Vertical Robot has delivered a stellar follow-up to its 2018 puzzler, Red Matter. Stepping into the shoes of Sasha, it’s up to you to chase down and locate your friend — believed dead — before uncovering an SOS message. This message leads you to a Soviet space station orbiting Saturn.
One thing that’s immediately obvious upon booting up Red Matter 2 is just how good it looks. Vertical Robot has without a doubt crafted one of the most visually impressive VR games to date. While the graphical fidelity is extraordinary, the art direction really seals the deal. Soviet architecture is very distinctive and the game lovingly offers plenty of brutalist design, with the occasional sprinkle of post-modernism, making for a title with a very strong visual identity. Amid these environments, the game provides many interactable items, which is both a blessing and a curse.
On the positive side, many of these items are worth seeking out, as nearly everything in the game can be scanned. And the game hides many of its funniest jokes in these entries, so find as much as you can. However, this item density makes it harder to find what you need for puzzles, as there’s just so much. Some better environmental cues would work wonders here, but luckily the game provides an immersive enough world that things never get too frustrating. It helps that the majority of the puzzles are clever and trust the player to be able to figure things out to a degree that puzzle games are often reluctant to do.
A more frustrating issue is item manipulation. You have two controllers with grippers on them to pick things up in the world, but there is an inconsistency with the physics. Sometimes, grabbing an object is trivial, but other times you’ll find things getting hitched on invisible barriers or trapped underneath something else. It happens enough to be noticeable but not quite enough to be a major problem. The same goes for using telekinesis to reach items, as the lasso-like tether to grab items randomly fails to work.
Ultimately, the issues that arise aren’t enough to quash the immense level of fun or the mastery of design on display. Red Matter 2 is a PSVR2 must-play.
