Imagine turning on a game you’ve been looking forward to for months — and dreamed of for years — only to get a knot in your stomach and a weird buzzing sensation behind your eyeballs. Is it excitement? Anxiety? No, my friends. It’s motion sickness, and it’s what has kept me from playing Spyro Reignited.
One aspect of Spyro Reignited that you may have seen mentioned in reviews or the online community is its heavy use of motion blur. For most, motion blur isn’t a huge deal. Some people think it makes a game look more cinematic. But some can’t stand the way it looks — and it’s a big deal.
[Editor’s note: As of 3/13/2019 Spyro Reignited has received a motion blur toggle option! Finally, I and others with motion sensitivity can play the game.]
I’ve never cared about it much, but I had also never gotten motion sickness before playing Reignited. Neither had my husband — but we both feel ill after about 10 minutes of playing the remasters.
Before I realized it was the game making me feel poorly, I actually stepped away and ate dinner because I thought the headache and nausea were just a byproduct of not having had dinner yet. Unfortunately, they were not, as I found out when I came back to the game an hour later and got an intense headache and a distinct dizzy feeling soon after.
Spyro Reignited makes heavy use of motion blur when panning the camera even a bit, regardless of the camera option you choose. The game’s Active and Passive camera options both end with the same result for me.
That result is what one might call “misery.”
It’s with a heavy heart that I can’t recommend Reignited to fans who are susceptible to motion sickness. The game needs a toggle or slider for its motion blur.
This really bums me out. Spyro was my jam on the PlayStation. I poured more time into them back in the PSX days than Final Fantasy 7, more than the Crash Bandicoot trilogy, more than pretty much every other game series on the platform except maybe teenage me’s long-running addiction to Monster Rancher 2.
I’m not the only one having this problem, either. There are plenty of threads throughout the game’s online community, even scattered across the Spyro subreddit, of people who cannot play the remastered trilogy because the motion blur makes them sick.
Just consider this a PSA if you haven’t gotten the game yet or are considering buying it for someone else. If there’s a chance you or the person you are buying Spyro Reignited for might be prone to motion sickness, save your $40 and avoid the literal headache.
This is all a huge shame because, from what I’ve played, Reignited is really wonderful. It ticks all the right boxes… I just can’t play for more than 10 minutes at a time. I haven’t uninstalled it from my PlayStation 4 just yet. A fan can’t help but hold out hope for a solution.
(Header image from a Reddit post showcasing the motion blur)
