Trapped on Myst, you will need to unravel its puzzles to uncover its secrets and escape. As you poke around-opening every door, pressing all the switches, reading the books and notes you find-your situation starts to take shape. ![]() When you arrive, you have no idea why you're there or what you should be doing. Myst is a small uninhabited island dotted with odd buildings and unintuitive, free-standing switches. When you get over that initial sense of wonder-or if you don't have the nostalgia that conjures it-Myst can’t hide its age, and its VR makeover exacerbates its blemishes. Being inside a world you’ve only seen through a screen before feels like diving into your own memory. For returning fans, seeing it in VR for the first time is a powerful nostalgia trip. Even after all these years, its puzzles will still test, and maybe even stump, you. Now, 27 years later, the classic is reborn in virtual reality-rebuilt, but almost completely unchanged. Wildly popular when it launched in 1993, the narrative adventure was a pivotal moment for puzzle-solving in games. There is a helpful built-in hint system I had to consult a couple of times, but doing so almost always made me go “Oh, I literally didn’t know I could interact with that,” rather than offering a moment of clever realization.If you've enjoyed having your brain teased by a video game in the last 20 years, or enjoyed the layered mechanical riddles of an IRL escape room, you have Myst to thank. The moments I did get stuck were very rarely because a puzzle was too “hard,” but because the interactable nature of something just wasn’t made clear. Having every object bolted to the table unless you need to use it doesn’t feel great in VR, and can sometimes make figuring out solutions a matter of going through the motions rather than engaging in tricky problem solving. ![]() But since the interactable bits of both the puzzle boxes and the environments around them blend into the decorative bits, I spent a lot of my time just grabbing at things to see if they were grabbable – which they frequently weren’t. Part of the reason for that is because The Room VR really does look fantastic, and its intricately designed props are awesome to admire and inspect up close. Those little assistances feel necessary because the intuitive nature of VR muddles the clarity of what you can and can’t interact with at any given time. Either way, I did appreciate that old points (and even objects you pick up) are often removed as options entirely when you’ve exhausted their purpose. That means you’ll only be able to go to a place if it has something useful for you within arms reach, which is certainly helpful even if it also makes puzzles a little more straightforward than I’d expected when I first arrived. The Room VR also cuts out the impulse to check every little corner for clues by tying movement to predetermined teleportation points (with no free-movement option). It adds a welcome bit of motion to the experience, and also frequently means there are multiple paths you could be making progress down at any given time. Instead, clues and collectible objects intertwine – you may solve one part of a puzzle box only to get a pendant that you then need to take to another, which then gives you a clue for solving another, and so on. Most of those take the form of more traditionally presented puzzle boxes, with your job being to twist a hidden piece, insert the right item, or find the correct combination to open part of it and be rewarded with your next clue – all of which is made more tactile and engaging when you get to use your actual VR hands to do that stuff.īut what’s really nice about how The Room VR structures its puzzles is that you’ll rarely just stand in front of a box until you find all of its secrets and move on to the next one. The Room VR has three main levels – plus two short ones that mostly bookend the plot – each with an interesting theme (one is about Egyptian relics, while another is set in an old church) and a compelling set of challenges to best. Thankfully, I didn’t need any of that context to enjoy solving the puzzles at hand. Though a villain was seemingly introduced, I genuinely have no idea who they were or what the ultimate threat was. Its atmosphere is appropriately spooky throughout, but the story itself is poorly explained through a few hand-scrawled notes and brief glimpses of Myst-style FMV characters (one of whom so clearly seems to be wearing a fake rubber mask that it’s downright laughable), while also being completely pointless and unrelated to any of the puzzles you are actually solving. ![]() ![]() The Room VR weaves these relics into a creepy, otherworldly plot about dark magic and invading monsters.
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