Puzzling Places Review (PS5 / PSVR2)

Puzzling Places is absolutely lovely — that’s the best way to describe it. A puzzle game best described as a 3D jigsaw, this is far and away the most relaxing time you can have with your PSVR2. The game leans into its unique appeal, allowing you to put together 3D dioramas of things that under normal circumstances would be challenging, or outright impossible to make as traditional puzzles.

You’ll get around 20 puzzles out of the box. These feature locales and settings from around the world, including coastal towns in Italy, castles in Sweden, and so on. The variety is impressive, meaning you’ll feel like you’re building something new all the time. It should be noted that there are a number of pricey DLC packs available as well, and it would have been nice to see some more of that content included with the main game.

Fortunately, solving what there is available is delightfully relaxing. You find yourself in a softly lit void, which you can customize to tweak the colours, lighting, and more. The ambient music is perfect, offering a soothing backdrop and fun audio cues. Depending on which puzzle you build, if you move your face closer to the environment, you can hear diegetic audio of what is going on in the image, be it a choir, church bells, or the white noise hum of a crowd. It’s all quite magical, and everything in the game works in concert to put you at ease.

And you can extend this feeling for quite a while, as you can change the size of puzzles from between 25 to 400 pieces. Should you choose 400, you’ll be occupied for a few hours, but it’s worth it, especially on PSVR 2. The resolution bump makes a huge difference here, as you can actually see details on the puzzles in a way you couldn’t previously. We were especially stunned to go inside one of the environments to find that we could read one of the sticky notes clearly.

You just have to hope the game cooperates to let you finish! We had multiple hard crashes, one of which corrupted our save, wiping away nearly an hour of puzzling. Still, we’re going to assume the developer will issue a patch promptly, and as long as it does, this is PSVR2 at its most relaxed.