip, Beat Saber, The Thrill Of The Fight, and a whole slew of others have all sold incredibly well, not just because they're a blast to play but because of their benefits.  Players, both young and old, were getting off of their butts and getting their heart rates up.

The most recent comer to this arena is a title called 'Supernatural', a game that touts gorgeous graphics, wonderful gameplay, and a guarantee to get your fitness on with the help of live, Peloton-style coaches.

Is it any good?

That really depends on you, actually.  I don't want to sit here and tell anyone that a tool is no good if it's getting them up and getting them active.  Like all tools, your mileage will vary depending on how you use it.  As a guy who's invested a lot of time -- and really not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things -- into virtual fitness through Beat Saber and The Thrill Of The Fight, I can honestly say that 'Supernatural' was a gigantic waste of time for me.  In order to understand why, you really need to know more about the game itself.

THE ONLY VERSION, WHICH IS LONG.

When 'Supernatural' launched, it was very, VERY clear where it was getting its influences from.  Someone had looked at Beat Saber and thought, "I wonder what this would look like if we made it for boring adults who were nostalgic for those old Tae Bo videos?"  There's just no talking about this game without comparing it to Beat Saber because there's really nothing else out there like it other than Beat Saber.  Seriously watch the trailer:

The primary gameplay mode for Supernatural is pretty much what you see here: You have a baseball bat in each hand and you're swinging at targets as they fly towards you in virtual space.  The targets come in the form of balls that have semi-transparent cones on them.  See a cone pointing to the left? Swipe that ball from right to left!  Additionally, there are those glowing triangles that it throws at you that force you to dodge and squat to get inside of the shape that's flying towards you.  You do all of this from a variety of locations that the game picks for you.

When you spin up Supernatural, the first thing you'll notice is that you can't touch this game at all without plopping down a credit card number. That's because Supernatural, like so many other fitness fads these days, is subscription-based...and it ain't cheap.  The normal monthly membership is $20 a month, which is very close to gym membership money.  What you get for that money is where Supernatural leaves Beat Saber completely behind.

Beat Saber isn't a fitness game.  If you want to play the game, you pick the song you want, you pick the difficulty level you want, and you go.  With Supernatural, you browse a course catalogue and pick a collection of songs to play and a 'live' coach to work with as you swing through each track.  

Recently, Supernatural also launched a boxing component as well; instead of swinging at the balls, you punch them instead.  Instead of squatting in and out of triangles, you bob and weave under and around glowing bars.  Otherwise, the experience is the same.

If all of this sounds like your bag, you can jump into a one-week trial period.  You can get an extra week of trial if you sign up for a full year. This comes out to around $18 a month, and there's literally NO REASON not to do this if you just want to take a peek.  

Now that I've said all of this, let me tell you why I cancelled my membership after just one hour.  Almost all of it revolves around things that Supernatural is trying to sell as positive value-adds.

- What Supernatural bills as 'Live' coaching isn't really live.  It's all pre-recorded coaches using generic dialogue to spur you towards the end of the song.  If I'm going to spend money on a personal trainer, I want the 'personal' aspect of it, not some canned responses that can't answer questions or give me the kind of detailed feedback that I actually need.  Plus, some of the coaches are REALLY obnoxious.  It's also not helped by the fact that the coaches do not represent the physical body that working with this kind of system will ultimately guide you towards.  You do not get uber-jacked by doing this kind of work, nor do you get uber-cut.

- While the boxing in Supernatural feels really good, the baseball bats feel HORRIBLE.  The hit boxes for the targets is terrible when you go after them with the bats and the haptic feedback that you get for each properly executed strike lags behind the visual impact noticeably.  There is zero reason for this and it throws the rhythm of what you're doing off completely.

- There's no way to pick individual songs or build your own playlists.  Worse, for those of us who think that most of the music that came out after 1985 is trash, the music in this game is utterly uncompelling.  Yeah, I realize this is subjective.

- Supernatural hangs a lot on its really cool locations.  Here's the problem with that: This game is all about watching shit coming at your face -- sometimes very quickly.  I do not have time to enjoy the gorgeous vistas around me while I do that.  This leans into the next problem...

- The black and white balls that Supernatural uses as its targets are just plain hard to see against some of the backgrounds.  My eyes are bad, but they're not THAT bad, and contrast ratio is a real freakin' thing.  Worse, many of Supernatural's levels have you actively moving your head and body around which means there's never really a static background to get used to.  THIS wouldn't be a problem except...

- Supernatural has absolutely ZERO Accessibility controls in it.  At all.  Anywhere.  There is simply no reason for this in 2021.  I contacted Supernatural's customer service team who confirmed that, no, there was no accessibility support built in anywhere.  People with visual impairments of any kind shouldn't go anywhere near this with their wallet until they've had a chance to trial it first.  Same thing for people who live with hearing loss.  No closed captioning anywhere that I could see so those coaches are basically useless.

Supernatural does a lot that Beat Saber doesn't...but what Beat Saber does, it does pretty much perfectly.  I can pick whatever song I want to play at whatever difficulty level I want.  I can practice it, speed it up, slow it down, change the appearance of the targets and configure the experience -I- want.  Saber impacts on targets are perfectly synced to haptics and those targets are very easy to see because of the high contrast ratio between foreground and background.

Oh, and about that accessibility thing?  Beat Saber -- a game that came out in 2018 -- gives you the ability to change your Saber colors, block colors, environment colors, and effect colors to whatever you want.  Want to speed the song up? Fine. Want to slow it down? Fine.  Don't want to deal with the dodging and ducking in Beat Saber or have to worry about moving around the bombs? Fine! Just turn them off.

Supernatural's biggest crime is poor decision-making.  They could have made a few very small, very meaningful changes to the game at launch that would have resulted in something much closer to being worth the price. Instead, they chose to ignore almost all of the things that Beat Saber did RIGHT.

I want to close by calling you back to what I said earlier though:   I don't want to sit here and tell anyone that a tool is no good if it's getting them up and getting them active.  Like all tools, your mileage will vary depending on how you use it.  Supernatural offers a perfectly legit free trial and if you're even remotely curious about it, use that trial.