Though no one would ever call puzzle games a niche genre there are a lot of great titles out there that struggle to survive in a world filled with first-person shooters of every type.
If you’ve been a long time PC gaming fan then you know that some genres are just dead compared to where they were in their heyday of the 1990s.
Chief among those are titles like Myst and Return to Zork, narratively-driven puzzle games that allow the player to interact with objects in the world to advance the game.
Largely rendered obsolete with the advent of robust 3D exploration games, these titles often employed pre-rendered graphics and cinematic cutscenes.
So it comes as somewhat of a surprise to not only see these types of games resurrected in 2018 but to see them on virtual reality.
And that’s what Twilight Path reminds us of when we watch it.
A 3D, fully-interactive virtual reality world filled with puzzles to solve sounds a lot like some older styles of gaming but Twilight Path takes the inspiration and runs with it, making it a unique game in the end.
Part of the magic of Twilight Path is the world around you. The devs have gone to great lengths to make it all feel quite alive and humming with energy.
Though the focus of the game primarily revolves around solving puzzles, there is a sense of wonder that comes part and parcel with the environment in which you do just that.
Upload VR has likened the puzzles in Twilight Path to those you would find in a Legend of Zelda game from Nintendo. Movement in Twilight Path is optimized along the lines of the expected VR teleport/glide conceit but the puzzles themselves do seem to borrow quite heavily from conventions you would normally expect to find in a Nintendo game. But don’t get too excited just yet, puzzle solving is really you will be doing in Twilight Path. Though you might want to explore the world around you, you are largely limited to solving the puzzles within it – and that’s it. This leads to a little bit of frustration on the player’s part because it can become a bit monotonous.
That’s probably the most frustrating thing of all about some games. There are titles out there that just drip with potential yet stay firmly locked within a sort of safe zone wherein the gameplay, though never boring, can lead to redundancy quite quickly.
Looking at it just as a puzzle game, however, and Twilight Path becomes a must-buy for fans of that genre. A strength of virtual reality games is in their ability to experiment with how a player interacts with the world. Though limited, Twilight Path’s world contains puzzles that are well thought out and challenging. Players that can overlook the lack of any kind of story – and there are many of us out there – will appreciate Twilight Path for its ability to transport us to a different place even if the tasks are, sadly, quite familiar.
