Wheels up in five — Wheelchair Simulator VR to be released next week, proceeds going to charity

Vira Games has recently announced that it will release its first VR title, Wheelchair Simulator VR, for VR platforms on May 7. While the game has a tongue-in-cheek approach to its gameplay, the company has also announced that it will donate profits from the game to the Dostupno UA Initiative, which helps raise awareness and accessibility efforts of people with disabilities in Ukraine.

Wheelchair Simulator VR is a comedic game that dares players to traverse a city by pushing two wheels with their own hands. That’s not easy as the place is pretty much ignorant or even hostile towards the wheelchair users. Thankfully, the journey is accompanied by sarcastic narrator that shares his own story, cracks jokes and comments on players successes and failings.

Wheelchair Simulator VR was voiced and narrated by Dmytro Schebetyuk, himself a wheelchair user. Dmytro suffered a spinal injury seven years ago, but incident hasn’t stopped him from having a full life – doing extreme wheelchair stunts, hitchhike around the world and participate in paralympics. He also started Dostupno UA initiative to help people like him.

ViRa’s game designer Igor Kachinskij says that the team became sympathetic to the cause thanks to the incredible videos Dmytro and Dostupno UA initiative were putting online. “They made us realize that Ukrainian cities are very poorly adapted for people with special needs and these issues are almost completely invisible to “normal” people. So we decided to change that”.

ViRa team was already experimenting with different ideas for their first VR title, and then they noticed that no VR yet game featured locomotion system based on pushing the wheels of the wheelchair.

“We quickly made a locomotion prototype, and reached Dmytro with our idea to literally put other people in his shoes (well, in this particular case, his wheelchair) in VR”, Igor says. Dmytro had a blast with the prototype and agreed to share his life story, talent and sense of humor with the project.
The team will donate profits from the game to the Dostupno UA initiative which supports accessibility programs and films video blogs about infrastructure and life of people with disabilities in Ukraine.

Check out the trailer for the game above, and stay tuned for more news here on Gaming Trend.