Deserving Life

Deserving Life is a room-scale virtual reality escape game developed by students for the HTC Vive. Players awaken to find themselves chained in an unfamiliar house and must solve a series of environmental puzzles across up to eight individual rooms to secure their freedom. The game is specifically designed to leverage the Vive’s room-scale features, requiring players to physically interact with their surroundings and combine resources to overcome challenges in this first-person horror-puzzle experience.

Deserving Life: A Forgotten VR Escape Room and the Promise of Student Innovation

In the vast and ever-expanding library of virtual reality experiences, countless titles are released, enjoyed, and then quietly fade into the digital ether. Among these, a peculiar category exists: the student project. These are games born not from corporate mandates or market analytics, but from the crucible of academia, where ambition, creativity, and technical learning collide. Deserving Life, a 2017 room-scale escape game developed by Lukas Paul and Gabriel Mittermair for their studies at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, is a quintessential example. It is a game that, on paper, promises a harrowing journey of puzzle-solving and survival. In execution, it serves as a fascinating, flawed, and ultimately forgotten time capsule from VR’s early commercial adolescence—a proof-of-concept that highlights both the immense potential and the steep challenges of indie VR development.

Development History & Context

The Academic Crucible

Deserving Life was not forged in the fires of a professional studio, but within the Media Technology and Design program at the Hagenberg Campus. In 2017, the VR market was still finding its footing. The HTC Vive, released just a year and a half prior, was a premium piece of hardware championing “room-scale” as its killer feature. The platform was hungry for content, any content, that could justify its high entry cost and demonstrate the unique immersiveness of physically moving within a virtual space.

For students Lukas Paul and Gabriel Mittermair, this landscape presented a perfect opportunity. The project was undoubtedly a thesis or a capstone project—a chance to apply their learned skills in a tangible, publishable product. Their vision was clear: create a classic escape room scenario, but one intrinsically tied to the Vive’s capabilities. The design constraints were likely twofold: the technological limitations of the hardware (requiring a minimum 2m x 2m play space and a GTX 970 GPU) and the scope limitations inherent to a student project with a finite timeline.

The gaming landscape at the time was seeing a flood of VR experiences, many of them short, janky, or tech-demo-like. Deserving Life entered this fray not as a commercial product seeking profit, but as a freeware portfolio piece. Its release on Steam on October 13, 2017, was a statement of completion, a way to share their work with the world and add a line to their resumes. This context is crucial to understanding every aspect of the game that follows.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

A Skeletal Premise

The narrative of Deserving Life is, by design, minimalist to the point of abstraction. The official description sets the stage: “You awake to find yourself chained down in an unfamiliar house.” This is the entirety of the narrative setup. There is no named protagonist, no backstory, no villainous monologue, no scattered diary entries fleshing out the world. The player is an anonymous entity, and their motivation is primal and immediate: escape.

The title itself, “Deserving Life,” is the game’s most compelling narrative element. It implies a thematic question: is the player-character worthy of the life they are fighting to keep? Have they been imprisoned as punishment for some unseen transgression? The act of solving puzzles to escape becomes a test of worthiness, a trial by intellect and environmental interaction. However, this promising thematic hook is never developed. The puzzles are logistical challenges—find a key, combine objects—rather than narrative ones that reveal character or story. The “misery” mentioned in the blurb is a state of confinement, not a psychological condition explored through gameplay.

The game’s eight rooms serve as levels, not chapters in a story. They are arenas for puzzles, not environments with a history to uncover. Any sense of horror or dread is derived solely from the atmosphere of isolation and the urgency of the escape, not from a crafted narrative. Deserving Life is a game about a situation, not a story. Its narrative is a ghost—you sense its potential presence, but it never materializes into something tangible.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

The Promise and Pitfalls of Room-Scale

The core gameplay loop of Deserving Life is pure escape room logic: examine your surroundings, locate objects, deduce their use, and apply them to obstacles to progress to the next room. As a first-person point-and-select adventure translated into VR, its primary innovation is its total reliance on room-scale interaction.

The developers touted that challenges were “specially designed for the HTC Vive’s room-scale features.” This means the game expects you to physically walk around your play space, crouch to look under tables, reach up to grab items from shelves, and turn your body to survey the entire environment. This physicality is the game’s greatest strength in theory. When it works, it fosters a unparalleled sense of presence and immersion. You’re not clicking a “search” button; you are actually bending down and peering into a dark corner.

However, this is also the source of its most significant flaws, as hinted at in the Steam Community discussions. Threads with titles like “Picking stuff up” and “BLACK SCREEN” point to technical inconsistencies. VR interaction—grabbing, manipulating, and combining objects—is notoriously difficult to perfect. The discussions suggest that the object physics and interaction fidelity could be janky, leading to frustration when a puzzle’s solution is understood but the game’s mechanics fail to execute it smoothly.

The game features eight Steam Achievements, likely tied to completing each room and the game overall, providing a bare-bones structure for progression. The UI is minimal, relying on the Vive’s motion controllers as your hands. The lack of any traditional HUD reinforces the immersion but also means feedback for interactions is limited, potentially leading to confusion.

Ultimately, the gameplay sits in a difficult middle ground. It is not a simple tech demo, as it has structured puzzles and multiple rooms. Yet, it lacks the polish and complexity of a full-fledged commercial escape room game like I Expect You To Die. It is a student project in the most literal sense: a competent demonstration of a concept that needed further iteration and refinement to truly shine.

World-Building, Art & Sound

Functional Atmosphere

The world of Deserving Life is a generic “unfamiliar house.” The art direction, based on the available information, appears to be functional rather than artistic. The goal was likely to create clear, readable environments where interactive objects could be easily identified—a crucial tenet of good puzzle design. There are no mentions of a distinctive visual style, photorealistic graphics, or stunning architectural details. It is a utilitarian space designed to facilitate gameplay.

The sound design is similarly geared towards functionality. One can assume it employs ambient noise to build tension—the creak of a floorboard, the distant hum of nothingness—and clear audio cues for successful interactions (a click of a lock, a scrape of a drawer). The presence of full audio and subtitles in seven languages is a surprisingly robust feature for a small project, suggesting the developers had aspirations of a wide reach or were fulfilling specific academic requirements.

The atmosphere, therefore, is built on a foundation of isolation and mystery. It’s a low-budget, eerie vibe that relies on the inherent strangeness of being alone in a VR space. It won’t be remembered for its artistic achievement, but it likely achieved its primary goal: making the player feel present in a confined and puzzling environment.

Reception & Legacy

A Quiet Life and a Fading Echo

Deserving Life‘s reception can be described as warmly niche. On Steam, it holds a “Very Positive” rating based on 142 user reviews. This must be viewed through the appropriate lens: it’s a free game. The barrier to entry is negligible, which naturally inflates goodwill. Players are more forgiving of jank and short length when they haven’t invested any money. The reviews that exist (the text of which is not provided but the rating implies) likely praise the core idea and the effort of the students, while perhaps critiquing the technical issues and brevity.

Critically, the game made no impact. As evidenced by the Metacritic page, no professional critic reviewed it. It was not covered by major gaming outlets. It was a drop in the ocean of Steam releases.

Its legacy is almost non-existent in the broader industry. It did not pioneer new mechanics, inspire a genre, or become a cult classic. However, its legacy is profoundly important in a micro sense: for its developers, Lukas Paul and Gabriel Mittermair. Deserving Life is a published, playable credit on their professional portfolios. It represents a completed project, a solved problem, a demonstration of their ability to ship a game using cutting-edge technology. For them, it was undoubtedly a valuable learning experience and a stepping stone in their careers. In the annals of video game history, it is a footnote—but for its creators, it was a vital chapter.

Conclusion

A Deserving Study, Not a Landmark Game

Deserving Life is not a great game, nor is it a bad one. It is a profoundly average and incomplete experience that is remarkable only when viewed through the correct lens: as an academic exercise. It is a time capsule from a specific moment in VR’s history when the tools had become accessible enough for students to create and publish their experiments.

As a game, it is a skeletal framework. Its narrative is a ghost, its mechanics are functional but unpolished, and its art is utilitarian. It provides a short-lived, moderately engaging puzzle experience that is often hampered by the technical limitations of its indie development scale.

As a piece of history, however, it is deserving of a brief mention. It exemplifies the vibrant underbelly of game development—the thousands of small projects that serve as learning labs for the next generation of creators. It is a proof-of-concept that room-scale VR could be used for thoughtful environmental puzzles long before the concept became more mainstream.

The final verdict on Deserving Life is this: you would not play it today for a compelling VR experience. But you might study it to understand the journey of a game developer, from the first ambitious steps in a university program to the polished titles they may one day create. Its place in history is not on the podium, but in the classroom. It is a deserving life, indeed, for a student project.