Purely Puzzling
The Last Clockwinder – $25
The Last Clockwinder feels a bit like a love letter to Hiyao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli and Factorio all at the same time. You’re beset on a mission is to repair the Clocktower, an ancient haven for the galaxy’s plants and seeds. You unravel a heartfelt story whilst physically cloning yourself to complete important clockwork automaton tasks. It’s magical, plain and simple.
‘The Last Clockwinder’ on Quest
Cubism – $10
Cubism is an extremely chill puzzler that will force you to think in three dimensions, as you fit oddly shaped blocks together in a specific target shape. It has hand tracking now too, so you can ditch the controllers and puzzle away like you’re in Minority Report, except with block puzzles instead of pre-crime and a contrived sci-fi user interfaces. Also, you can cube in mixed reality.
Puzzling Places – $15
This is the end-all, be-all of VR jigsaw puzzles. Puzzling Places takes jigsaw puzzles in a new and clever direction by offering up multiple difficulties of some highly textured and interesting 3D scenes, making for an experience that’s better than either physical 2D or 3D puzzles in almost every way. It also includes a mixed reality mode!
LEGO Bricktales – $30
LEGO Bricktales may not be a VR-native, as it was first released on flatscreen last year, but this Quest-exclusive port makes a pretty solid case that lego brick-building not only works in VR, but is something anyone can do for hours on end—even in the face of a fairly kid-focused story. It’s pretty much all of the fun of building with LEGO in VR, albeit without a ‘free mode’ sandbox. Mixed reality mode included.
Gadgeteer – $15
Gadgeteer has a lot of fun physics-based A-to-B type puzzles to solve, but it’s more about making and experimenting with fun and weird inventions along the way. Build one of those endlessly complex Rube Goldberg machines or try to accomplish your task in the least amount of pieces possible, but once you’re done with fulfilling objectives it’s absolutely your prerogative to go hog wild by building any contraption you can imagine.
