‘Fantastic Contraption’ Puzzle-crafting Fun is Coming to PlayStation VR

One of our favorite VR games, Fantastic Contraption, is heading PlayStation VR. The gameplay makes great use of motion controllers to allow you to craft solutions to puzzling platforming problems.

Fantastic Contraption released originally as one of the launch bundle titles for the HTC Vive. It’s since come to Oculus Touch and, in Spring 2017, will land on PSVR. The game tasks players with a seemingly simple objective: move the pink ball into the goal.

In order to do that, you’ll need to use rods, wheels, and more to build a machine to get the ball where it needs to go. It’ll be up to your imagination to solve each level, some of which will initially seem impossible until the lightbulb in your head goes off and you think of a workable solution. Part of the fun of Fantastic Contraption is that, while solving each level is the main objective, the number of solutions to each problem is limited only by your creativity. The obvious way to get from point A to B may not be the most fun way…

While the Vive version of Fantastic Contraption makes use of a standing, roomscale space, the PSVR version (which will require the PlayStation Move motion controller), shrinks the game down to a desk-sized building space, allowing you to craft easily without your hands or head moving outside of the PlayStation camera’s tracking bounds. As we’ve had some issues with the fidelity of PSVR’s hand tracking, we wonder if jitter could impact building at this scale. While the trailer doesn’t appear to exhibit any shakiness at that scale, it seems the creators used an interesting trick to use the HTC Vive to film what appears to be the PlayStation Move controllers, so we’ll have to wait to try it ourselves to see how well it works on PSVR.