Now Playing: Red Matter (VR)

Red Matter is a puzzle focused sci-fi VR game that released back in 2018. You play as ‘Agent Epsilon’ who has been sent to a investigate a secret research facility on Saturn’s Moon, Rhea. As you explore the facility, you’ll learn about the small team that worked there and the dangerous discovery that they made.

From a narrative point of view, Red Matter is pretty decent. It’s set in an alterative Cold War style universe where a war was fought between the ‘Atlantic Union’ and ‘Volgravia’. Because you don’t speak or read ‘Volgravian’, you’ll use a scanner to translate text you encounter throughout the facility.

This gives you an insight into the researchers who lived and worked there, but also allows you to understand the controls of various machines you’ll need to operate in order to progress. There’s no combat in Red Matter. This is a puzzle game with some (very) basic platforming involved. You can use smooth locomotion if you wish, but there’s also a ‘teleport’ option of sorts, in the sense that you can choose a location on the ground and use your spacesuit to jet pack over to it.

The puzzles are simple but fun. Structurally, the game sees you move from one level of the facility to the next, and in each level you’ll have a puzzle to solve involving some kind of machine – opening an airlock, or reactivating a power generator, for example. There’s lot of knobs to pull, switches to flip and buttons to press providing a fairly tactile VR experience.

Visually, Red Matter still looks decent despite its age thanks to the simple but effective art direction of the facility environment. There’s a bit of a ‘horror’ angle to the game, but I certainly wouldn’t call it a horror oriented experience, and maybe the game would have benefited by leaning more into that aspect.

The real problem I have with Red Matter is the length. I completed it in about two and a half hours and that was with me being quite thorough when it came to scanning. Now, games should be as long as they need to be – length certainly doesn’t equal quality. But Red Matter is not as long as it needs to be.

The best way I can describe it is that I felt like I’d played a demo of Red Matter rather than the full game. The ending hit quite abruptly, just when I felt like the game was about to open up and become more complex and interesting. But no, it just ends. Maybe that was a budget issue? I don’t know. I just know that Red Matter doesn’t offer much of a substantial experience or a satisfying conclusion.

I can’t say I didn’t enjoy my time with it, and if you see it on sale for a few quid, it’s probably worth picking up. And I’ll probably give the sequel a shot in the future to see how they’ve built upon this fun but extremely limited experience.

5/10