So I suggest you read my review of the original.

Seriously, there isn't much else to say here. The story is a jumble of ethereal nonsense. The enemies are defeated by rather dull button-mashing. And collecting all the collectables doesn't really do anything. It is gorgeous, and beautifully animated. If you're happy with an expansion pack for the first game, you'll be happy with this.

The puzzles are a little repetitive - but they make good use of the VR system; you'll often use your hands or have to peer behind something.

It's fairly gentle and - although the enemies can be a little frustrating - there are plenty of tutorials. You'll need to remove your helmet to watch them though!

In short, I constantly felt like I was working rather than working out.

If you like that sort of game mechanic; I'm happy for you. But it just turned me off the game so much that I never completed it.

A few years later, I got the Meta Quest 2 VR Headset. Most of the games on it are pretty crappy. Nintendo Wii level graphics, screaming kids on the online experiences, and pathetic battery life. There are a few charming experiences, but it mostly sucks.

Except for Beat Saber.

I think Beat Saber might be my personal zenith of gaming. There are no complex instructions - you slice the blocks in the indicated direction. That's it. Here's me playing a level (with my microphone muted so you can't hear my huffing and puffing).

There are no power-ups to help you cheat your way through the levels. No boss fights. No collecting or spending coins. The only decisions you're ever asked to make are "what song would you like?" and "how difficult do you want this to be?" Much like the fabled L-Game, it is the distillation of ludic perfection.

Best of all, your only opponent is yourself.

As I've previously noted, most games aren't about you getting better at the game; they're about you getting better equipment. Beat Saber is the opposite. You have to physically practice in order to complete a level.

Note - you don't have to "beat" levels in order to progress. This isn't one of those games which holds content back if you can't complete the earlier levels. If you want to skip a song, or try something harder or easier, you can pick whatever you like.

In does have in-app purchases. Far from being the sort of loot-box bullshit most games are infested with, these are brutally honest. You can buy an album of songs for between £10 - £16. If you try to buy a single song, it will warn you that it is probably cheaper to buy the multipack. If you are happy with the base songs, it won't push the premium ones on you.

And, yes, there is online competitive play if you really want to test your mettle against people younger and fitter than you. But why bother? What good does it do you to know there's some kid in Seoul who can dedicate 20 hours a day to practicing? It doesn't.

I don't know if it is making me fitter. I'm certainly sweating more. And I don't know if I'll continue playing it. But, as long as it doesn't change its basic premise, I'm finding it delightful.

You can get 25% off Beat Saber using my referral code.

It is like playing with a dolls house. And yet, the scale of it is epic.

Vast castles, haunted forests, arid deserts - it is a wonderland for a platformer/puzzler.

The puzzles are mostly very good. Move the thing, jump on the whatsit, move another thing, back to the start etc. Most of them take advantage of the 3D environment which leads to some lovely designs. And, if you get stuck, the little mouse will mime a clue to you. Get it right, and she'll demand a high-five. It is lovely.

Except for the combat.

Bugs come out to fight you. You hit them with your sword. Repeat. When the enemy can be manipulated to be part of the puzzle, they become interesting. Otherwise, it is just a slog. A couple of the bosses kept me in a death-loop until I'd hit them enough. It wasn't even an interesting "wait until they rear then hit the underbelly" fight. Just button mashing.

I fully agree with Jennifer Hepler and Dara Ó Briain that games need a "Skip Combat" button. I'm here for the story, the puzzles, and the graphics. Hitting monsters is boring.

The story is fun - and set up nicely for a sequel. There's a bit of replayability with a couple of collectables you can find.

Like all VR games, it is expensive for the length of gameplay. £15 for a few hours. You can get 25% off using my referral link

Labyrinth deLux is brilliant. The puzzle is simple enough - point lasers at mirrors, then align mirrors until they point at the target. You've almost certainly played a 2D version of this.

But it has a mind-bending 3D layout which requires you to continually walk on the ceiling to adjust your perspective. The UI is, thankfully, not chunder-inducing. You point and click at a surface and then smoothly float and reorient to it.

The plot is a bit silly - your spaceship crashes and you have a mysterious destiny or some nonsense. But the voice acting is good and you can ignore the story without consequence.

Graphics are lo-fi charming, which helps prevent the usual VR weirdness. Excessive graphics quality just shines a light on how bad the Meta Quest 2 is. But the Minecraft style helps keep the FPS up.

There are 16 levels of increasing difficulty - which took me about 3½ hours to complete:

At £6, it's probably one of the cheapest games on Oculus - and excellent value for money.

So a whole industry has sprung up to fix Meta's mistakes!

The good folks at ZyberVR have sent me this smart docking station to review. Let's take a quick whirl:

It's... pretty good! For £35-ish you get a sturdy docking station, a 15W USB-C charger, 2 AA batteries and controller covers, 4 magnetic USB-C plugs, and a USB-A pass-through cable.

The magnets are plenty strong enough, they controllers jump into place and stick there. The headset is slightly harder to place - but you get a reassuring charging light when it makes contact.

And, if you don't like lights, a simple button turns them off.

It's a reasonably compact unit and fits unobtrusively onto a shelf. Yes, there are some silly LED effects, but you can switch them off.

Downsides

There are a few oddities. You get four magnetic USB-C connectors - but they only get used in the headset. It might have been nice to make the controllers use them as well. Still, having 3 spares isn't so bad.

I'd have preferred a detachable USB cable rather than having one hard-wired into the plug. But I guess it means people don't use crappy cables which can't handle the 3A.

The rechargeable batteries will only ever show a maximum of 85% within the Quest's OS. That's normal for these sorts of batteries - but a little weird when you first see it.

But, overall, it's a nifty device. Once you've finished slicing-and-dicing virtual aliens, the Quest 2 slips neatly into it and recharges pretty quickly. The only thing the ZyberVR doesn't do is wipe the sweat off the headset.

Discount!

You can get 15% off this and other equipment with discount code EDENT15

What's it like? Exactly the same as the first. Lots of creepy corridors, a range of puzzles, and a sedate-ish journey. You're exploring an abandoned space-station, looking for clues and trying to figure out what happened.

It's a completely linear journey, and consists of a series of locked-room puzzles. The developers have made sure not to repeat the same puzzles over and over. The story, such as it is, makes very little sense. But it has a great feel to it - you are always learning a little more about the characters off-stage.

There are a couple of things which I found annoying. The developers have introduced a fighting element to the game. It is totally unnecessary in my opinion. You're happily trying to solve a puzzle and then, without warning, there's a jump-scare and you have to point your gun at killer robots.

I get it. The Oculus store is populated with tons of these sorts of games because it feels very natural to point your hand at something and "shoot". I'm not a big fan of those games as they prioritise dexterity over imagination. It feels out of place to have a puzzler descend into "shoot-the-robots-before-they-shoot-you" territory. There's a setting to make combat easier, but it is still a chore.

There are one or two bugs. Try as I might, I couldn't adjust the walking speed - which meant it took a while to move around. A few graphical gliches caused objects to appear in the middle of the surfaces they were resting on. But over all it was a great experience.

Well, it was a short experience. Maybe I've been spoilt by all the multi-hour games you can get for a similar price. Puzzlers like the Broken Sword series are 5 - 8 hours long if you follow a walkthrough. I think Red Matter 2 took me under 5 hours for me to complete. Of course, the Meta Quest 2 needed to be charged 3 times while playing, so perhaps I ought to count that?

Anyway, Red Matter 2 is an excellent sequel.

You can get 25% off Red Matter 2 with my referral code

But Meta gave me £30 in credit for helping people fix their broken Quests. So I bought this much hyped puzzle game. And…

It's excellent! Much better than I expected.

As puzzler, it works really well. Lots of different types of puzzles, some of which make effective use of the VR environment. Items which need careful manipulation, 3D items which need examination, and wandering around a complex interactive world.

The voice acting is superb - although it is reminiscent of Portal's Cave Johnson.

It is spooky - without relying on jump-scares to frighten you. I was worried that I was going to have to get into a fight, or be chased, or have to beat the clock. But, instead, it's an atmospheric puzzler with some very mild peril to keep things entertaining.

The puzzles are moderately difficult - but I didn't have to resort to a walkthrough; they're all fairly logical. It was a great way to spend a couple of hours, and I'm eager for the sequel.

With a few caveats, of course

The first is that it is short. I guess I spent about 6 hours playing before I completed it. You can buy something like Skyrim second hand for the same price and get over a hundred hours of gameplay. Oculus games seem particularly expensive. Presumably because of the small audience.

Secondly, the manipulation can be really shonky. Picking up small items is finickity. Picking up large items sometimes causes unexpected movement in the environment. There are also some severe clipping issues. Your "hands" quite often pass through "solid" objects. As with all VR games, it is fully immersive until something breaks the illusion.

Thirdly, it's impossible to play for long periods of time. I had to stop a few times to recharge the headset. That's not the fault of this game - but of the Oculus. I can't remember the last time I played a PS4 game so long that the controller needed recharging.

Similarly, wearing a VR headset for more than an hour is just painful.

But these are minor nits. Yes, the end is slightly silly. But it is no worse than most modern movies.

I think I'd feel a bit cheated if I'd paid full price for it but, overall, it was a great experience.

I have an Oculus Quest 2 and wanted to pay money for an in-app purchase. This seems like a normal thing to do.

There's no way to add a credit card while your head is strapped to an overheating Android device. So I emerged into meatspace opened the Oculus app on my phone and typed in my credit card details.

I went through the usual dance of getting a 2FA code from my card provider and was successfully authorised. Nice!

I jacked back in to the Metaverse and clicked the "BUY NOW" button.

This was the message that greeted me:

What - and I say this with all due respect to Facebook's Meta's employees - the actual fuck is this half-baked bullshit?

Why would you let a user add a credit card if you know that you can't accept card payments? Why not warn the user? Why not do five minutes of user testing? Why?!

Anyway, I took off the helmet, found my phone, and added PayPal. The transaction then went through... On to the same card that was just refused!

Look, I don't claim to know the intricacies of all the payment systems in the world. But this just shows an aggressively hostile attitude to usability.

Why would you make it so hard for your potential customers to give you money? Don't you like money?

We all know the Metaverse is a joke. It's just a way for companies to hype up whatever they're already doing. But do they have to make their contempt for users so obvious?

I bought a Meta Quest 2 second hand from a child who was bored of it. The Quest was in excellent condition but, after a few days use, it became clear that the physical volume up key was broken. There are lots of tips and trips for fixing this. One of which is factory resetting. I turned off the Quest, held volume down and power, and got into the factory reset screen. In order to confirm the reset, you need to press... Volume up!

The Oculus chat team were very helpful. They took me through basic troubleshooting and agreed it sounded like it was broken. After confirming the headset serial number and some other details, they sent me an RMA label which was valid for the next 30 days.

I packaged the Quest headset in the original box, taped it up, slapped the label on it and dropped it at a local DHL point. 48 hours later and it was delivered to the Czech offices of Meta. 12 hours later I got confirmation Oculus had accepted it as defective and, a couple of hours later, I got a shipping confirmation for the replacement from Ireland. The replacement was due a week after I handed over the defective unit. I thought that was pretty good going!

Then, the next day, I got a delivery notification and the refurb was in my hands that afternoon.

So, I handed it over on Tuesday, got the replacement on Saturday. Outstanding service!

But it didn't work. I couldn't get through initial set up. It wouldn't connect to the controllers and couldn't pair with the app

After a few days of bashing my head against a wall, I finally found a solution.

Instructions

1. Download the latest firmware file
2. Rename it update.zip
3. Power off your Quest 2
4. Hold Volume - and power until the device boots into a bootloader screen
5. Using the Volume buttons, navigate to "Sideload Update" and then press power
6. Connect your Q2 to your PC via the USB-C cable. Use the cable which came with the Q2 if possible
7. Install the Android Debug Bridge (adb)
8. If you're on Windows, move update.zip to the same folder as your adb installation.
9. Run adb devices, you should see something like List of devices attached: 123456789 sideload
10. Run adb sideload update.zip
11. After a few minutes the file will have transferred and your Q2 will begin updating
12. Once updated, you should be able to pair the app with the handset

If that doesn't work, ask Meta for a refund of their crappy product!

The current range of VR headsets have to be strapped tight to your face. In order to prevent your eyes going out of alignment with the lenses or the focus suddenly changing, the mask clings tight to your face. Sure, it has a foam/rubber seal to soften the pain, but it can still be pretty uncomfortable.

Take a look at most promo photos of models wearing a VR headset - their mouths are open in delight and surprise, but they're rarely smiling.

Here's 100% human Mark Zuckberg showing off the next generation of headset. He's smiling, but look at how his dimples are squashed

It doesn't look comfortable, does it?

Perhaps I just have an oddly-shaped face and I ought to get cheek reduction surgery? Or plenty of Botox? I'm sure Mark's perfectly smooth and motionless face is the target demographic for these face-clamps. The technology will mature until it's no more uncomfortable than wearing a pairs of specs. But, for now, it is physically limiting in all sorts of weird ways.

It is a tantalising glimpse of a future which isn't quite here yet. I dislike Facebook's Meta's vision of the Metaverse - but the tech is undoubtedly fun when it works.

I remember using VR way back in the 1990s. When on holiday, games arcades often had a VR helmet. I wasted all my pocket money on virtual tanks, creeping through virtual dungeons, and generally feeling virtually claustrophobic.

A few years ago I tinkered around with Google Cardboard. Finally! VR was cheap and available to the masses! Just flip your phone on the side and off you go.

Sadly, the world didn't bite. VR still suffers from the same two problem that it always has. First, no one has enough space. This was a problem which the Xbox Kinect faced in the UK / EU. Our living spaces are generally a lot smaller than those in the USA - and the Kinect just couldn't cope. If you took a step forward from your couch, it lost sight of you.

VR has the same problem. You need a large amount of dedicated floorspace, and no cats, kids, or clutter to bash into. Otherwise you're just sat on your arse on a spinning chair.

The second problem is that VR is fundamentally alienating for everyone else in the room with you. If you're playing a console game, your friends or family can watch what you're doing. If you're strapped into VR, you're like a junkie in the corner giggling away at sprites only you can see.

This is why Facebook Meta are heavily pushing the idea that the Metaverse is a place to socialise. Because otherwise you're just a lonely git ignoring everyone around you.

Anyway, I bought a 2nd hand Meta Quest 2 from a kid who was bored of using it. It's partly for my MSc, and partly so I can see what the fuss is all about.

I'm a sceptic and a grumpy old fart - so adjust your expectations accordingly.

First Impressions

The Quest uses USB-C to recharge! Hurrah! I feared I'd need a proprietary Zuckercable - but it came with USB and plug. Except... the Quest controllers are not rechargeable!

This seems bonkers to me - especially as you can buy AA batteries which recharge via USB-C

It also demands a mobile phone be paired with it. There's no indication of why. If you don't have a phone, you're out of luck. There's no way to even demo the unit without a companion app. Again, a needlessly user-hostile action. Luckily, there's a workaround to log in with a developer account.

Once in, and after the requisite multi-gigabyte updates, it's a pretty good experience.

Play Time

The tutorial app is pretty fun. Dancing with a robot, throwing paper planes, shooting laser beams. It's nifty - but hardly revolutionary. Holding a gun in VR looks cool, but fundamentally isn't any different from Nintendo's Duck Hunt from 1984. The grab-and-manipulate mechanic is similar to the Nintendo Wii.

The brightly coloured graphics make everything pop - but hide the fact that things are generally low-resolution in order to keep things running smoothly.

The interface is adequately intuitive. It does a reasonable job of guiding you through the set-up. Everything is cartoony and playful. If you slip in to pass-through mode (where you can see the real world) the cameras show you a fuzzy & greyed-out picture - almost as if to emphasise how dull the ordinary world is compared to the Metaverse.

I was impressed at how well it let me define the safe space around my body, and it did an excellent job of preventing me from walking into walls. No mean feat given how clumsy I am.

The app store looked neat - but there didn't seem to be an easy way to filter for free games. And while Beat Sabre and Darth Vader™ look like fun, I'm unwilling to plonk down £30 without a free demo. Given the expense of the hardware, the need to keep people hooked, and the novelty of the medium it feels like a weird misstep. I'm sure there are some cool free experiences, but the Quest doesn't make them easy to find.

After an hour or so of playing, it whined about needing more power. So I returned to the mundane world.

Through A Glass Darkly

The original problems with VR are all still there. Getting interpupillary distance correct is a bit of trial and error. I was expecting to be able to adjust the distance between lenses while wearing the headset. Instead you have to remove the headset and manually adjust. That makes it difficult to share the headset with friends.

Adjusting the tightness of the headset is a bit tricky. It's a loop of fabric which is impossible to adjust while you're wearing the headset. Unless the headset is really tight, the picture quickly becomes blurry. But when the picture is clear, it's pretty pixelated. It's a lose-lose situation. Reading text is just about OK, but gets tiresome quickly as your eyes struggle to focus.

And, if the strap is too tight, it's painful and sweaty.

Peripheral vision is limited. Without a radical change in screen shape, there's not much can be done about that.

The sound is compellingly good. Even without headphones. There's great directionality. Although, it does stutter now and again.

Hand tracking is weirdly accurate. The hand controllers do a reasonable job of mapping your finger movements. Picking up objects and interacting with them is intense. So much so that I tried to put down an object on a virtual table and nearly dropped the controller on the floor! Thank heaven for wrist straps!

And then the tracking gets confused and your hand isn't where you expect it to be. Your proprioception goes out of whack and the illusion breaks.

That's where the problem lies. The key thing about VR is that when you're in, you're in! But it only takes a dropped frame, skipped audio, or glitchy bit of tracking to drag you out of the illusion.

Verdict

I got a 2nd hand Quest on the cheap. I'd have been pretty narked if I'd paid full price for this sub-par experience. I've only played it for an hour, so I doubt I've experienced the full range of wonder. But it's a slow and choppy start. I can see the potential, but have yet to experience anything compelling. It's a bit like playing Night Trap on the Sega MegaCD - yes, this is what the future of interactive movies could look like. But, no, it's not likely to grab mainstream attention.

In a world of 4K consoles delivering cinematic quality visuals, the Quest's graphics looks like an N64 in comparison.

The tech is tantalisingly close. The experience is reasonable fun - if you're happy with a heavy, battery hungry, face-hugger strapped to you.

VR is like cold-fusion. It's going to be amazing next year. Next year the glasses will be smaller. Next year the graphics will be better. Next year the battery will last longer. Next year the hand tracking will be more accurate. Next year... Next year... Next year...