‘Laser Dance’ Coming to Quest 3 in 2024, From Creator Behind One of Quest’s Best-rated Puzzle Games

Thomas Van Bouwel, the developer behind popular VR puzzle game Cubism (2020), is nearing launch of the long-teased mixed reality game for Quest that turns your living room into a moving grid of lasers straight out of Mission Impossible.

Update (October 3rd, 2023): Van Bouwel announced Laser Dance is coming to Quest 3 and Quest Pro sometime next year. There’s no release window yet, however users looking to get early access can become best testers. Check out the new teaser below:

Original Article (October 24th, 2022): Called Laser Dance, the Quest game aims to turn any room of your house into a laser obstacle course—basically recreating the old laser hallway trope you may recognize from a ton of films, TV shows and video games over the years.

There’s no word on release dates yet, although progress is looking good. Check out a work-in-progress level of Laser Dance in action:

Van Bouwel came up with the idea over the two-day Global Game Jam 2022 earlier this year, and has since fleshed out the game to include parametrically-generated laser patterns based on room size and layout, meaning the action should dynamically fit to your space and serve up a challenge no matter how big (or cluttered) your space.

Although the game has been shown working with Quest 2’s monochrome passthrough, the indie dev is no doubt positioning Laser Dance for release on Meta Quest Pro, which is capable of more realistic passthrough AR thanks to its five external sensors, offering a higher resolution color view with improved depth-detection.

We’re looking forward to learning more about Laser Dance, as Van Bouwel is excellent at creating deceptively simple gameplay that really makes you think—look no further than Cubism, which has also kept lock-step with passthrough and hand-tracking updates on Quest since its initial launch in 2020. If you want to follow along with progress on Laser Dance, check out the game’s official Twitter.

‘I Expect You To Die 3’ Action Revealed in New Gameplay Trailer, Coming Soon to Quest 2 & PC VR

Schell Games announced during Meta’s big Quest Gaming Showcase today that I Expect You to Die 3: Cog in the Machine is coming in Summer 2023. There’s also a new gameplay trailer to show off the sequel’s spy-flavored, escape room-style puzzling action.

Initially announced in February, Schell Games is bringing the next episode of its critically-acclaimed Bond-style puzzle-adventure to Quest 2 and SteamVR headsets at some point later this year. The studio hasn’t said whether it’s also heading for PSVR 2, although neither of the previous titles have made the jump to PlayStation’s latest headset, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

In the I Expect You To Die games, the player is tossed into a number of escape room-style puzzles that require sharp wits to defy deadly traps, solve complex object-oriented puzzles, and maneuver your way ever closer to defeating the evil Dr. Zor and his henchmen.

This time around Dr. Zor has a dastardly new scheme, the studio says, pitting you against a new villain, Dr. Roxanne Prism, a former inventor for the agency turned rogue. Dr. Prism is trying to make robot agents and prove they’re superior to their human counterparts.

You can pre-order I Expect You To Die 3 now on Quest and wishlist on SteamVR. The Quest pre-order comes with a 10% discount.

Quest’s Most Graphically Intense Game is Coming to PSVR 2 Next Week

Red Matter 2, the sci-fi VR puzzle adventure for Quest 2 and PC VR, is bringing its best-in-class graphics and interactions to PSVR 2 next week.

Update (May 11th, 2023): Vertical Robot announced Red Matter 2 is headed to PSVR 2 on May 18th. This is said to include 120fps, foveated rendering, 4K remastered textures, enhanced lighting & bloom, and custom controller & immersive haptics. You can wishlist the game on PSVR 2 here.

The original article follows below:

Original Article (April 20th, 2023): Vertical Robot says the sequel is slated to arrive on PSVR 2 “very soon,” noting in a tweet it will feature a smooth 120fps with no reprojection, foveated Rendering, 4K re-mastered textures, and enhanced lighting.

And while some may rightly bemoan it as another Quest 2 port, it’s really much more than that.

Launched in mid-2022 on Quest 2 and PC VR, Red Matter 2 features some of the most impressive graphics and immersive gameplay to date—of any VR platform—easily drawing comparisons to some of VR’s most visually intense games, such as Lone Echo and Half-Life: Alyx. It’s really that good.

Here’s the setup: in Red Matter 2, you take on the role of Sasha, an agent awakened in a lunar base by an undercover operative and tasked with uncovering the secrets of ‘Red Matter’, a mysterious substance introduced in Red Matter (2018).

The sequel introduces combat for the first time, which although not a high point, definitely makes for an interesting break from the game’s wide variety of puzzles. Enough said. Check out our spoiler-free review to find out why we gave it [8/10].

There’s no word on when we can expect the original Red Matter on PSVR 2 (see update). We’ll also be keeping our eyes peeled for a more precise launch date for the sequel, so check back soon.

BAFTA-Nominated Adventure Puzzle ‘Call of the Sea’ Releases on Quest 2 Today

Call of the Sea (2020) always looked like a good candidate for VR support, and it seems the developers Out of The Blue Games thought so too, as the Madrid-based indie studio today released the BAFTA-nominated adventure puzzle on Quest 2.

Redesigned for VR, Call of the Sea is all about solving the mass of first-person puzzles which fill the mysterious island, set in the South Pacific circa 1934.

As a story-driven adventure, you’ll explore the lost ruins of the island and uncover its mysteries as you chase your missing husband who was on a mission to find a cure for a strange disease that afflicts you.

The game’s object-oriented puzzling feels like a good fit for VR, as users are tasked with browsing forgotten journals, solving musical puzzles, and manipulating Lovecraftian mechanisms which litter the island.

There’s also a good helping of narrative twists and turns to contend with, as Call of the Sea typically takes players between five to six hours to complete.

We haven’t gone hands-on with the VR adaptation yet, however the original flatscreen version has garnered very positive user reviews from across Steam and Epic Games Store. It also received a BAFTA nomination in 2021 for Best Debut Game and a Raindance Immersive nomination in 2022 for Best Immersive Game.

You can download Call of the Sea VR on the Quest Store starting today, priced at $20. The game isn’t live yet at the time of this writing, as it’s set to unlock in the next few hours.

Time-looping Puzzle Shooter ‘We Are One’ is Coming to All Major VR Platforms, Trailer Here

Flat Head Studio announced at UploadVR’s Summer Showcase today that its time-bending puzzle shooter We Are One is set to be published by veteran VR studio Fast Travel Games, and is arriving on “all major VR platforms.”

We Are One is all about using time loops to blast your way through mechanical enemies hellbent on destroying mother nature.

“With cleverly designed action puzzles, We Are One provides beginners and the most seasoned VR gamers with endless challenges. Just make sure you coordinate your plan of attack with your own clones – if you fail, you have no one to blame but all the different versions of yourself,” the studio says.

First revealed in February and published as a demo on Quest App Lab, the full version of We Are One is said to feature over 50 action-packed levels, cloning and time looping, and an environmental story amidst bleak industrial landscapes.

We also named We Are One one of our top 10 demos from Steam Next Fest back in February, noting that it features a mobile arcade game feel that fans of Angry Birds VR will probably like.

Although supported headsets are still uncertain, “all major VR platforms” typically means Meta Quest 2, SteamVR headsets, and PSVR (or PSVR 2). There’s no release date yet, however you can wishlist the game on Steam now and join the game’s Discord (invite link).

The post Time-looping Puzzle Shooter ‘We Are One’ is Coming to All Major VR Platforms, Trailer Here appeared first on Road to VR.

Preview: ‘Shores of Loci’ is a Gorgeous 3D Puzzler Coming to Quest 2 & SteamVR Next Week

First time VR studio MikeTeevee is soon to release Shores of Loci, a 3D puzzle game backed by gorgeous and fantastical visuals. The game is set for an Early Access release on Quest 2 via App Lab and SteamVR on May 24th.

Though production company MikeTeevee has been around since 2011, the studio has never released a VR game before Shoes of Loci. Along with the game’s initial release on App Lab (also coming to SteamVR), you might expect the studio’s debut project to be rough around the edges. On the contrary, after previewing the game myself I found a polished experience that offers up enjoyable 3D puzzles with a backdrop of sharp and fantastical visuals that are a cut above many games you’d find on Quest 2.

At its most basic, Shores of Loci is like a fictional version of Puzzling Places. While the latter has you snapping together scans of real buildings, Shores of Loci instead slices up totally imagined (and quite beautiful) little dioramas.

A completed puzzle in ‘Shores of Loci’ | Image courtesy MikeTeeVee

Shores of Loci is enhanced by a surrounding environment that’s beautifully rendered and art directed—from the last glimpse of sunlight reflecting at the very edge of the horizon to the towering structures that surround you like silent giants—even on Quest 2 it all looks great.

A completed puzzle in ‘Shores of Loci’ | Image courtesy MikeTeeVee

The game effectively uses VR as a canvas for the imagination and serves up some very striking and creative visuals, like a scene transition that sees the entire world before you enveloped as if being consumed and then regurgitated by a black hole (it’s more peaceful than it sounds, I promise).

Shores of Loci’s puzzling offers a slightly more organic feeling than Puzzling Places, perhaps because of the way that the 3D models you fit together have volume inside of them instead of being hollow textures. In any case, the fundamental gameplay is quite similar in that you’ll need to use a combination of traditional puzzling skills (edge shapes, color matching, etc) with some spatial reasoning to reach the point that you get to snap that final, satisfying piece into place.

Alongside its lovely visual backdrop, Shores of Loci also has some great audio design, with peaceful music and satisfying sonic feedback as you progress through each puzzle.

– – — – –

For anyone that loves puzzles, Shores of Loci is an easy recommendation. You’re getting some fun 3D puzzles and a fantastical visual feast to go along with them. And you won’t need to wait long to try it yourself; Shores of Loci launches on App Lab and SteamVR on May 24th, priced at $15.

The post Preview: ‘Shores of Loci’ is a Gorgeous 3D Puzzler Coming to Quest 2 & SteamVR Next Week appeared first on Road to VR.

VR Puzzler ‘Shadow Point’ Coming to PSVR This Month, From Studio Behind ‘Jurassic World Aftermath’

Coatsink, the studio behind the Esper and Jurassic World Aftermath series, is finally bringing Shadow Point out of Quest and Rift exclusivity, as the stylish story-driven puzzle adventure is headed to PSVR this month.

Shadow Point, a first-person single player game, throws you into a mystical world that unfolds between a mountaintop observatory and an ever-changing fantasy environment. It includes some clever puzzles that require you to think spatially, and use magical objects at your disposal to move forward through a beautiful, surrealist world.

Now Coatsink says it’s leaving Meta exclusivity with its PSVR launch scheduled for March 22nd.

The game includes over 80 environmental puzzles that you can play either seated or standing. You might also recognize the voice the trailer above: that’s Sir Patrick Stewart (aka Star Trek’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard).

Originally a launch title for Quest back in May 2019, Shadow Point will arrive on PSVR March 22nd, priced at $20.

The post VR Puzzler ‘Shadow Point’ Coming to PSVR This Month, From Studio Behind ‘Jurassic World Aftermath’ appeared first on Road to VR.

‘Puzzling Places’ to Bring its Engrossing 3D Jigsaw Puzzles to PSVR December 14th

Puzzling Places (2021), the VR puzzle game that takes highly-detailed and realistic room scans and breaks them into jigsaw puzzles, is finally set to launch on PSVR tomorrow, December 14th.

Created by Realities.io, Puzzling Places brings a myriad of objects and places to life with the use of a photogrammetry, a technique that takes high-resolution photos and constructs them into a 3D model.

Like conventional puzzles, you’re not only tasked with matching the crenelated edges of each piece, but also with keeping tabs on the image’s different textures and how they flow together. Being able to simply click the 3D pieces together makes for an immersive way to appreciate the finer details as your pour over complex stitching patterns of a handmade kimono, shadows from tiny buildings, or rich tapestries hanging from the walls a historical residence in central Stockholm.

Puzzling Places is set to release on PSVR with five main puzzle packs that span historical sites (and interesting gubbins) in Sweden, Armenia, France, the United States, and Japan. The additional DLC pack, which typically sells for $5 on Quest, brings to the game four scenes from the Mars Research Station in Utah, making for a total of 20 scenes.

Each scene can be played in multiple difficulties, which allow to tackle the puzzle in 25, 50, 100, 200, and 400 pieces. There’s a few tools at your disposal too, such as the ‘repacker’ tool which lets you keep your pieces neat and tidy. Whatever the case, you’ll never lose a piece.

If all of that sounds intriguing, make sure to check out our review on Quest to find out why we gave it [8/10] when it first launched back in September. You can find it over on the Playstation Store for $20, Mars Research Station DLC included.

The post ‘Puzzling Places’ to Bring its Engrossing 3D Jigsaw Puzzles to PSVR December 14th appeared first on Road to VR.

‘Squingle’ is a Brilliantly Creative Puzzler That Proves Why App Lab is Essential

Squingle is a psychedelic indie puzzle game that’s available now on PC VR and Quest. It’s also the perfect example of a game that probably wouldn’t be allowed onto Quest’s main ‘curated’ store because it’s difficult to understand at a glance, despite being brilliantly creative and highly optimized to run at 120Hz on Quest 2. Luckily, thanks to App Lab, you can get your hands on the game whether or not it fits Oculus’ vision.

Squingle is one of those games that you can look at and still not entirely understand what you’re actually seeing. But once you get your hands on the game all becomes clear: it’s a clever, trippy, and fun puzzle game that plays to VR’s spatial strengths.

To put it simply, the goal of Squingle is to guide a pair of spinning balls through a pipe. Sounds easy enough, right? Well like any good puzzle game, Squingle starts simply enough but introduces more difficult concepts as you go—like a button that reverses the spin of the balls or one that changes the axis of the spin. And the pipe? It’s actually a bit more like a cosmic bowel that undulates with twists, turns, and parallel tunnels.

There’s something really satisfying about moving the balls through the bendy, bubbly tubes. Without knowing exactly where the edge is (because it has some amount of flex), you wind up leaning heavily on feel (aided by haptics)—rather than sight alone—to know if you’re in danger of being penalized for bumping too hard into the edge of the track.

Beyond being a creative puzzle game that leverages VR’s strength of spatial input, Squigle is also quite beautiful in its own psychedelic way. The luminescent, trippy visuals are pristinely sharp and shiny, even in the Quest version—not to mention the game can even be kicked up to a smooth 120Hz refresh rate in the options menu.

All in all, Squingle is a small but fun and unique title with excellent technical merit. But it’s precisely the kind of game that would probably have a difficult time getting onto the main Quest store due to Oculus’ curation.

Thankfully, Oculus App Lab finally gives developers an official back door onto the headset, which means games like Squigle at least have some avenue to prove their value to customers. With any luck, maybe a look at the cold, hard data will show Oculus that this obtuse looking game is actually quite the gem. And maybe, just maybe, that will give Squingle a real shot at making the jump onto the main Quest store.

In the meantime, you can enjoy Squingle on Quest via App Lab (demo here) and on PC VR via Steam (demo here).

The post ‘Squingle’ is a Brilliantly Creative Puzzler That Proves Why App Lab is Essential appeared first on Road to VR.

‘Puzzling Places’ Review – Putting Conventional Jigsaw Puzzles to Shame

Puzzling Places takes jigsaw puzzles in a new and clever direction by offering up multiple difficulties of some highly textured and interesting 3D scenes, making for an experience that’s better than either physical 2D or 3D puzzles in almost every way.

Puzzling Places Details:

Available On: Oculus Quest, (PSVR coming in 2021)  
Price: 
$15
Developer
: Realities.io
Release Date: September 2nd, 2021
Reviewed On: Oculus Quest 2

Gameplay

The concept is simple: the game includes 16 puzzles at launch, all of which can be fractured into 25, 50, 100, 200, and 400 pieces. All scenes are based on photogrammetry—a technique for taking high resolution photos of a thing and stitching them together to make a 3D model—so puzzles have an extreme lifelike quality to them that wholly artificial objects typically don’t. Click the pieces together in any order you like and voilà: you have a detailed little model of something cool in front of you.

In Puzzling Places you’ll be able to build things like millennia-old temples in Armenia, a delicate and expressive Japanese kimono, and a densely-packed drawing room in Sweden that, when pushed to the max 400-piece difficulty becomes a smorgasbord of chairs, rich tapestries, and all sorts of finery that may take you literal hours to assemble. Playing Puzzling Places really can be as simple as clicking a large stretch of beach together like a Hot Wheels tracks, or going in to match miniscule bits of houses that all look very similar.

Image courtesy Realities.io

After the tutorial, the game invites you to run through a few 25-piece puzzles first to get your legs. Beyond that, you won’t hear a peep out of the game, even as you head on to more difficult puzzle configurations. Although the full gamut of puzzles available at launch feels fairly low in number, all puzzles have been thoughtfully fragmented from 25-400 pieces so you can play each level as if it were new. There’s multiple hours of puzzling here and Realities.io promises more is yet to come post-launch. A bit more on difficulty in Immersion though.

Anyway, here’s a great mixed reality look at what it feels like to build in Puzzling Places, courtesy of Fabio Dela Antonio:

Like conventional puzzles, you’re not only tasked with matching the crenelated edges of each piece, but also keeping tabs on the image’s different textures and how they align. An efficient puzzler tends to group pieces and solve the most obvious bits first, which thankfully is an uncomplicated thing in Puzzling Places since you can easily summon pieces from the puzzle backboard and either leave them anywhere in mid-air, or return them to any spot on the board you want. Once you create your system for sorting pieces, the real challenge begins and you’re forced to examine every aspect of the piece, looking for more context clues like stitching patterns, shadows from buildings, and logical flow from one to the next. Is that a bit of chandelier, or maybe a chair leg?

By default a few reference images taken from different angles are placed down by your feet, but if you’re looking for a real challenge you can turn them off and attack each puzzle without truly knowing the end result.

Image courtesy Realities.io

There are two tools in the game to make things easier, although they’re really more suited for users attacking advanced puzzles since so much can be done by hand. Tools include ‘Grouping’ and ‘See-through’, which let you respectively group pieces together for better organization, and temporarily render pieces invisible so you can work on obscured parts like interiors. You’ll see those projected on the backboard where you can select and summon it to you just like you do with a puzzle piece. Neither of the tools felt vital to puzzle-solving though, as I almost immediately forgot them as I went on about selecting, organizing and piecing together scenes naturally.

Thankfully, pausing and resuming a gameplay session is simple. It remembers every time a piece is moved thanks to the local autosave function. You can also save up to four profiles so you can share the game with friends and family too.

Immersion

Ok, I said it was better than physical 2D and 3D puzzles in almost every single way, although it notably lacks an inherent tactility that you might find important to the whole process of building things with your own two hands—or rather, two egg-shaped hands. Although realism suffers a bit here due to abstract hand models, pieces do ‘chunk’ together automatically when you fit them close enough, and that on its own is pretty satisfying.

Not as satisfying as picking up a piece and fitting it together, but on the flipside you also never have to worry about breaking a nubbin that’s supposed to slot in just right, or losing a piece. The game even encourages you with sound effects once you’ve reached your penultimate move, and gives you a tiny celebration once the last piece has been fitted.

Image courtesy Realities.io

Puzzles are impressively detailed, and are also variable in size. At first, playing through the 25-piece difficulty level I thought not being able to inspect the creations in greater detail was a missed opportunity. You can’t just zoom-in and make the puzzle bigger to see more. Puzzles physically scale according to difficulty though, so you’ll get a good and thorough look at each scene as you muck through piles of stones and golden relics galore in the 400-piece range.

Environments are fairly plain, offering either a grassy reed motif by default or a skybox with variable color themes which you can change via the Color-Picker tool. You’ll find that next to the other two puzzle-solving tools on the backboard.

Because your puzzling environment is so plain—probably to not step on the toes of its unique and detailed photogrammetric puzzles—the game has ostensibly focused on audio to bring you closer to the essence of each puzzle. Various parts of the puzzle trigger an audio cue, like when you hear sprinklers turn on once you’ve slotted in the golf course at the lighthouse on the Biarritz puzzle. It’s charming and immersive, although the ambient sounds personally became a little too repetitive and distracting for me during longer sessions.

Comfort

As you’d imagine, the default control scheme is extremely simple. The Index finger trigger pulls double duty and works for both selecting and holding pieces, which can be a bit tiring if you’re going in for a long session. ‘Tiring’ is a relative term, I guess. You may not be used to holding your arms out at 45-degree angles for 30 minutes at a time, but that’s what it takes to play. I didn’t have issue with it, but it’s fair warning just the same.

I wish the grip button was used for this because of common design conventions, however the game reserves this in a grip-the-world style locomotion method (also gripping B+Y works here too). I didn’t particularly like the locomotion implementation here since you have to physically depress each controller’s grip button to move anywhere, as opposed to naturally gripping one and moving forward like in many games that use the convention.

Still, Puzzling Places has a good range of options when it comes to how you want to play so you’re not forced to move about virtually if you don’t want to. You can remain seated and select and summon pieces from afar, stand for greater maneuverability, and room-scale to you can physically walk up to pieces on the backboard and grab them naturally. You can also select a 360 mode that takes the backboard and wraps it around you, making it so you don’t need to flip through the backboard menu tab in larger puzzles. In the end, Puzzling Places is one of the most comfortable games since every movement you make is 1:1 with the real world.

Puzzling Places Comfort Settings – September 2nd, 2021

Turning

Artificial turning ✖
Smooth-turn n/a
Adjustable speed n/a
Snap-turn n/a
Adjustable increments n/a

Movement

Artificial movement ✔
Smooth-move n/a
Adjustable speed n/a
Teleport-move n/a
Blinders ✖
Adjustable strength ✖
Head-based n/a
Controller-based n/a
Swappable movement hand n/a

Posture

Standing mode ✔
Seated mode ✔
Artificial crouch ✖
Real crouch ✖

Accessibility

Subtitles ✖
Languages n/a
Alternate audio ✖
Adjustable difficulty ✔
Two hands required ✔
Real crouch required ✖
Hearing required ✔
Adjustable player height ✖

The post ‘Puzzling Places’ Review – Putting Conventional Jigsaw Puzzles to Shame appeared first on Road to VR.