*MSRP: $19.99 – https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/2109562142495943/
Flow Weaver is a pretty solid escape room game with a heavy emphasis on narrative. There are a lot of voice acted lines and while it does create a more immersive experience, impatient gamers like myself will be a bit tortured due to the fact that you can’t skip through these scenes. Definitely a first world problem.
You start the game as a sorcerer traveling between worlds to study for a test when you are suddenly ripped from your travels by a mysterious necromancer. You find yourself bound to one location by five powerful rune stones in a world you have never seen before. This is a pretty creative narrative solution to making sure you stay stationary, as Flow Weaver is a seated experience and you do not move around. From here, you start planning your escape before you end up dying as a test subject of the necromancer.
The game plays like an escape room game. You gather clues and items and solve puzzles to unlock more items and clues until you get the one rune stone from each world in order to free yourself from the spell of binding. The puzzles make creative use of the different flows as making one small change in one world, will make changes in other worlds as well. Most of the puzzles are straight forward and simple but a few are quite involved and difficult.
If you ever get lost, you can use the meditate button to highlight all the objects you can interact with. I would recommend doing this and looking carefully at every item if you ever get lost in the game. After unlocking the rune stones, you finally free yourself or so you think.
Overall, Flow Weaver is a nice escape room experience in VR. It made me want to see more escape room games in virtual reality because the level of immersion is that much greater. This is the only VR game so far that I have played from start to completion in one sitting, I could not put it down. That said, the unskippable cut scenes made me want to pull my hair out. Definitely a VR title worth checking out for fans of puzzle games.
Ducky Obrien 