Adam the explorer

Adam was excited.

You may think he would be scared of not being able to see his status, check his items, or any of the usual stuff. Instead, he figured he was on the starting scenes for a new chapter of the game or a quest introduction.

In older games, you used to get cinematic shorts explaining the storyline or something like that. For the newer VR games, to enhance the experience, the player had the same mobility and functionality as in the rest of the game, but with a limited system interface, to avoid breaking the flow of the story.

He was sure this was something new. He had not seen anything related to red grass on anything like it in the posted videos for this game. It had more of a wild place feeling and the parts of the game shown were mostly gothic. Big castles, shadowy cities, and horrible monsters, that kind of stuff.

As it is, Adam was kind of lost on what he should do next. There was no indication of where he should go now. His immediate surroundings were a patch of burned-out grass of approximately 5 feet in diameter, with some blue flowers blooming in the middle of the burned-out zone.

He would normally pick the flowers and get some ash from the zone, to avoid missing out on any limited items for future quests, but he could not access his inventory and he did not want to carry things in his hands. It would be cumbersome if he needed to fight. This was a game after all. Some kind of enemies were bound to attack him any moment now.

He decided to follow an old strategy from a massive battle royale game he tried a couple of years before. When stranded on a new map, get to the highest point you can and scan for goodies. He checked his surroundings and noticed a hill in the distance, where no grass grew. It did not seem a long way to get there, but he had to cross about 10 miles of red grass.

He would need to be careful. It has been one of the rules of gaming since forever. Random encounters abounded in high grass. Adam checked himself. He was dressed in a simple white tunic that reached his knees. It felt like silk to his skin. Bare feet. Nothing else on his hands.

He decided to run for it. This cutscene was sure to send some beast or something horrible his way, but if he made the smallest of efforts he should breeze thru it. No studio wanted to alienate its fans with an instant kill during a cutscene, without any chance of starting the real gameplay. It was a shame he could not record it, though. Maybe they were trying to keep it under wraps until an official launch or something.

Setting his sights on the brown hill, he settled his breath, got on a runner's pose, and bolted as fast as he could.