The Key integrates more than VR. You enter a misty room wearing a neckband speaker that begins the story's narration and music. You're alone with a woman in a simple tunic, and she acts out the first-person narrator's cues. She shows you a large key in her hand when the narrator mentions it, for example.
And she helps you put the VR headset on. The headset's soundtrack syncs with the speaker collar you're wearing -- one of the most clever ways I've seen for a VR project to ease the often-clunky transition from the real world into virtual reality.
The VR itself is an allegorical animation. Finding the look of the experience was important to Tricart: watercolor skies, primary colors, a bare lunar-like landscape. And as you go through the experience, in barely perceptible ways, you lose one color after another. Your world degrades.
But in a shocking transition, The Key's VR experience flips from its artistic presentation to blunt realism and explains the underlying truth to everything you just saw. Refugees aren't mentioned until the very end.