Marble Land, a physics-based puzzler made to be played in VR, has you guiding a rolling marble through beautiful ruins and lands, with a view to make it to an end goal within each area. Marble rolling puzzlers have been around for quite some time, but Marble Land takes it up a notch by immersing you in a wonderful environment where you can peacefully figure out how to get the marble to its goal.
In each level, a marble spawns at a starting point, rolling forward into whatever is in front of it. There are contraptions scattered across each level — blocks the marble can hit, portals to transport it to a new place and levers which may need to be activated before you can make it to the end, opening doors or unlocking more contraptions to play around with. You can rotate blocks around and manipulate pieces of the level to influence your marble to go where you want it. You don’t have a limit in the number of tries you take — but if you spawn a new marble, your old one explodes into a bunch of shards, which satisfyingly fade away.
Though there are a bunch of puzzles to solve, Marble Land is very relaxing — even as the difficulty increases. There is no time limit, so you can spend however long you need staring at the world around these puzzles or figuring out what to do next. There are three different worlds to get lost in: the desert, the cave and the mountains, each with beautiful graphics and a wonderful themed environment around them.
I had the chance to play this game at the Bucharest Gaming Week in Romania using a VR headset! Being able to turn the puzzles around, move around the environment and stick my head close to the exploding marbles was super fun — the game really is polished and beautiful. As a VR game, it didn’t make me feel motion sick, but instead made me super interested in the small details and bits of graphics around me. You can, of course, pick up these wonderful puzzles and play them without a VR headset — it just adds a ton to the experience.
If you like relaxing puzzle games and stunning worlds to play them in, Marble Land is worth checking out — with or without VR equipment.
