I was really disappointed a little over a year ago when we couldn’t play VR anymore – some update, some setting suddenly ate up so much system performance that it was no longer enough to stream. Now it works again, and it started with the game “The Last Clockwinder”. What it is all about and how I liked it, you can read here.

I discovered the game in a TikTok video by pure chance. It was briefly introduced there, and the concept appealed to me: you press a button, perform an action and press it again – and a robot appears and repeats this (time-limited) action over and over again. A chain of such actions with the right timing solves puzzles. It sounded really good.

So, with just the knowledge from the last paragraph, we jumped into the game and I was hooked. Not only that the VR performance is watchable again, but also by the game. There were a few points that particularly excited me, but as always, I’ll start with the basic description.

I had already explained the mechanics so far, only the details are missing. Throughout the game you are in a huge tree, the clock tower. The previous Clockwinder has disappeared and now the tree is slowly sinking into the vast ocean that forms the planet. We can “load” different rooms via a console, which then appear in the middle of the main hall and each house a puzzle that has to be solved by machines.

With each room we learn more about the story by finding and playing audio tapes. Mostly it’s about dialogues between us and the last Clockwinder, because we’ve been here before as a kid.

Overall, the game is about finding out what happened to the tower and the last keeper, and how we can fix the damage that has already been done. I don’t want to give too much away, but I thought the story was very nice, even if it was more an accessory than the main topic.

The puzzles, on the other hand, were relatively similar, and yet again and again challenging. You have to grow different types of fruit – but these are anything but normal and therefore you have to find different ways to bring them into the silo. Once we have a certain amount of a fruit, we unlock the next level.

I found the game to be very entertaining and beautifully made. Not only the story, but also the environment inspired me very much. It looked very coherent and you felt comfortable in a certain way. I didn’t have any problems with motion sickness, although after more than a year of not using VR (with a few exceptions), I had counted on it. Technically speaking, the game ran flawlessly, apart from a few stutters with a particularly large number of simultaneous actions, we had no problems.

But now to one thing that I found particularly nice: the recording function of the actions. I always doubt such promises in advance; I’m used to systems like the Nintendo Switch having a few predefined actions that more or less correspond to the movement you make. Here it was different: the movements were accurately recorded and replayed, with all the errors and accidental movements. You had to think carefully about what the chain of actions from multiple copies should look like, and time it just as well.

Overall, I can definitely recommend the game. I had a lot of fun, the puzzles built on top of each other and the complexity of the action chains increased with each level. The story gave the whole thing a nice meaning and even touched me a bit at the end – that’s how it should be! From my point of view, getting back into VR was a complete success!

What do you think? Did you have fun watching, have you perhaps played it yourself or did you find it completely different from me? Discuss it with me on Discord!