Puzzling Places Review

February 28, 2023

Amongst all the things that is on offer from Virtual Reality like experiencing horror, killing zombies, shooters, flying through the air and driving, sometime comes a surprise title that is a little more relaxed. A perfect example of this is Walkabout Mini Golf, a game that is a more chilled but works so well on the medium. This is where Puzzling Places comes in, just relaxing and building 3D puzzles in VR, but is it worth picking up?

Gameplay

As mentioned above the whole premise of the Puzzling Places is building jigsaw puzzles in VR. However, what makes this so much more special is you are building 3D puzzles of scanned locations from all around the world be it Mt. St. Michel or Kushiyaki Restaurant.

The base game comes with twenty-six puzzles, with all the DLC also being available at launch – which means you can increase the amount of puzzles to a whopping ninety for a cost. Each puzzle comes with the option to do them at different difficulties, that is managed by increasing the amount of pieces – these range from 25, 50, 100, 200 and 400 pieces (with the PSVR2 having an exclusive 1000 piece puzzle).

I really like the fact you can base the size of the puzzle to work around the time you have available or take on a bigger size overtime as it does save the progress you have made on a puzzle. You will also find some useful tools laid around your work place with reference images, a tool to peek inside of the puzzle and a grouping tool for organising the pieces.

Presentation

What makes Puzzling Places work so well is the team have made a simplfied background and surrounding, meaning you get no distraction from the puzzle pieces. This is also customisable meaning you can change the colour of the skybox to match what you want. This was the correct approach from Realties.IO as it allows you to take in the great detail of the minitures you are building – with higher resolution and sharper textures allowing them to look better than ever.

Adding to the simple settings for creating your puzzles, the use of relaxing music and ambient noises suits it so well. Then the nice little touch of sound effects to match the puzzle as its built really gives it that finishing touch – for example, when connecting a clock tower together, the bells will start to chime.

Comfort/Controls

Puzzling Places can be played standing, sitting or even using room-scale with the new tracking available on PSVR2. There isn’t any sort of artificial movement in the game, meaning it will be suitable to anyone, never mind their level of VR experience.

In the game your hands and shown as transparent orbs with a pointer to bring the puzzle pieces, tools or even reference images closer with a press of the trigger. If your workspace is getting to cluttered, you can simply grab the piece and flick the analogue up to place it back in the distance.

Longevity

With the aforementioned twenty-six puzzles available in the base game and each of them coming with five different puzzle size settings, there is plenty of replay value in the base game alone. If you are really enjoying what you are experiencing with the game, you can increase this to a massive ninety puzzles already – with monthly puzzle packs still being released moving forward.

reviewed using playstation vr 2

For the purposes of transparency, this review was created using a review code provided by the company or their respective PR company. The use of a press code does not affect my judgement of the product.

REVIEW OVERVIEW

Puzzling Places is something you should not over look if you are looking for something different and relaxing for your VR library, if you are a fan puzzles of course . There are some games you don’t know you needed until you have tried them and Puzzling Places is one of those. As soon you start playing time flies by as you either think one more puzzle or take on the larger piece puzzles and don’t want to stop. With the amount of content available straight away in the base game, making it cost under £1/$1 per puzzle it really is a steal and offers so much playtime.