Puzzling Places isn’t a new VR title, having been available since the first half of 2020, but its developers, Realities.io, have just announced that it will arrive on PlayStation VR later this year.
“Today, we’re really excited to announce that Puzzling Places is coming to PlayStation VR, set to release in the winter of 2021!,” Daniel Sproll, cofounder of Realities.io, wrote in the company’s official announcement.
As the title of the game suggests, Puzzling Places is a puzzle game with a virtual reality twist. Instead of piecing together 2D puzzle pieces, you build real-life places using highly detailed scans of some of the world’s most beautiful places.
The game takes advantage of a 3D scanning method called photogrammetry, which revolves around using the parallax obtained between several pictures, taken from different points of view, to record complex 2D and 3D motion fields, as explained by 3D printing company Sculpteo.
Since 2016, Realities.io has been using this method to make real-world places explorable through VR, and Puzzling Places is the result of a happy accident. “An error in our pipeline caused the pieces of one of our Photogrammetry models to be jumbled up which sparked a brilliant idea to, you guessed it, puzzle the pieces back together!” revealed Sproll.
Despite the sophisticated technology used to create Puzzling Places, the game’s core gameplay is straightforward and intuitive. You start with a pile of mismatched puzzle pieces, and your goal is to find two pieces that match and put them together. The result of your work will be a detailed 3D model brought to life by authentic sounds.
Once finished, the game promises to offer many puzzles to finish, with each puzzle offering multiple difficulty options to satisfy casual and challenge-seeking players alike.
