Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son is a VR sequel to the classic 1993 film, Groundhog Day. You play as Phil Connors Jr., son of Bill Murray's character, Phil Connors, who is suffering from the same repeated day disorder as his (now deceased) father. Through mini-games, dialogue trees, branching paths, and puzzle-solving, you'll need to get to the heart of Jr.'s father issues in order to break the curse and stop living the same day over and over again. A canonical sequel to a 25-year-old comedy in VR is a fairly absurd premise that may strike you as cash-grabby, but believe it or not, Groundhog Day VR managed to win me over with a surprising amount of pathos, a satisfying gameplay loop, and not a lot of heavy lifting from my own personal love of the film.

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Phil Connors Jr., like his father before him, has a big ol' chip on his shoulder when the story begins. He is a professional vlogger whose brand is a bad attitude and snarkiness that doesn't go away when the cameras stop rolling. The game takes place on the day before Groundhog Day. Jr. has returned to Punxsutawney to participate in a ceremony honoring his recently deceased father. After the events of the film, Phil Connors became something of a local celebrity in town, known for sharing the wisdom and selflessness one can only gain by reliving the same day over and over for 10,000 years. As expected, the ceremony completely falls apart, and in fact, the entire day is one disaster after another, all fueled by Jr.'s self-centeredness and lack of empathy for others. When he then wakes up again on the same day, Jr. realizes pretty quickly what his dad had been talking about all those years, and sets out to make things right.

Making Failure A Core Mechanic

The game is broken up into a series of scenes where you can interact with the other characters to change the outcome of the day through your actions. Immediately, Groundhog Day VR begins to satisfy with exactly what I had hoped the game would be. Remembering the timing and sequence of events in the first scene gives you the opportunity to change things immediately. Opening the window just before Jr.'s nephew throw a snowball prevents it from breaking, which has a butterfly effect that changes the course of the entire day. This first scene has a series of puzzles that immediately sucked me in. For some inexplicable reason, however, the game never returns to this technique for altering the timeline, something I was slightly disappointed to discover.

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Instead, the game puts you on a track that mirrors Murray's in the original film: sometimes progression is about finding the right answer in a conversation that gives you pertinent information to shortcut to a solution the next day, while other times you'll need to play a mini-game multiple days in a row until you master the skill it represents, just like Phil and his ice sculpting in the movie.

Repeating scenes, and especially mini-games, has a tendency to get tedious in any game. In Groundhog Day VR, repetition is part of the experience and baked into the story. It's very frustrating to fail a mini-game or say something wrong in a conversation and lose a lead. It's frustrating to the player, frustrating to Jr. himself, and frustrating for Phil in the original movie. That's just part of it, and I couldn't help but smile every time I had to redo a mini-game or try to have the same conversation again without screwing it up because every attempt was PART of the story. "Try again" literally means try again the next day.

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It took me 49 days to complete the game. This wasn't beginning to end 49 times, because the game lets you redo each scene as many times as you like, essentially just "skipping" to that part of the day. But, I saw MOST of the scenes 49 times, and, though I got frustrated, I was always aware it was part of the experience. It's strangely the most immersive part of the game and the first time I've ever consciously revel in my own frustration. It was kinda nice to have appreciation for my own negative feelings, honestly.

Now's The Part Where I Say VR Has A Long Way To Go

That being said, the mini-games themselves aren't my favorite. They're the gimmicky kind of VR mini-games that remind you about the limitations of the hardware rather than excel within those limits. Job Simulator is a game that celebrates the awkwardness of interacting with objects in VR while Groundhog Day looks you dead in the eye and says, "No, seriously, cook an entire breakfast with your dumb VR hands and don't mess anything up. We'll come back here every day and try it again until you get it right."

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There's a dancing mini-game that you can't pass until you actually learn the moves, a spray painting mini-game that you'll need to repeat three times to show your improvement as a graffiti artist (this was the one that actually made my arms sore, very hard to stay in the lines), and several others that require fine motor skills and precise actions. I wish more of the game was like that first scene, and less mastering mini-games, but I get what they were going for and I do appreciate it.

What If There Is No Tomorrow? There Wasn't One Today

The most surprising thing about Groundhog Day VR is how many damn feelings it gave me. It's fairly crass, inappropriately so by my measure, and I found the vulgarity to be in opposition to both the cartoony aesthetic and the particularly heavy themes the game juggles.

Despite that, there are a number of scenes, especially with the Mom, that invoke the self-awareness and philosophical contemplation about existence, purpose, and mortality that the film is remembered for. Maybe it trades on the strengths of the film a bit too often, especially if you've recently revisited it, but in the end, Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son works systematically as a time-loop puzzle game and emotionally as a story about forgiveness, self-acceptance, filial devotion, and letting go.

4 Out Of 5 Stars

A PSVR review copy of Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son was provided to TheGamer. Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son is available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son

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