Groundhog Day's sequel isn't a film but a VR game, and it's out later this year

Sony has announced that the sequel to 1993 movie Groundhog Day—in which a TV weatherman relives the same day over and over—isn't another film but a VR game, and it's coming to both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive later this year (and potentially to some of the other best VR headsets later).

Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son, developed by Tequila Works, will follow the story of Phil Connors Jr., son of the original film's protagonist. Just like his dad, he's stuck in an infinitely-looping day in the small town of Punxsutawney, and he can't escape the nightmare "until he learns the true value of friends and family".

You'll be solving puzzles and moving through a branching narrative, and Tequila Works reckons it'll take around eight hours to complete. The first trailer, above, doesn't show much actual gameplay, but I imagine there will be plenty of motion control-based shenanigans in the Connors family home and elsewhere in the town.

Tequila Works is the studio behind puzzle-platformer Rime (which I loved but Samuel wasn't too keen on) and Deadlight, and it also helped develop The Sexy Brutale, another game about time loops. The game is being produced and published by Sony Pictures Virtual Reality.

You can check out the official website here. Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son is due out at some point in 2019.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.