Profundum | VR Review | Steam Punk Virtual Reality Puzzle Game
20Profundum is a narrative driven puzzle game within a steampunk aesthetic and while it has beautiful visuals, solid puzzle design, and good game play it has a few shortcomings holding me back from being able to recommend it.
In terms of gameplay many of the puzzles are reminiscent of an escape room and rely on physics based puzzles using cogs and belts but then expanding to using pipes and steam. There are also stages that mix it up in between such as putting you at the risk of getting crushed by spikes if you dont finish fast enough. The gameplay works well for the most part but can get a little buggy when two pieces make contact and picking up things off the floor begins to get tedious.
Content wise theres a narrative driven by notes you find in game throughout the levels that are kept in a journal for you too look back on and piece together. The game does offer a good amount of content for its asking price but do take note that its replay-ability is limited and it isnt the type of game i would consider coming back to once beat. the game does offer both teleportation and walking as well as smooth and snap turning for locomotion and can work in room scale.
Visually the games graphics are amazing and the video certainly doesn't do it justice. They really nailed the steam punk atmosphere and the sound design suits it very well too. Sadly the immersion just dosnt hold up. being able to see your controller overlay on top of the hands is a constant immersion breaker and some of the visual glitches and bugs also really took me out of the experience. I also have to mention that i ran into performance issues a couple of hours into the game leading it to be unplayable. Im not sure what caused this as up until then it was running smoothly and without issue. I did try reinstalling the game and switching from my HDD to SSD but the issue continued, for reference im running on an RTX 2070 and 2600X Ryzen cpu with 16 gb of ram.
Overall I actually did enjoy my time with the game and as a puzzle game I thought it was great, but I cant recommend it. My experience was hurt by consistent visuals bugs and became unplayable for me two hours in. It makes me sad because i think theres something special here it just needs a bit more polish and optimization to get there. Ill be sure to keep my eye on it and see if future updates fix this. If they do I will revise my review and revisit the game.
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