Flow Weaver (2021)

It never feels good giving a negative review. I sat on this for a full day, agonizing over scoring such a beautiful game poorly. But what other choice do I have when I had to restart multiple times for even a shimmer of hope to finish what I started? It’s possible Flow Weaver isn’t optimized for the Oculus Rift S despite what the website states, so if you have an Oculus Quest or Oculus Quest 2, perhaps you won’t experience the bugs I did. I do see on the game’s Oculus page that the dev team is working hard at tackling bugs, so if this even remotely interests you (which, for real guys, it has potential), keep an eye on it and check back in a month or two. But as it stands, I regrettably cannot recommend Flow Weaver in its current state.

Flow Weaver is a virtual reality escape room experience with a dull story that doesn't understand what makes escape rooms fun.

You’ll finish Flow Weaver in anywhere from one to three hours, depending on how long it takes you to figure things out. That’s not a lot of content, even for a VR game. Flow Weaver is a solid escape room-style puzzler, and it has some nice rooms and a few interesting characters to interact with, but overall the limited gameplay and short playtime are a let-down. Try this VR game if you really love the escape room genre, but if you want to feel like a real wizard, there are better VR titles already out there.

There are not many games that are marred with so many issues as Flow Weaver. The gameplay is boring, the texture quality is akin to a PS1 game, the story is barely interesting, and there are far too many bugs and glitches to count. Trudging through the mess that this game is, the only redeemable quality is the dimension-hopping --- a great idea that definitely needs to be implemented properly. As for now, Flow Weaver is not one I'd recommend getting your hands on.

Flow Weavers is a well designed and enjoyable escape room puzzler that is perfectly suited to virtual reality but also suffers from some of the common issues that the format provides. While it doesn't reach the genre heights of The Room: A Dark Matter, it offers a welcome change of setting with the emphasis on magic and dimensional teleportation well suited to the virtual world. This is a game that may well weave its magic on you, albeit for only a brief while.