Laser Puzzle in VR is the type of game you would normally find as a mini-game puzzle inside a larger game like BioShock or Prey. You know the kind; where you want to hack a computer or unlock a door but to do so you must solve some arbitrary pipe puzzle or bounce a laser off a few mirrors to reach an optical port. Well, that is exactly what you’ll be doing when you find yourself trapped on a space station with 72 sealed doors, all locked behind increasingly difficult laser grid puzzles.
We’ve probably all played something like this at one time, but nothing can prepare you for the increased level of enjoyment doing this simple task in VR thanks to expert use of precision tracked motion controls and an enjoyable room-scale experience that plays best standing up but feel free to sit for some of the longer puzzles.
When the game starts you’ll find yourself in one of two connected rooms, each with several doors and all of which are locked except for one. Completing the set of locked-door puzzles behind that door unlock the next with an all new set of puzzles. The puzzles are refreshingly simple in construction but grow more diabolical the further you go. There is a yellow laser emitting from a source that you must bounce around a grid on the wall using reflective spheres so the laser reaches all of the blue destination panels so they turn yellow as well. The spheres are all inside a wire boxes that magnetically snap to the grid squares on the wall, but there are dead squares in some puzzles restricting your placement. Your placement determines the angle of reflection and the ultimate destination of the beam.
The puzzles range in difficulty by the size of the grid as well as the number of spheres you have to work with. Some rooms have extra spheres lying on the floor when you arrive while some puzzles require you to rearrange the spheres already stuck on the wall. Some puzzles can be solved in a few seconds while others will take 10-15 minutes of trial and error to figure out, especially in the later puzzles where there are multiple laser sources and even more destination targets.
VR adds to the experience with a simple teleport movement system to get around the station and position yourself in front of the puzzle, then you simply reach out and grab a sphere-in-a-box with your motion controller and move it around to where you want. The magnetic attraction of the wall helps with placement and even allows you to walk into a room and grab the blocks on the floor and toss them toward the wall where they snap into temporary placement until you figure out where they are supposed to go.
My only minor complaint is that many of the puzzles are on the left wall of the virtual hall and due to the placement of my Rift cameras to the front and right of my play area, I often had my back to one camera which randomly glitched my motion tracking. This was more of an issue with the Rift than the Vive, and is not a negative on the game but merely a concern and potential warning for those with similar camera placements. Rift owners may want to think about a third camera for true room-scale.
The visuals are excellent, not that there is much to see other than some simplistic space station wall textures, the obligatory view out the giant curved window, and some bright yellow (almost orange) and blue lights…really bright lights. Despite the dark dull grey of the spheres they still had a shiny texture without going full-on chrome ball. There are some cool sound effects for blocks snapping into place, lasers bouncing around and unlocking seals, and doors hissing open along with a light jazzy soundtrack to sooth any mental distress which is sure to come later in the game when puzzles start spanning multiple walls.
Laser Puzzle in VR is a total steal for only $8. That’s .11 cents per puzzle and with some of the later puzzle taking upwards of 20-30 minutes to figure out, that’s some serious bargain gameplay. The graphics are clean and smooth and there was no eye-fatigue; even the one session where I spent almost two hours playing. I was constantly reminded of games like Portal and Talos Principle, at least from a raw puzzle-solving mechanic, and my enjoyment was certainly no less than those classic titles. While the concept behind Laser Puzzle in VR is certainly nothing new, the flawless presentation and expert use of VR evolves a simple premise into a must-have puzzle game for anyone who owns a Rift or Vive.
