I have not yet figured out why I was in Apple Vision Pro Experience

What If… An Immersive Story? Revisiting the MCMC arc with Wong and the Watcher’s Thermodynamics

There is more potential in the approach for What If… An Immersive Story, if the team decides to do more with it. Bushore replied to my questions that the format won’t stray further into game territory, and it’s hard to know if the team will change the way the story is presented. (Multiple branching paths through it would be neat, for example). It’s worth a look if you have a Vision Pro but don’t expect anything crazy.

Wong is the master of the mystic arts and a good friend of Doctor Strange in the multi-verse. But he reluctantly trains you and then you go on a quest through realities to buy each stone for a specific purpose. Along the way, you acquire various abilities, and Wong teaches you special gestures that activate them. You can shoot fist lasers with the power stone or wave your hands around to distract your opponent.

This stuff is actually fun to do, but it’s also very constrained by the fact that you can only do it at scripted moments, which sucks. It is not given any room to be compelling, so it would be fine if it was. You can get whichever stone you want by taking a series of short pieces, then you get dropped in to learn a new skill that you may or may not use again later. Each vignette basically follows the same pattern and ends up feeling like it’s building to something that never pays off.

The biggest disappointment is that so many of the elements feel like they would work in a different package. It looks great, for one, and it’s fun to see The Watcher towering over me in my dining room and to get a sense of how big Thanos is actually supposed to be. I like to shoot fist lasers. There is an experience that doesn’t lead to a video game or a movie, but it is still a good one.

What if…? will be free for a long time and probably not a game (or not) for the iOS app store (Apple/Adobe)

Dave Bushore, who directed What If…?, told The Verge in an email that the experience is “holistically different than a game.” The interactive bits, he said, are meant to support the story. Shereif M. Fattouh said that the team plans to keep supporting the app and will be watching to see if any updates need to be made. The app will only be temporarily free, though they didn’t say for how long or how much it will eventually cost.

Make no mistake, What If…? is a story. Everyone is taking care to refer to it as that. This seems significant given that it certainly isn’t a game—or if it is, it’s one with a hell of a lot of exposition and not much playability.

The majority of the things you are expected to do as a user involve hand motions, such as making a fist with your fingers facing you and carrying a shield. Turn your hand and extend it outward, and you can control objects with telekinesis. You can open portals, change reality, and send energy blasts from your fists. These tricks, though, are all just based on a series of similar, not very engaging movements, all of which I forgot numerous times over the course of my time in the story. It was sometimes hard to know what I was supposed to be doing, but I had Apple publicists there to remind me.