Journey to Foundation review: Reality comes up short in abridged Asimov

But no, there’s magic in those numbers – most famously revealed by Einstein with his celebrated E=MC² equation that he believed could explain the universe.

Sci-fi author Isaac Asimov went one further, proposing a branch of maths that could predict the future via a beautiful algorithm. This fanciful concept appeared in his 1950s series of novels called Foundation, in which a great thinker modelled the mass behaviour of entire populations and concluded civilisation was headed for disaster.

If that rings a bell, it’s quite probably because of the mega-budget TV adaptation on Apple’s streaming service, now in its second series and shot partly in Limerick. All of which brings us to Journey to Foundation, which has little to do with the TV show and bravely tells a story beyond Asimov’s books.

In this VR-based spin-off of the Foundation universe, a sort of galactic private eye named Agent Ward is dispatched to the further reaches of the cosmos to investigate a kidnapping in a remote colony. What follows is a menagerie of elements as the developers put a narrative pot on the stove and throw in several ingredients in an attempt to cook up a compelling tale about threats to the Foundation empire.

That they succeed to an extent is testament to the strength of the story, a sprawling yarn of geo-politics, machinations and duplicity rooted in Asimov’s fiction. Less effective is the range of gameplay glueing all this storyline together. There’s a few puzzles, a fair bit of shooting, a touch of stealth … and a lot of talking.

There’s not much maths on show but it turns out Agent Ward has psychic powers that allows her unearth clues that reveal the past and possibly predict the future. While investigating the abduction – and later the chaos in the empire – she can read people’s thoughts with a gesture in VR, which in turn unlocks new conversation options. Oddly enough, none of the other characters object to you waving your hands in their face as you chat, which erodes the immersion somewhat.

Those lengthy sequences nonetheless feel more polished than the other components, none of which convince entirely. Certainly, the rather mundane gun combat and stealth sections fail to get the pulse racing. Visually, Journey to Foundation resembles more a last-generation VR title and quite a few technical bugs remain despite recent patches.

It’s a valiant but workmanlike effort to recreate the drama of Mass Effect, EA’s galaxy-straddling space opera – but without the budget.