Red Matter 2

I put the headset on for what I expected to be a gentle puzzle crawl and came out the other side genuinely shaken by a few of those vistas. Vertical Robot has built something with real atmosphere here - the kind where standing on an asteroid with Saturn's rings stretching behind you stops feeling like a tech demo and starts feeling like a place. That sense of physical presence is the engine everything else runs on, and it works almost every time. The core of the experience is your dual multi-tools, which mirror your actual VR controllers in shape. One hand grabs, interacts, and force-pulls items from a distance; the other handles a scanner that translates Volgravian text, reveals clues, and hacks terminals. As you move through the game's sequence of abandoned Cold War space facilities, new modes and mechanics unlock at a measured pace - a jetpack that rewards careful thrust management opens up platforming sections, while a remote-controlled maintenance drone and an organic-matter printer factor into some of the more inventive puzzle solutions. The puzzles themselves range from satisfying environmental logic (press a switch behind glass by angling a shot through a tiny gap) to the occasional obtuse moment where a single missing hint can leave you circling a room for far too long. A force-pull ability also goes chronically underused - you may forget it exists, which is partly on the design. The fiction is a quietly strange alternate history: the Soviet Union never fell, the Cold War never ended, and somewhere out near Neptune something called Red Matter is doing things that defy clean categorisation. The story is delivered almost entirely as voice radio chatter, which creates distance rather than intimacy. Character names slip away. Motivations stay foggy. For players who never touched the first game, the opening recap tries its best but leaves meaningful gaps. What the narrative does accomplish, though, is keeping the mystery alive long enough to hold your attention through the full six to seven hours - and a few late-game moments hit harder than the radio-play delivery deserves. The weakest stretch is the combat. Introduced in the second half, it replaces puzzle tension with a pistol that feels imprecise and humanoid drones that demand you hit specific weak points while they strafe. Most reviewers agreed the difficulty on Easy is the correct choice from the start - not because challenge is unwelcome, but because the shooting mechanics simply are not the reason anyone comes to this game. Stealth segments fare better, adding a quiet tension without demanding pinpoint accuracy. A small number of bugs - clipping objects, occasional physics misbehaviour - surfaced at launch, though nothing game-breaking. What holds it all together is craft. The soundscape moves between wonder and low dread in a way that few VR titles manage. The lighting inside those brutalist interiors is meticulous, and the PC VR version adds further detail and fidelity on top of the already impressive baseline. For a small studio building a game at this visual standard, the ambition is genuinely striking. Newcomers should play the original first if they can - it deepens the story considerably - but even without that context, the world communicates enough of itself through its architecture and environmental details to carry you through.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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