The Room VR: A Dark Matter (2020)

I love The Room series, and had played all the other games in the series before I tried this one. What I did not expect was that I would love The Room VR for a completely different set of reasons than I love the other The Room games.

The intricate puzzle boxes and creepy atmosphere made the previous games great, as well as the portability because they are all available on mobile phone. It’s hard to say objectively how hard these games were, because I can only comment on my own experience, but I remember them as being not too difficult but still hard enough that you would get stuck a couple of times in each game.

The Room VR seems like another The Room game but has quite a different feel: it’s probably easier than previous instalments, and, though the atmosphere is creepy, there are less cutscenes/story scenes (probably to avoid jump scaring the player in VR). However, none of this matters, because what makes The Room VR a great game is the awesome nature of the environments on VR. Even when a puzzle is solved easily, I didn’t feel disappointed, because the mechanisms in the game felt satisfying on their own. The same can be said for the story; like the other games in the series, the plot is not that fleshed out or detailed, but I found myself too visually interested by the pharaohs, knights, cauldron, and other scenery that I hardly cared.

The puzzles are quite different than what I expected, being less focussed on puzzle boxes than other The Room games. The game however made up for this by introducing more puzzles than would only work effectively in VR, like pouring juices into a cauldron, or a fantastic puzzle that involves pressing keys on a piano with both hands to manoeuvre a ball through a vertical maze.

The game uses a blink movement (as in, like the blink movement setting in HalfLife: Alyx) which does take away partially from immersion, but I feel is necessary for the game because it signals which areas are actually involved in the puzzles. The blink movement is also better for countering VR nausea, in my experience, than continuous movement.

Although not an inbuilt feature, you can also play this game with another person, if your VR headset has casting. I played it on a Meta Quest while casting to an iPad so that others could watch and work through the puzzles together and it was great fun.

Overall, a great puzzle game that shows off the amazing potential for puzzlers in VR, and would be particularly great for someone new to the tech, or in a group.