PSVR is a hot property in my household, seeing almost daily usage thanks to the variety of fun experiences you can have on it. Given that Paper Beast is made by the creator of the hugely influential Another World from 1991, I couldn’t wait to see what he did with the possibilities of PSVR. It drops you into a surreal dream-like ecosystem born from snippets of decades-old lost code and algorithms in the primordial pool like deep recesses of a data server. This isn't a God game, but it contains some key ingredients to get your thirst for experimentation and discovery flowing.

Jumping into the game you are treated to a tongue-in-cheek series of pop-up advertising-style menus on the "Quasar Computer,” each asking more and more questions regarding odd personal choices and how willing you are to divulge personal information and how much you would like to participate. While you're faced with a super futuristic loading screen, another pop-up asks if you would like to listen to a music video while you wait. I hit yes and was treated to what can only be described as an absolutely superb light and sound show in the same vein as a Splatoon 2 concert. High energy, dreamlike, sensorily stimulating, and it acts as the perfect tutorial for grabbing and throwing items with the triggers. Some objects are clearly draggable thanks to the coloured line emanating from your controller’s augmented antenna that indicates whether you can mess with said object. Each item you interact with has a virtual heft to it. For example, any cloth can be drawn across like a curtain, or ripped from its moorings and blown into the air. Tethered items have a great feel of elasticity which means you have to heave backwards like you're catching a giant fish to pull an item out of the ground, or untangling something. Regular objects such as rocks, technology, or scrunched up pieces of paper can be manipulated and thrown according to their elemental weights too. For instance, it’s simple to toss a piece of paper around, throwing it miles with a flick of the wrist, yet a boulder takes all your might to roll them just a few feet. The opening musical tutorial allows you to throw around three main organic-looking doohickeys that also cunningly interact with the game’s spacial sound. One controls the drums, one the synths, and the final one controls the vocals. With the sound emitting from these things your action of throwing it further aways lowers the volume based on its distance from you, you can drag them around the screen causing you to hear a stereo effect based on its positioning. All in all it’s a very impressive tech demo, or proof of concept, that then awards you a trophy for your troubles, and the actual game commences.

You wake up blearily with the music you were just enveloped in playing on a reel-to-reel in a tinny mono, shrouded in a red cloth tent. You tear into the panels of cloth and a desert with blue mountains, red sand, and an ominous-looking dark cloudy sky built of jumbled letter clouds. The second you start taking in your environment, the tent comes alive. It was a beast all along, cunningly hidden in plain sight while protecting you, keeping you contained and giving you a sense of comfort in the opening cloth cocoon. The creature lunges away with a noble stoicism, an intriguing monolithic scale and sun-bleached white colouration that immediately puts you in mind of a skeletal giraffe. You are drawn to this animal, you are captivated by this creature’s seemingly alien yet organic aesthetic and the way it appears to move around by itself, but is it? Is it using scripted actions to direct the flow of the story, or is it a blend of sandbox AI and event-driven sequences? I have to say that, either way, it feels like the latter and it is amazing. You spot an object falling from the sky, it crashes into the mountain range in front of you, and as a result, small, scrunched up balls of paper, about the size of your fist, start raining down. Everything about this game draws you to its hay-wire madness with some child-like innocence, and as you carelessly throw around these pieces of paper in your new physics-based playground, you quickly realise that you and your mammoth comforting beast are not alone. Oversized bug-like critters scurry around the dunes, dog-like varmints bound around watering holes together and even stranger mini-beasts wander listlessly across the terrain. From gigantic behemoths to tiny insect-sized beings, you are encapsulated in creativity, observing the animal’s grace, lending to a phenomenal sense of exploration and discovery. It feels as though you have just observed these creatures for the first time, no one else has been here or seen the sights you are beholding, it is incredibly liberating and relaxing. The dog-like folded-paper creatures called Papyvorus spot you messing with these pieces of paper and initiate a game of fetch with you, and as you engage, you find yourself picking them up, throwing them around, and as a knock-on effect you notice that they leave tracks in the sand, that you can draw in the sand or drop them in the water and cause a splash and ripples. It's all organically fascinating, and it's all just within the first opening minutes of this highly intelligent and inspired title.

Elements such as wind, fire, water and ice act as key ingredients in the sandbox as well as its unique flora and fauna. In early stages you find double-ended worms, with a one-way digestive tract, acting as a pump for cultivating pits and dunes to empty great subterranean bodies of water. It's up to you to orient them and utilise them as you see fit. There are insects that craft balls of mud, others that roll or stack them. Later on, in the arid desert sections, water is required to feed trees and rehydrate the menagerie, but its source is hidden and when you do locate some it's at an infuriatingly perplexing distance from where you need it, so what do you do? Ingeniously, the solution is to craft a track for the liquid to run down in the sand by dragging various items across the dirt to dig this track. Conversely, other sections have an abundance of liquid and you have to stem the flow with other creature’s unique abilities, and once you have the water where you need it, you have to figure out how to freeze it solid. All of this is completely free form, and entirely up to you to creatively resolve given the tools and traits of the landscape. It's incredible to get to play around with such a familiarly varied, realistic to a fault, and yet still aesthetically alien set of tools in an intricately interwoven physics-laden environment.

Towards the end of the game, I actually came undone on a couple of puzzles, namely a wind-driven one and a water-based one. Though it becomes obvious eventually what you have to do, I was simply so perplexed as to how I was required to achieve it that in the end, I resorted to quitting and re-loading the levels from the beginning to ensure I hadn't accidentally teleport-moved into an out of bounds area with no hope of getting back out again—which happened a couple of times when I pushed the literal boundaries in search of secrets. 

The reason I explored for obscure areas to get into is that there are several hidden collectibles to find per chapter. Once you find a secret object and grab it, it will explode in a flash of light and a new item will be added to your toolset in sandbox mode. Sandbox mode gives you exactly what it says on the tin: a sandbox to play around in and experiment with the plethora of linkable assets, and environmental things such as the height of the sun in the sky, and the weather. As a technical demonstration for what can be achieved in VR I think that this is a stunning little feature, and I found it very relaxing after having to think my way through the main story, but I'm not sure how often I would actually visit the sandbox, given that there are no puzzles to solve and no narrative to follow. Sure, making and breaking stuff is fun, but how long will that sparkle last the average user? I spent a good hour of my time playing around specifically with water, ice and explosions, then resetting and crafting a simple oasis for the creatures to congregate and drink at, only to flood it all and then blow it all up again.

Controller-wise, I found myself equally at home with the move controllers or just using the DS4. Either way, I felt fully in control of everything that was going on; however, the movement for turning is limited to a button press to twist you around 45 degrees per press, and there is no option for smooth turning in any of the settings. Using the move controllers felt more tool-like, and therefore seemed to suit the sandbox mode better, but in the campaign mode, the DS4 felt equally great for general play.

Linearity is the most glaring shortfall of this title. There are effectively several micro-sandbox levels linked together in such a way that there is only one outcome, and therefore ultimately only one ending sequence. I think that to really mix it up, and make use of some sort of variation, it could have been better to perhaps randomly seed a selection of the level’s creatures and environmental assets based on the time you started playing. For example, if the game captured and hashed your PS4 clock time string as you hit the button to begin, this would be your seed value for this playthrough of the game. Next time you begin a new game the hash would be different and cause an alternate look or feel to the game's stages and critters. In the same way that EA's similarly ambitious game Spore randomly generated creature features based on their actions, such as the number of legs or fins, the scale, the colour scheme, etc. I feel that Paper Beast spent so long making everything within each environment elementally freeform, they didn't stop to make the creatures more freeform and, though this wouldn't affect the linearity of the game, it could have broken up and subtly increased the variety of the beasts for subsequent playthroughs.

Paper Beast is such an incredible experience. I would heartily recommend it to anyone with a love of physics-based environmental puzzlers. Every aspect of this title exudes intelligence and discovery, which easily makes this one of my favourite games on PSVR this year. The fact that it is so inherently enjoyable so quickly and so effortlessly gives me fresh hope for more content for Paper Beast, and an expanding market for these types of games.