Crytek’s 'Robinson: The Journey' Coming To Rift This January

Crytek is bringing virtual dinosaurs to the Oculus Rift Platform. The development studio revealed that Robinson: The Journey is only exclusive to PSVR until January.

Crytek first revealed Robinson: The Journey in July 2015. The developer couldn’t ignore all the positive feedback it received from its two VR tech demos, Return to Dinosaur Island 1 and 2, so it decided to build a full-fledged game out of the concept.

Shortly after the announcement, we spoke with David Bowman, Crytek’s Director of Production, about the Robinson: The Journey project. During the interview, Bowman explained that Crytek was working with the three major VR players: Oculus, Playstation, and HTC/Valve.

We interpreted Bowman’s comment as an indication that Robinson: The Journey was destined for all three VR platforms, but that was the last time Crytek mentioned anything about it coming to Rift and Vive. In October 2015, Crytek revealed that Robinson: The Journey would be a launch lineup title for PlayStation VR. The developer didn’t say the game would be exclusive, but it only mentioned Sony’s platform.

Crytek further reinforced the illusion of PSVR exclusivity at E3 2016. The company revealed a PSVR trailer for the game, again with no mention of the other platforms. Also, the PlayStation blog featured an interview with two Crytek developers that worked on the game; Elijah Freeman and Fatih Oezhayram.

Crytek spent a lot of time and effort promoting Robinson: The Journey for PSVR, and no effort at all talking about the possibility for other platforms. Had we not spoken with David Bowman in 2015, Crytek’s announcement that Robinson: The Journey is coming to Oculus Rift would be a complete shock.

Crytek plans to release Robinson: The Journey to the Oculus Store in January. The developer didn’t provide any further details about the release, so there’s no telling what may be different about the two versions of the game. Crytek built Robinson: The Journey with CryEngine, so we expect to see a wide range of graphics options to take advantage of the most powerful GPUs. No one uses the phrase “Will it run Crysis?” anymore, but maybe we’ll be asking “Will it run Robinson?” next year.

 Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years.