We’ve had a great deal of fun playing around with Puzzling Places in PSVR 2. We’ve kept it relaxing – but it has the potential to be a real stressfest.
Essentially, Puzzling Places is a 3D jigsaw game. Putting you in a room filled with jigsaw pieces, it’s up to you to piece them together, with each puzzle recreating a beautiful real-world building or scene. We loved recreating a Thai temple and a Christmassy shopping street. But we kept it easy for ourselves: we used only 25 pieces. Puzzling Places lets you turn up the pressure with four hundred pieces. There’s even a 1,000 piece puzzle exclusive to PSVR 2.
A 25-piece puzzle is just the right size to get to grips with Puzzling Places. The pieces are all laid out in front of you, and you can grab them, move them around, and figure out how they interact with each other. Using the Sense controllers, you can rotate them in your hands and place them just about anywhere in the space around you. It’s very tactile, and feels great to make use of your environment however you see fit. Just make sure you’ve got enough space in the real world so you don’t go hitting your hands against anything.
Up that piece count to even 100, however, and things become more tricky. A 25-piece puzzle might take you ten minutes to complete – five if you’re well-versed – but with 100 pieces? Expect to spend an hour or more twisting pieces around yourself, trying to figure out what goes where. We’ll be honest: we haven’t even dared try anything larger than this. Just looking at a 400-piece puzzle was enough to scare us away. You’ll need a lot of patience, but the payoff is incredible if you do.
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There are 26 puzzles included in Puzzling Places, each playable with different piece counts, and all based on beautiful realistic environments. Some are more challenging than others: we found putting together an entire building, like a temple, fairly straightforward. But putting together a room – like the included fancy billiards hall – a little more taxing on the brain.
If you want more from it, however, there are multiple DLC packs available – twelve of them, in fact. And more packs will be released monthly. It’s already been available for some time on Meta Quest, and all puzzle packs previously released are now available on PSVR 2. New puzzles have been added for free in the past, too, so that’s something we can hopefully expect to continue going forward.
A free demo of Puzzling Places is available right now on PSVR 2 so you can try it out for yourself. But if you’re a fan of jigsaws and like the idea of recreating beautiful buildings in VR, there’s a lot to love here.
