Yup, it’s that time! Time to match another group of colored things together in a VR Match 3 game. Who doesn’t love matching things together? Who cares if they’re cubes, not gems?! Quest for Runia doesn’t care!
Quest for Runia is actually a pretty good bargain for the size of game it is at $5 on Steam. It has an astounding 27 achievements, at least 7 environments (maybe more?!), and some zen-like play that’s only moderately difficult at times.
Ok, here’s the whole shtick with Quest for Runia. Basically, you have a big staff in one hand. You use this staff to shoot out a colored cube that snaps to other colored cubes in a color cube puzzle. If you match at least 3 colors together, then all the matching colors that are touching sides will be stripped away. The object, remove ALL the colored cubes on the playing field. If you are super efficient, you’ll 3 star that puzzle. If you’re mildly efficient, you’ll 2 star it. If you are just kinda clicking things, you’ll either 1 star or fail the level. Fail the level, and you have to try again.
While this is 3D space in VR, the puzzle stays in front of your field of view for the most part, and you don’t need to move around much at all. Save for the boss levels, where the big bad of the story, Karos the magician, puts you in a color cube prison, and you have to make matches to get out.
Environments are set up as kind of floating islands, and as you beat one puzzle, you progress to a different location on the island until you beat all the puzzles in the environment. As any level designer for match 3 games can tell you, one of the best moments in crafting a level is when you get to shape it like something. The most common being “the heart” shape, for example. You can tell the level designer in Quest for Runia had a lot of fun making these tear-away matching puzzles. Sometimes the puzzle would look like a cauldron or a ship or what-have-you. Kind of cool! Most of the time it was just a mess of colors in big cube shapes with plenty of holes in the middle.
Check it out!
Now it’s time for all my complaints. I’m sorry! Yeesh, me and my complaints! Only a couple here:
The big complaint – there is nothing more frustrating than when you want to place a cube somewhere in this game, and the slightest movement of your hand while you click your trigger button to place it, somehow makes a cube end up somewhere else besides where you intended it.
It’s hard to explain it, but here’s the scenario: say you wanted to put a blue cube on the top of another blue cube to connect two rows of blue cubes together, thus removing both rows of blue cubes with one click. BUT, if you ever so slightly move your hand down a touch when you’re clicking to place your cube, then BAM . . . aww crap, I placed the blue cube on the FRONT of a cube instead of the TOP and then only end up removing one of the two rows. (You can actually see something like that happen at the 1:41 mark in the video above)
For a zen-like game, having any moments of frustration is a big turn off. I’ve been kind of wracking my brain thinking, hmmm, if this was my game how would I do that differently. I think it comes down to the controls they give you. The only method for alleviating this is to “spin” the 3D structure of cubes around by pressing a button and hoping for a good angle as the puzzle shifts in 90 degree increments. In a perfect world, I’d change this so that I could grow or shrink a puzzle through pinch and pull movements and allow the player to drag themselves around the puzzle instead of always having it stuck in front of me. If I could get INTO the puzzle’s nooks and crannies, I’d be a match-happy friendly necromancer. I suppose that could be considered just part of the challenge, but . . . really? I don't think so.
Next big complaint – VR is a tricky medium to work in when it comes to UI. A player’s immersion gets really killed by floating UI elements. It’s like, you have this low-poly charming world around you in Quest for Runia, but it’s kind of ruined by this slapped on UI that floats at the bottom of the puzzle area. It’s a real challenge to incorporate UI into the environment so it feels more natural. I don’t know how I would have done it differently, but just know there’s kind of a UX no-no going on here. Not to mention the UI icons look like temp art, but then again, the game is $5, so you get what you pay for, right?
Anyway, those things aside, this isn’t a bad game. You progress through worlds filled with puzzles getting some light story with a little zen-like match 3 that has an occasional point of frustration because of controls. Ok. It’s better than a lot of these other Match 3 VR games I’ve played, so there you go!
Happy Dueling
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