How bad could it be? Such was the question I asked myself as the Ubisoft representative handed me a controller, slipped one of the publisher’s proprietary Nosulus Rift headsets snugly over my face and appraised me with an ominously mischievous smirk. I was at a Ubisoft showcase on the eve of Gamescom 2016, and I was about to play a fifteen minute demo of South Park: The Fractured but Whole. The same demo had previously been shown to IGN two months prior at E3, but this was the first time it would be experienced with the ability to smell certain elements within the game’s small town setting.
And by ‘certain elements’, I unfortunately mean ‘anything to do with butts’. Before I started the demo I had thought, perhaps naively, that the Nosulus Rift would be a more sophisticated device. I had pictured the little containers in the headset triggered by items in the game to dispel real world odours to be more like a multi-chambered colour printer cartridge - perhaps divided into ‘pleasant’, ‘neutral’, and ‘mildly offensive’ chambers. I had thought wrong.And then all manner of unholy nasal hell was unleashed.
As I moved around Cartman’s house as main character Douchebag, I was unable to smell the sugar-stuffed Big Schlurf beverage I found in the kitchen fridge, nor the purple flowers on the side table that stood beside the basement door. In fact I couldn’t smell anything at all until the Ubisoft rep eagerly encouraged me to use the Cartman family’s upstairs toilet. At this point I dropped virtual trou, straddled the throne, squeezed both controller triggers to ‘clench’ and pushed the thumbsticks apart in order to ‘separate’. And then all manner of unholy nasal hell was unleashed.“
To be sure, there was no multi-chambered ink cartridge design to the Nosulus Rift. It was just a single-chambered stink cartridge, purpose-built to blast your bugle with a small but potent tank of stank. Make no mistake, this was no mildly unpleasant whiff. This was the smell of a turd, trapped inside a corpse, whose body had been found in a portable toilet on the last day of a music festival.
And it wasn’t just the pungency of the Nosulus’ emissions that was a surprise, it was how violently they assaulted my stinkbuds. So powerfully were the Nosulus’ fetid fumes propelled up into my skull that I had to immediately drop the controller and examine the back of my head for an exit wound. Life flashed before my eyes; not my life, mind you, but the life of a plumber that had spent his career unclogging toilet pipes at all you can eat Mexican food buffets.As if that initial uppercut of muscular miasma wasn’t enough of a blow, I subsequently copped an assault of three quickfire guff grenades when I performed the special fart-powered parkour to move from street level to rooftop, aided by Kyle and his kite. With the Nosulus Rift’s vile vapours putting me in a firm chokehold, I had no choice but to tap out.
The morning after my experience with the Nosulus Rift, I still couldn’t get it out of my mind. Wait, did I say ‘mind’? Because I meant sinus cavity. Despite vigourously brushing my teeth, gargling with mouthwash and trying to think only good-smelling thoughts the night of the demo, I woke up the next day with a taste in my mouth that can only be accurately described as ‘wet hobo jeans’.
But I suppose I should be thankful. As the Nosulus Rift has only been developed as a promotional tool, rather than a consumer product, I can count myself as one of the few people in the world lucky (and/or stupid) enough to have tried it. If ‘smell-o-vision’ ever does become mainstream tech, then I can say that I got in on the ground floor. (Nevermind that I didn’t so much as ‘get in on the ground floor’ as ‘slide nose-first into the dankest basement level of a sewage treatment plant’.) And really, what kind of idiot is ever going to say no to the experience of actually smelling a videogame?As for the game itself? Well you can get the gist of my experience by reading Alanah’s E3 hands-on here, only do a ‘find and replace’ on the word ‘fart’ and swap it for ‘searing stink-punch to the nose balls’. What I will say in addition, though, is that while the Nosulus Rift will not be sold alongside the game, it should at least be considered a testament to how committed both Ubisoft San Francisco and Trey Parker and Matt Stone are to bad taste gags; in the sense that they were willing to literally gag Gamescom attendees with the baddest taste possible. And that surely must be a good sign for fans looking forward to South Park: The Fractured but Whole. Tristan Ogilvie is a video producer at IGN AU who now knows what videogames smell like, but still doesn't know what love is. He's also on Twitter (incredibly rarely).