Now Playing: The Room: Dark Matter (VR)

The Room: Dark Matter is a VR puzzle game. You play as a Detective working on a missing persons case who gets mixed up in some supernatural shenanigans. There’s a story, of sorts, that unfolds as you progress, but it’s only told in letters – there’s no voice acting or characters with whom you interact.

Visually, Dark Matter is very impressive. It’s easily one of the best looking and immersive VR games I’ve played, but it’s also very restrictive – there’s no free movement within the environments, you can only teleport from one puzzle node to the next.

The opening level serves as a short tutorial that introduces you to the basic mechanics. The bulk of the content, however, is found in the next 3 levels which offer completely different environments and puzzles to solve – a museum basement full of ancient Egyptian artefacts, an old church with a crusader motif, and a . . . witch’s hut, which seems weirdly out of place but I can’t fault the variety.

The last level, which I thought would be a lengthy, elaborate environment that combined the various puzzle mechanics of the previous levels, is a major disappointment. It’s short and there’s no real puzzles to solve.

So all you really get with Dark Matter is 3 ‘full’ puzzle rooms to solve. It’s a game you can easily finish in under 4 hours – maybe 3, depending on how easily you solve each room. The quality of the puzzles is decent, but nothing special, and some of them are only tricky to solve because it’s not always clear what pieces of the environment you can interact with and what you can’t.

The controls can prove a little fiddly at times – there was one puzzle that I just couldn’t seem to solve. I was sure I knew what I had to do, but I couldn’t seem to get an item to turn in the way that I wanted. I then realised that I was right with my solution, but I just wasn’t holding my controller at the precise angle I needed.

Overall, I’m a little disappointed by a Dark Matter. Given the impressive visuals and production quality, I expected a more lengthy and elaborate game than what I got. It’s still a VR game I’d recommend – but only on sale. It’s another game that’s a good ‘entry’ kind of VR experience for people new to the platform.

6/10