PlayStation VR’s Statik Puts Abstract Puzzles In The Palm Of Your Hand

A little like a giant Chinese finger trap, you look down to find both your hands completely encased in a high tech looking box – well, high tech by mid-80s standards. On the one side, it’s covered in rolls of paper, with a pair of cassette players alongside. The face adjacent to the left has a grid of lights, each with a few little buttons underneath, the side directly opposite it features a joystick and some cassette tape accommodating rails. What the hell does it all mean? How do I get my hands out of this damned thing? Is that even the aim of the game?

Of course, as a PlayStation VR game, your hands aren’t really cocooned in a box, but wrapped around a DualShock 4 that’s obscured from your view by the head mounted display being dangled in front of your eyes. However, much like the subconscious synergy of sitting down in a real chair and being projected into a virtual car or fighter jet cockpit, Statik’s virtual hand consuming puzzles work brilliantly alongside the natural pose of having both hands on the DualShock 4.

It also tells you nothing about what you need to do and how you can go about doing it. The first few minutes of the two levels I played were consumed by simply pressing buttons on the DualShock 4, pulling triggers and twiddling analogue sticks to try and find out what each of these manipulated on the outside of the box. Compared to the first puzzle box I described, another had a simpler design with a little mechanical arm on the outside, a trap door that opened up with four slots, a screen and a few other widgets. Without the game prompting you at every turn, learning how to control all of these and how they can interact with one another is the first step of each puzzle.

Each of the game’s levels puts you into a new setting, sat in a different room with a lab coat wearing scientist somewhere nearby, their face blurred to protect their identity I suppose, while they idly kill time and occasionally chat to you about this and that. However, sometimes that idle chit chat can provide clues to the puzzles you’re trying to solve, or draw your attention to elements in the room that do so. While each room might be a little humdrum, they’re actually full of other details, any number of which might be an important part of the puzzle, just waiting for you to realise that you need to pay attention to it or interact with it using some ability of this particular box.

As is so often the case in video games, whether it’s Portal, The Turing Test or whatever puzzle game you can think up, this is a fairly loose interpretation of science. There’s really no indication as to what on earth having this succession of bizarre mechanical boxes attached to your hands will achieve, with their various gadgets, gee-gaws and gimcracks. That’s not really the point, though. You’re not meant to be in the know, you’re the unwitting test subject, trapped like a rat in a maze trying to figure out where the block of cheese is.

In this case, the metaporical block of cheese is a strip of delightfully wavy paper that prints out as you successfully complete a puzzle box, with Edith the equally wonderful little robotic helper leaning in to try and scan it. There’s a playfulness here when you realise that shaking your hands back and forth makes the print out shake back and forth realistically – I’m sure Tarsier agonised over getting the paper physics just right – and the way Edith leans in to try and read the paper, but also reacts to your movements to shy away if you push too close. If you like, you can even keep the paper away from her camera lens, preventing her from scanning it and ending the level which is a cute little touch.

Of the various games I saw at a PSVR showcase last week, where Sony were keen to demonstrate that yes, there are actually games coming out for their VR system this year, Statik was easily one of the highlights from what I played. Its keenly clever puzzle design is so effortlessly enthralling, drawing you in and forcing you to think both in, and out, of the virtual box.

Written by
I'm probably wearing toe shoes, and there's nothing you can do to stop me!

1 Comment

  1. Reminds me of those wooden puzzle-boxes i’ve seen people solving on youtube, i might check it out when i board the VR train.

Comments are now closed for this post.