New Oculus Rift game from Words With Friends creators brings Mario-like gameplay into virtual reality

Virtual reality gives people the opportunity to look through someone else’s digital eyes, but that’s not how developer Playful Corp. is going to do things.

The studio, which Words With Friends co-creator Paul Bettner founded in 2013, revealed that it is making a VR game called Lucky’s Tale for the Oculus Rift headset. It is a platformer (where characters jump around on things and enemies to reach the end of a stage) that players will control from a third-person perspective, which is a very unusual experience for the Rift, which usually hosts games with first-person perspectives. Playful is teaming up with Oculus VR to work on the title, and the two companies will show it off in action for the first time at next week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. This is just the latest piece of software for the device that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spent $2 billion to acquire.