Vertical Robots provided an excellent follow-up to 2018’s puzzle game, Red Matter. Put yourself in Sasha’s shoes and it’s up to you to track down and find out her friend who was thought dead before she revealed her SOS message. This message will lead you to a Soviet space station orbiting Saturn.
One of the things you’ll notice as soon as you launch Red Matter 2 is how it’s done. good I can see it. Vertical Robot is arguably one of the most visually impressive VR games he’s created to date. The graphical fidelity is astonishing, but the art direction is the real deciding factor. Soviet architecture is very distinctive, and the game offers plenty of lovingly brutalist design, with occasional sprinkles of postmodernism, giving the title a very strong visual identity. Within this environment, the game offers many interactable items, which are both a blessing and a curse.
On the positive side, you can scan just about anything in the game, so many of these items are worth seeking out. And many of the game’s funniest jokes are hidden in these entries, so find out while you can. However, the density of this item makes it difficult to find what you need for the puzzle. So many. A hint of a better environment would have worked surprisingly well here, but fortunately the game offers a sufficiently immersive world so things don’t get too frustrating. This is because most of the puzzles are clever and trust the player to have some understanding of what puzzle games don’t want to do.
An even more frustrating issue is item manipulation. He has two controllers with grippers to pick up things in the world, but the physics are inconsistent. Sometimes it’s easy to grab an object, but other times it gets stuck in an invisible barrier or under something else. It happens enough to be noticeable, but not enough to be a serious problem. The same is true when using telekinesis to reach items, a lasso-like tether for randomly grabbing items won’t work.
Ultimately, the problems that arise do not negate the immense level of fun and design mastery on display. Red Matter 2 is PSVR2 Mandatory play.
