System: Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift & Windows MR
Price at Time Of Review: £14.99
Comfort Rating: Green (No Movement)
Genre: Puzzle
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Standing
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG
Description: Currently awaiting regulatory approval, we invite you to visit our testing facility and give them a go! We have prepared a selection of test scenarios for you and we are certain you can solve them! Also, feel free to create your own test scenario and share them with fellow participants!
Please be aware that strong gravitational forces can cause severe brain damage! Never look directly at the emitted particles! While we tried our best to avoid the creation of micro wormholes, please never try to stack gravitational objects. All damages to the time and space continuum and involved repair cost will be passed on to you!
Review: It might sound like some sort of development tool, but Grav|Lab (Short for Gravitational Testing Facility & Observations) is a physics-based puzzle game where there are multiple ways to solve each puzzle. But the basic gist of it is pretty simple. Get a ball into a tube! But the things you get to do this are all gravity-powered, some push the ball up a path of sorts, some change the ball’s gravity so it flys towards the ceiling and some shoot the ball over long distances. As I said, there is no one solution you finish it your own way.
The good news is there is a tutorial to get you going, but to be honest the learning curve gets pretty steep from that point forth. If you do fail to do a puzzle (and you will at some point) it seems to insult you as well, by calling you a Chimpanzee. But try enough times with enough pieces and you will succeed in the end.
This is not a simple puzzle game it will require deep engineering thinking to solve each puzzle. Sure you learn a lot of what you are doing along the way, but this is still a very serious puzzle game that relies heavily on precision. While short on levels, the good news is you can make your own which is a really nice touch. I feel this is a well polished and good looking game that takes VR touch controllers into a whole new area. Sure it can be hard to get the hang of, but stick with it and you will find a satisfying puzzle game that will eat your gaming time like it was a strand of spaghetti.
