Fast Travel Games this week launched its new VR first-person shooter/hide-and-seek game, Mannequin, on the Quest Store and Steam. This is the studio’s first multiplayer title, as well as the first original game developed in-house since 2019. It’s been in early access for a time on the Quest 3, and at launch it comes with crossplay and custom modes. GamesBeat both played the game and spoke with Fast Travel’s CEO on the launch of its new IP.
Fast Travel has worked on VR titles for several years, but most recently it’s published games based on Paradox Interactive properties: Cities VR, Ghost Signals: A Stellaris Game and Vampire: The Masquerade — Justice. The studio also publishes VR titles made by other studios, including 2024’s Project Demigod by Omnifarious Studios. Mannequin, on the other hand, is one of Fast Travel’s own new properties.
GamesBeat got the chance to preview Mannequin’s gameplay before its launch. It’s essentially a combination of hide-and-seek and freeze tag: One side plays Agents, humans with sensors who search levels in which other humans are frozen in time. The other side plays Mannequins, alien beings who can pose as frozen humans, but can’t move once they do. Agents try to seek out and shoot Mannequins, while Mannequins try to touch Agents. Whichever side “tags” the other team out wins that round.
I played both sides during my preview, and both sides had their strengths. The Mannequin gameplay is a fun exercise in seeing how much one can look like an NPC — and the maps are populated be enough of them that I doubt any player will be able to memorize all of the actual NPC locations. However, it also requires patience, as Mannequins are very visible when they break stealth in line-of-sight. The Agent gameplay, meanwhile, feels like playing the protagonist of a horror game.
Fast Travel on making its first original multiplayer title
GamesBeat also spoke with Oskar Burman, Fast Travel Games CEO, about Mannequin’s development and inception. According to Burman, the concept of posing was one of the founding ideas behind the game: “We had this great idea of posing, and that you needed these poses that you could only do in multiplayer. Mixing that with a multiplayer component, that basically turned in Mannequin. We started prototyping the game about three years ago, with a very small team that ideated rapidly and tested out really different things… We’re so happy to be back in our own IP again. We’re kind of back to our original reasons for founding the company.”
Burman added that the founders of Fast Travel had previously worked on multiplayer titles at DICE, adding that, when the company entered the market, many games were relatively short. “This was 2016, 2017 that the first VR wave happened. And many, many games were 30 minutes to an hour, and then you were done with them. And we felt like, if this is ever going to be a great gaming market, then there needs to be longer ‘real games’… Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a number of really great multiplayer games in VR take off. You’ve reached this critical audience of gamers that are looking for multiplayer games. So we’re really happy to be able to now, you know, go into multiplayer because we think the market is ready for it.”
Burman expanded that the market for VR titles has expanded in the preceding year. “There’s been an influx of a younger demographic entering the VR games space and looking for these kinds of multiplayer, social playground experiences, and I think Mannequin could fit quite well there. But there’s also the demographic that we have always been building games for: The hardcore VR gamers, who hopefully also find something interesting in this game. I think those two audiences should be able to like this game. It’s definitely a very interesting time in the VR gaming space right now.”
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