Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son [VR] key

My first instinct when I saw a VR sequel to a 1993 Bill Murray comedy was skepticism bordering on reflex rejection. Then I put the headset on. Tequila Works, the studio behind The Invisible Hours, turns out to be an unusually well-matched developer for this premise. You step into Phil Connors Jr., a self-centered vlogger who has returned to Punxsutawney for a ceremony honoring his late father, only to find himself trapped in the same time-loop curse his dad once famously escaped. The setup is a legitimate canonical sequel, and the writing earns it more often than you would expect. The structure is clean: the day is carved into five scenes, each roughly five to ten minutes of real time, and you revisit them loop after loop. Dialogue trees, branching conversation paths, and context-sensitive puzzle-solving form the core. Figuring out that a piece of info from one scene unlocks a new dialogue option in a completely different one is the game doing its best work. That cross-scene logic is clever, and when it clicks, it clicks hard. The game also lets you skip past puzzles you have already solved on previous runs, which is the right call and keeps the loop from becoming purely punishment. Completing roughly 49 in-game days to see everything through is an investment, but the runtime sits around six to eight hours of real play, so it never overstays its welcome on a clock level. Here is where the frustration lives, and it is real: the minigames. Carving a statue with hammer-and-chisel motions, spray-painting a wall, dancing with insurance-salesman Ned, cooking breakfast, strumming a guitar in a rhythm section, shooting T-shirts into a crowd. Individually they sound fun. In practice, several of them suffer from finicky VR tracking, the kind where your hand drifts off into space mid-dance, or the spray can randomly jerks sideways across your careful work. Worse, the game sometimes forces Phil to fail a minigame the first few attempts as a narrative device, meaning even a technically perfect player performance gets rejected because the story decides it is not Jr.'s time to succeed yet. That design choice is either thematically brave or genuinely infuriating depending on your patience level. Steam's mixed score at 78% positive makes complete sense once you hit that wall. What holds the thing together is the writing and emotional core. Scenes with Phil Jr.'s mother carry real weight, touching on themes of ego, forgiveness, and what a person leaves behind. The adult dialogue, which skews surprisingly crude and vulgar compared to the family-friendly tone of the film, divides players sharply. Some find it funny; others find it tonally jarring against the cartoonish art style and the heavier emotional notes the story is reaching for. Both reactions are fair. Movement is node-based teleportation only, no smooth locomotion, and playing seated is the comfortable choice. The cartoony character models keep things away from uncanny valley territory, though the animation has rough edges that VR magnifies more than a flat screen would. If you love the source film and want to spend a few hours inside a version of Punxsutawney that actually tries to honor the spirit of the original, this delivers that. If your patience for repeated VR minigames with inconsistent tracking is low, the back half will test you hard. It is not a game for everyone, but it is doing something specific unusually well.

Alex · Scout Team

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