Game review: Statik – Institute of Retention

The concept of Statik — plonk a PSVR on your head, sit in a chair, and get this… *thing* off of your hands — is deceptively simple. Because we’re sure not talking about removing a pair of gloves here, people. For reasons unknown, you’ll need to decipher and defuse a series of technological terrors that have been handcuffed to your virtual wrists. Worse, your progress is being tracked by a faceless, sleeping-gas-happy “scientician” whose mental state seems to be declining. Wonderful.

Here’s how the opening puzzle went for us (so slight spoilers ahead). Upon waking up in a laboratory that could have been ripped right out of Portal’s Aperture Science, our guide condescendingly asks us to break out of the most basic-level apparatus he has.

With our two hands on the controller, we basically twist the box this way and that and hammer all of our buttons, sticks, and triggers. Holding L2 and R2 causes bars to fill up on a panel in front of us. Rotating our sticks and tapping buttons causes LED lights to blink into life. Science guy offers a sarcastic congratulations. We are smrt. 

At this point, we get dragged out of the kiddie pool to be tossed into the deep end. The box on our hands reconfigures itself, like an angry miniature Transformer. Now, pressing our shoulder buttons and triggers cause the rounded corners of the box to punch out on pneumatic legs, and the control sticks cause them to rotate like little helicopters. Ok… then. Using the Dualshock 4’s perfect 1:1 motion tracking, we twist the box every which way, trying to figure out what our buttons are manipulating. The d-pad seems to be tied to an odd grabbing mechanism on the left hand side.

The four face buttons clearly concern a pipe flow puzzle on the right side that puts us in the mind of the original BioShock’s hacking mini-game.

After much fiddling, we make every doodad align and everything clicks. Creepy guide guy reveals he has an assistant (creepy AI camera on a stick) who scans our results sheet and then we’re drugged into unconsciousness.

This is essentially the entire ebb and flow of the game, and it’s only occasionally broken by odd little intermission moments (unintentionally comedic questionnaires and an out-of-body object puzzle experience).

We can’t speak of any more of the puzzles, lest we ruin the game, but we loved every one of them. Both the difficulty and mystery of this institute progressively get weirder as you progress through the dozen puzzles and/or encounters available.

The dry wit of your guide and the silly humour of the surveys is consistently funny throughout, too. We’ve not been this impressed with a PSVR puzzler since the superlative I Expect You To Die. 

Basically, and just like the contrabulous frabtraptions adhered to your hands, Statik is impossible to put down. If you love a good melon test, and are looking for the next quality experience for your PSVR, look no further. Sign up to the Institute, today.

Score: 8/10

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