“These two shouldn’t be Shen Junxing…” a player muttered.
She Qulin didn’t respond.
He had only found two people named Shen Junxing—one was very young and still in kindergarten, and the other was quite old and living in a nursing home. If Tang Yu and Shen Junxing had a May–December friendship, then perhaps that elderly man with one foot in the grave could be Shen Junxing.
But after She Qulin looked into the records of the Shen Junxing in the nursing home, he realized that unless the stroke-stricken elder had experienced some sort of medical miracle, it was virtually impossible that he was the one making delicious breakfasts for Tang Yu and delivering them from miles away.
So then—
Where is the real Shen Junxing?
Could it be that Shen Junxing’s personal information was so highly classified that it was inaccessible even to him?
Other players had also tried bothering Tang Yu’s classmates today, asking around campus, searching online, but whether through real-life questioning or internet digging, all they found was a complete blank when it came to Shen Junxing.
It was as if Shen Junxing only existed in Tang Yu’s words. Who were they? Male or female? How old? Everything was a mystery.
“The game definitely won’t let us just use cheat-like methods to instantly locate Shen Junxing,” a player said while stroking his chin. “How about we go ask Tang Yu again?”
“Isn’t Yan Lang sucking up to Tang Yu already? Once he shares what he finds, we’ll know. Let’s see if his bootlicking paid off.”
“Hey, check the forums! Yan Lang and his group triggered a hidden quest!”
“What?! Let me see!”
“D*mn, if I’d known earlier I would’ve followed Yan Lang. They even got some key info!”
“…”
She Qulin, hearing this, also opened the player forums.
The forums weren’t just for beta testers—there were tons of “cloud players” desperately hoping to win a beta key for Anomaly Resurgence. And because the testers were too hooked to post updates, the cloud players were actually the most active ones.
Anomaly Resurgence, marketed as the world’s first full-dive VR game, had garnered massive attention. Yan Lang’s post had only been up for thirty minutes but already had tens of thousands of views and thousands of replies, making it a hot topic.
[Post Title]: #Anomaly Resurgence Review! I’m Blown Away!#
[Original Post]
Long time no see, I’m first-wave tester Yan Lang. I’m honored to have received a closed beta slot for Anomaly Resurgence. No BS—here’s my take on the world’s first game using groundbreaking virtual reality tech!
In a word: I’m completely blown away!
Anomaly Resurgence is basically a second world. Whether it’s freedom, realism, visuals, NPC interaction—everything is next-level!
First, the freedom!
Besides not being able to create non-humanoid avatars, take off your pants, or walk through invisible walls, you can do almost anything!
That said, the game encourages immersive roleplay. We’re college students, so even with this high level of freedom, there are certain constraints—like how we decorate our dorm.
Here’s what the player’s default dorm looks like: [image]
Here’s our dorm after one night of gathering furniture from various NPCs: [image]
Here’s our dorm after the dorm supervisor NPC and the police NPC visited: [image]
See what I mean?
Now let’s talk realism and visuals.
The art style blends realism with horror. The number of unique scene models, the 3D layout of the map, the freakish level of detail—it’s all unheard of. Even after just one day, I can confidently say Anomaly Resurgence can hold up to any scrutiny.
Check out this bus: [image][image][image][image]
Yep, it’s the infamous ghost bus. Doesn’t it look exactly like a normal city bus?
Now here’s what it looks like after we tore it apart: [image][image][image][image] Pure magical realism. 🤪
Ignore the blood, bones, and moving wheels for a second—notice how the internal structure is a perfect replica of a real-life bus? If we hadn’t destroyed it so fast, I honestly wanted to try refueling it to see if it’d actually drive.
Tearing it down helped prove that Anomaly Resurgence isn’t like other games with shiny exteriors and lazy internals. The obsessive attention to detail is a huge part of what makes the realism so immersive.
And the ghost bus? You can not only destroy it—you can rebuild it! Here’s the cart we made with the parts: [image].
Player character models? Also insane.
First, character creation—you can use AI prompts, manual sliders, or a 1:1 scan of your real face: [image].
I scanned my real face, then applied the beautify filter. Here’s the before: [image], and the after: [image]. Still, no matter what I did, the system rated my charm stat as 8. I looked around—no tester has a charm score higher than 8. Makes me wonder what charm 9 or 10 looks like. I mean, not to brag, but IRL I’m objectively hot.
Every hair strand, every pore on the model is visible. The pupils even dilate and contract depending on lighting—look, here’s my pupil in the dark: [image], and here in daylight: [image].
Other testers have already posted about Anomaly Resurgence’s insane level of detail. Because of how real it feels, the horror atmosphere hits harder than in any other horror game.
Usually, being able to play with friends kills the scare factor. But not here.
Take a look at this ghost passenger: [image][image][image].
Even if you turn the game’s mosaic filter to max and your teammates are goofing off, the hyper-realistic smells, touch, and sounds—corpse stench, cold drafts, eerie noises—still scare the hell out of you. If I had to name a downside: this game is not for the faint-hearted or anyone with heart conditions.
More on that another time.
What I really want to highlight is the second reason this game feels so incredibly realistic: The intelligence and interactivity of the NPCs!
Before playing this game, I could hardly imagine a game where every NPC the player interacts with has their own unique personality and backstory. But Anomaly Resurgence fully achieves this—NPCs are collectively intelligent. All of them react differently based on your favorability rating with them, your words and actions, and even your charm value. They’re nothing like traditional NPCs with canned, repetitive dialogues—it’s all genuinely fascinating.
For example, at first, I wanted to test whether the food on an NPC’s plate would actually decrease as they ate, whether they’d chew, and if their Adam’s apple would move, and so on. Then I discovered: if you stay about two meters away, most NPCs won’t react at all. But if you stare at them from close range—some will ask what you’re doing, some will stop eating and walk away, some will curse you for being a weirdo, and some will just move to a different seat and continue eating…
Here are the expressions they made at that time:
[image] [image] [image] [image] [image]
And that’s not all—one NPC who cursed at me later rolled his eyes when he saw me again and told the surrounding NPCs I was the freak who stared at people eating in the cafeteria. [image]
So I told that NPC that both my parents died young, and I was raised by my grandmother. She recently got seriously ill, and I had to send all my money back home. I now live on plain white rice and free soup in the cafeteria, and maybe I hadn’t seen decent food in too long, so I couldn’t help staring at his plate. I apologized.
Here’s how he reacted: [“I’m such a jerk.jpg”]
I even suspect Anomaly Resurgence uses real human actors to play the NPCs, and every one of them is a top-tier performer—only that could explain how incredibly lifelike they seem.
This NPC insisted on treating me to a meal, so I had him run errands to buy a bunch of breakfast food, and I completed a task assigned by Tang Yu.
That’s right—in this game, you can even get one NPC to run errands to complete a different NPC’s quest!
While doing Tang Yu’s fetch quests, I also discovered that you can bargain with NPCs in stores!
At first, the shopkeeper wouldn’t accept any haggling. But once I told my “I have a seriously ill grandma” story, along with [these images], [these images], [these images]—suddenly everything was a fire-sale bargain!
Even more interesting is that both the NPC who cursed me and the shopkeeper increased their favorability toward me after giving me gifts.
This shows that Anomaly Resurgence’s favorability system is very flexible and open-ended—very different from other games.
But the wildest part? After completing all of Tang Yu’s errands… his favorability toward me was still only 1. [thumbs-up.jpg]
Tang Yu is by far the hardest NPC to raise favorability with.
Forget the one who called me a psycho—after I accepted a system quest to search for things, I went rummaging through dorm rooms, and many NPCs’ favorability toward me went negative.
But those are relatively easy to recover. Just tell them the grandma story and explain that you were searching for a photo of you and your grandma. Most of them will forgive you a little.
Only Tang Yu.
No matter how many gifts you give him, how many tasks you complete, or how many versions of the grandma story you tell—his favorability stays at 1.
And what does a favorability of 1 even mean?
Because my charm rating is 8, the lowest initial favorability any NPC has toward me is 60.
Tang Yu was the first NPC I interacted with. At first, I even thought the max favorability in this game was 10 because he started at 0.
Even though Tang Yu’s favorability toward me is only 1, his behavior feels like an NPC with 60+ favorability. [thumbs-up.jpg]
I took a look at the NPCs around Tang Yu. The system notes that they all have crushes on him, and their favorability toward him is no less than 90. [image] [image] [image] [image]
Yes, in this game, we can see not just NPCs’ favorability toward us, but also their favorability toward each other.
But the strange thing is—I can’t see Tang Yu’s favorability toward any NPC.
As one of the earliest NPCs to appear in the game, Tang Yu already has a lot of analysis posts on the forums. Some think he’s a “newbie guide-type” NPC. But here’s my personal take: I believe Tang Yu is a special clue-type NPC.
What’s a clue-type special NPC?
This brings us to the game’s main storyline.
At the beginning of the game, the system introduces the world setting (image): the anomaly is about to resurge, and it will change the world. We players are the chosen ones, and our mission is to participate in this great resurgence plan. In completing tasks, players will gain anomaly powers—such as infinite resurrection and supernatural abilities—and their frail human bodies will also be transformed (attribute points enhanced).
The ghost bus is the first resurgent anomaly entity that players encounter. The system task is to find a living driver (image). But during the task, I realized the real goal is to find a living person and use their blood as fuel for the ghost bus.
As mentioned earlier, when the ghost bus is dismantled, its structure is nearly identical to a normal bus in real life. For example, the fuel tank is located in the lower left, about three meters behind the driver’s seat (images).
The person sitting in the driver’s seat does make the bus run—but as fuel.
Once we take on this task, a janitor NPC soon appears (image). This NPC was apparently designated by the system to be the fuel. However, Tang Yu helps the janitor escape, disrupting the original task process.
When a player suggested using Tang Yu as the live driver instead, a second task appeared (image), requiring us to escort Tang Yu and destroy the ghost bus.
Task Two directly contradicts Task One—one asks you to protect Tang Yu and destroy the ghost bus, the other to kill Tang Yu and aid its resurrection.
If traditional main quests are like a straight line, then Tang Yu’s uniqueness is that he allows the storyline to branch off into different paths.
Some may think I’m jumping to conclusions, but after finishing the first task, I only had a rough hunch. Then came the second task (image).
The task was to “Find ???”, but the system gave no clues. No description, no leads. Finding ??? on the huge campus map was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
But after completing Tang Yu’s delivery questline, I got a clue about the ???!
I’ve written so much without realizing it—let me eat something first before continuing the update.
[Post #1]
?? I took off my pants and this is what you give me?!
…
[Post #444]
Hey everyone, it’s Yan Lang—I’m back!
Previously, I mentioned being hacked to low HP by that paper effigy. I have to praise Anomaly Resurgence again for its realism. When the paper effigy cut me, they even captured the sensation of the blade snagging on muscle. When it hit bone, its movements lagged slightly—there’s no actual pain, but it felt real!
Here’s the oppressive vibe of the paper effigy (images).
I died afterward.
But it was worth it. Remember the “Find ???” mission? I got a system hint—it turns out the ??? is hidden within this instance (image).
In this instance, the number of deaths affects your score. You only get one chance per day. I’ve used mine, so now it’s up to the rest of you—I’ll continue exploring!
[Post #445]
I really want to play this game ahhhh!!
[Post #446]
I’m kinda curious now what Tang Yu with a charm stat of 10 looks like. Has no one seen his face?
