Riddle me this
VR puzzlers to make you think in a new dimension
1 £9.49 SYMPHONY OF THE MACHINE
Atop a desert tower, you are tasked with fostering the right environmental conditions to get a little bulb to grow. To do this, you angle light beams so that they shine upon and activate various panels that in turn can create a range of weather conditions.
Billing itself as a “meditative spatial puzzle game,” Symphony Of The Machine can certainly be a peaceful experience, allowing you to watch the rain or snow fall in PS VR. Unfortunately, it can be equally frustrating. If it’s not your helper robot getting in the way, it’s the general claustrophobia of the main puzzle area. The puzzles are relatively straightforward, but you can finish the main game in one sitting and all that’s left after that is a relatively light sandbox mode. That said, there’s the germ of something more here and we look forward to seeing what Stir fire Studios does next.
2 £15.99 STATIK
This puzzler positions your Dual Shock 4 as the star of the show, encasing your virtual avatar’s hands inside a series of increasingly twisted puzzle boxes. The solution is always at your fingertips, but this game isn’t one for heavy-handed hints. Through tinkering you may just stumble onto some sort of understanding. There’s no real penalty for taking your time to pick apart each puzzle, but tension is maintained by the perturbing interjections of a lone scientist observing you.
This is another offering you could finish in one sitting, though the puzzles here are far more fiendish than Symphony Of The Machine’s, and chasing the high of discovering a solution will keep you going. That said, I don’t think I’ll be rushing back to it as it hits a little too close to what happened after my last interplanetary communication blunder.
3 £11.99 GNOG
Featuring a series of puzzle boxes, here called ‘monster heads,’ you must tinker your way towards a solution, not unlike how you do in Statik. But solutions are certainly not obtuse; the flow of progression’s a fairly direct one. GNOG’s core strength is its overall presentation, which is, in a word, joyful. While it’s appealing on your TV screen, there’s something subtly transformative about viewing it through a PS VR headset that makes it the recommended experience by far.
Strangely comforting, GNOG presents a mood you’ll want to wrap yourself up in. The bite-sized length might dissatisfy a tad, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing to leave your audience wanting more… as I have learnt the hard way from an series of social faux pas that left me more acquainted with strange and terrible boxes than one has any reason to be.