Man, I'm really looking forward to Statik. Looks so cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d76izN32YSE&feature=youtu.be
Developer: Tarsier Studios
Publisher: Sony
Release Date: April 24, 2017 (WW)
Price: £16/$20
Let's start with the most impressive. Statik, created by Swedish indie Tarsier Studios, is described as "a VR game about solving puzzles in a place you don't know, with a person you don't recognize, and hands that arent completely yours," which is about as succinct an elevator pitch as you can get for a game that defies description.
Statik solves the classic problems of restricted movement and suspension of disbelief by using the limitations of VR to its advantage. In each puzzle you awake on a chair, in front of a scientist with a pixellated face that periodically offers words of self-deprecating British encouragement. It emerges that you're undergoing a test, although quite what the results will be used for, or indeed why you're being tested in the first place, remain pleasingly nebulous.
The focus is on the task in front of you: namely, fiddling with a madcap contraption that completely encapsulates your hands.
Statik is played with a DualShock controller, rather than PlayStation Move, which cleverly plays on the idea that by donning a VR headset you can't see your hands. This restriction of the real world reflected in the virtual world, as well as a complete (and thoroughly intentional) lack of instruction, makes you feel utterly helpless when you first start playing. All you can do is look at the weird, whirring box and hammer away at buttons until something happens.
And something does indeed happen. Every button press, D-pad direction, and flick of the analogue stick makes the contraption do something. Your job is to make sense of the levers, screws, lights, and other such mechanical paraphernalia that hum around your hands, while trying to memorize exactly what each button does without getting into a finger-twisting mess. In an earlier, supposedly easier puzzle, the hands-trapping box contains a laser projector and a rack of circular slides that change the shape of what's projected.
After much fiddling, it becomes clear that your job is to match up the projected shapes with those on the cards in front of you. Except, without any guidance on how to operate the contraption, the game quickly turns into a battle between your brain, your fingers, and the on-screen animations.
A later level ups the ante, with a puzzle that requires dozens of different steps to solve. There's a tape that needs to be slid into a tape deck via a rack of moving cassettes, a pictorial puzzle that's solved by listening to audio cues on the tape, and a series of coloured lights that need to be flicked on and off in the right combination.
The solution to the puzzle is both a result of trial and error and some less than obvious environmental clues scattered around the level. Indeed, one of the clues is so perplexing that it's being tweaked for the final version of the game to make things that little bit easier. Even then, Statik will remain a real head-scratcher. Of the two puzzles I tried, the second took me around 20 minutes to solve, and even then I was only able to do so with the gentle prodding of a PR person.
But that's exactly what I want from a puzzle gamesomething that truly tries the intellect, yet remains logical enough for a solution to be truly satisfying. And if it can do so while being one of the most compelling examples of how to design a VR game yet, all the better."
https://arstechnica.co.uk/gaming/2017/04/psvr-2017-games-statik-korix-persistence-starblood/
(for that exact reason, in fact)
