Solving cases as a detective is easily one of the best things for a mystery and puzzle game lover, but sometimes we find ourselves biting off more than we can chew. Creating a simple mystery set up and expanding it to being a supernatural case of odd puzzles in strange locations is Fireproof Games with their newest title The Room VR: A Dark Matter. Facing the oddities that hide the secrets that veil the truth will require patience, courage, and brainpower. Are you ready to begin working, detective?

Story

As a detective from 1908 in charge of the missing person investigations, you begin looking for clues on your latest case. During your work, a package arrives for you with a strange note on it. In the package is a glass monocle that was your first step to solving the case through a journey you could have never expected!

Gameplay

Most VR games use either free-roam movement controls or provide a teleport option that lets you freely move where you’d like on the map, but this game uses a much stricter teleportation option for movement. Providing you with the usual point and move style teleportation, you will find yourself limited to only going to designated spots on each map. This is likely to help you only go to key areas to solve the puzzles that get you through each level but is an interesting choice nonetheless.

Each level will be a completely different area in the game that will have you doing a series of tasks and puzzle-solving in order to uncover the secret of this location. The good news is, this is prime detective work as you will uncover more than one missing person along the way. The bad news is, your life is at stake and the journey is a supernatural one. Don’t worry though! These tasks can be solved by a mixture of observation and old school puzzle solving.

All around the levels you will find markings to hint what you need to do with various things or contraptions that are interestingly weird yet easy to quickly understand. I’ll be honest, sometimes I didn’t exactly reveal what I was expecting, but that is part of the joys of the mystery-solving job. There won’t always be an obvious marking to follow, so be sure to be aware of your surroundings and remember things that seem like hints to refer to them later.

You get an inventory with only six slots, but I never once had an issue holding items. The inventory is set up to be just big enough to hold everything you need for any one concurrent task. It’s also easy to pull things from the inventory and try them on various locations, given you aren’t sure what exactly you are supposed to do with it. Although, keep in mind that you might be picking up something early on in the level that you will hold and use in the later parts of it.

If you ever start to feel lost or thoroughly confused as to what to do, there is a hint system that you can use. When you open your inventory, you will notice a gray bar with a tab holding a question mark on it. This is your hint tab and you are welcome to pull on it at any moment in the game. It is actively updating to whatever step you are currently on and was incredibly helpful every time I used it, which wasn’t often because I am a try-hard.

One of the main things that you should keep in mind when stuck, before pulling at those hint tabs, is your crystal monocle. I would forget about it all the time and when I checked the hint it told me to use the crystal. It is easy to forget this aspect of the game when your mind is all over the place, but it is very useful to many aspects of the puzzles. Each level will give an upgrade piece for the monocle as well, giving it a new type of special vision that provides access to essential puzzles and elements of the game, which was a nice touch that kept you unsure what to expect out of each new area.

Visuals

Everything in the game had a semi-realistic design to it. Even when things got to be purely in the realm of supernatural activity, it held a well enough design to it that you could feel like you are really there. Beautifully crafted even when the view wasn’t beautiful in itself.

Sounds

There is no music to this game unless some kind of story progression is happening. The silence helped when it came to thinking through the challenging puzzles they have set up, but also had a sense of unease with only the sounds of the lightly rustling atmosphere to fill the quiet.

Replayability

There is no replayability to this game, unfortunately. All the levels are the same and there is nothing new about a second run-through, so unless you are trying to enjoy the environment without your focus straining on the puzzles, the levels don’t offer anything new to a second run.

What Could Be Better

While I understand the restricted movement was to help with guiding players on the key sections of each level, I would have liked more freedom in my movement. Even with their pretty well set up teleport spots, I found myself reaching to work with some of the devices. This may be for various reasons, but ultimately it would have been nice to just move myself a little closer. The same can be said with the idea of being able to view things from multiple sides without having to lean around it. On a development side, simply giving players more room in the movement department would have given more puzzle opportunities, similar to the “strange flashlight” one near the end with the symbols (vague for anti-spoiler reasoning).

A bit insignificant, but the lack of trophy variety kind of caught me off guard. I was expecting to see challenging trophies like “Complete the Game without using any Hints” and “Solve X level or X puzzle in X amount of time” but instead just got chapter completion trophies. Consider adding more of these because trophies alone could add replayability for the players.

Conclusion

The Room VR: A Dark Matter is a strange journey with difficult puzzles that were fun to get though! Solving the strange puzzles and having a rough start to each level only to see things click more and more as tasks were completed is always entertaining. Doing this in VR made the experience all the better too. A defining title in the VR and puzzle genres.