With Elijah Wood as a creative director and plenty of live action sequences, Ubisoft and Spectrevision's upcoming psychological thriller Transference was always going to draw similarities to a silver screen experience. The game is designed to be an immersive virtual reality title (though it can be played just a controller), with players jumping through the digitized brain data of a troubled family. Players will shift through the perspectives of different family members, piecing together a full picture amidst puzzle sequences and several bits of in-game live action videos. Transference will feature a decent amount of these story building sequences, but how long will the experience ultimately last?

During a recent hands-on with the title, it took 15 minutes to get through two puzzles in an increasing cryptic apartment setting. By the end of the demonstration, it became clear that the player wasn't the only one creeping through the corrupted dimensions of the Hayes family brain data - there was also a monster which had apparently been chasing members of the family, too. Transference will be a creepy experience in the vein of a more horrific Gone Home, and producer Kévin Racapé is confident fans will be able to reconstruct what happened to the Hayes family over the course of the game.

According to the Montreal-based producer, early playtests of the game have lasted about 2-3 hours, so gamers with a free afternoon should expect to be able to complete Transference in its entirety:

It’s the average length of a movie. According to our playtests, it takes 2-3 hours to complete the game.

Of course, that's assuming that gamers don't get stuck on any of the puzzles within the game. Transference is designed to feel like a movie, though players will progress through the storyline through both in-game object inspection and things like live-action sequences. Racapé also says that players can also collect items that will unlock supplementary live-action video rewards which can be accessed from the main menu.

When it comes to Elijah Wood's influence on the movie-length production, Racapé says having the Hollywood veteran helped tremendously when it came to developing the storyline.

While players should be able to piece everything together in 2-3 hours, Spectrevision has developed an ending that should be open to interpretation. If Racapé had to guess, he'd say most gamers will feel either empathy or sadness by the times the credit roll. Other psychological thrillers like SOMA have done a wonderful job leaving gamers in dark and contemplative emotional states in recent times, so Transference will have some big shoes to fill in its 2-3 hours of action.

Transference will release on September 18, 2018 for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, PC, PS4, PSVR, and Xbox One.