Gameplay

This game is a puzzle adventure with story focused elements. You'll be travelling across different locations, and the goal is to figure out how to achieve certain objectives by digging around and finding clues to help out. Sometimes you're tasked to find a specific object, sometimes you're tasked to solve a puzzle, so on and so forth.

You can pickup many objects in the game, but you can only store important objects in your watch, so that helps in figuring out what items you'll be needing to solve something. You'll find puzzles such as trying to find the combination of a lock, disactivating a bomb, turning on the power of a control room, and other variety of things.

Given how you're travelling in a location where there's a lot of radioactivity, there are sections where you will need to be careful not to get too much of exposure, or else you might fail your mission. But don't worry, these timed section don't always happened, so you don't always feel like you're on a time limit when you look for your next clue.

Story

You start the game in the shoes of 28 years old agent Olena Ponomarenko. The year is 2031, and time travel is now possible. You work in the Timeline Control Bureau, and your job is to make sure that there's no disruptions.

The Chernobyl disaster is a real life catastrophe that happened back in 1986 where a nuclear powerplant exploded and caused many deaths. In the game, we learn that this disaster was caused by a Timecorruptor. These people disrupt time for their own reason. So the main goal of the game is for you to prevent this event from happening to change the timeline of the present. There's a lot more that happens to the story, but I don't want to spoil it of course. It pretty much keeps you on the edge of your headset the whole time. I personally enjoyed it.

Graphics I've played and finished the game on my Quest 3, and it looked pretty amazing throughout my journey! It's not the graphical quality of Red Matter 2, but it was enough to keep myself immerse and never felt like I got out of the immersion. The resolution inside the headset felt good, and I didn't see any pop-ins or distracting rendering as far as I can tell.

Environments It feels almost surreal visiting Chernobyl during the events of the disaster. You'll be sometime teleported to events before and after the explosion. You can really feel empty inside when you see a deserted fair with damaged attractions. It's very eerie and unsettling going in there alone. The Chernobyl event is actually something that I always had interest in looking into. It was really something being able to explore these places.

You will also find environments such as an apartment from the 90s. I just find it cool that not only am I playing a game with an interesting story and fun gameplay, but I'm also visiting these very well crafted places where I really feel like I was there. It's like I'm having the combination of an experience app with a game at the same time.

Difficulty The difficulty of the game is not too bad, although there can be some annoying part. It's not the type of game that holds your hand throughout, although it tries to do that.

In the game, you have a watch that you'll be using that has some useful gadgets. If you're not sure what to do next, you can press the briefing button, and it'll tell you your objective. If you need extra help afterwards, there's a navigation button that will give you an arrow that points where your next objective will be.

The hint system is a great idea, but it wasn't always useful. If I needed to find an item, for example, it would point me to where I needed to put the item in, but I need to find this item on my own. It's a good concept, but not when you're stuck trying to find something for a long time.

It took me a little bit more than 4 hours to finish the game, although a lot of the time was spent trying to find an item, or trying to figure out how something work that shouldn't have taken as long as it did. I'd just like to mention that the flow was just average. I just felt like I was spending too much time trying to find an item that I know that I needed instead of trying to solve puzzles.

QoL/Bugs So the game could benefit by having some improvements. It's a fun experience, but a few things could be reworked to help making it a little less painful at a few times.

I remember this one time I spent way too long at opening a door for some reason. I kept turning it and playing with the key. But it just wouldn't open, up until it actually did.

There's also 2 places where there was a key that I was blocked by something ,like a fire. But I could just move physically and grab it, making me skip the puzzle.

The sound design could also use some work. There's a part where a phone was ringing, but I had no idea where it was. They didn't use spatial audio, so I could only tell if I was close or not by hearing the ringing going lower or louder, but I couldn't find the location for a while. These were the 3 most major issues for me. But there's other little things. I honestly think that the devs can make a little bit more adjustments and could make the experience better for sure, so I'm not too worried, and these are semi nitpicks.

The only real bug that I've encountered is that one time I had to restart a checkpoint, but it teleported me to a completely dark environment with my hands flashing. Thankfully, after restarting the whole chapter, it didn't happen again. So it wasn't too bad.

Outro I hope that you enjoyed today's review guys! Chernobyl Again is a fun puzzle adventure, but I think that it's a game for people who loves this genre already, because the improvements needed may turn off people who are not used to the difficulty and tools that it's offering. Although keep a lookout, I'll be posting a full playthrough of the game soon on my channel if you ever need help in figuring out a puzzle. Vimagineo's studio will only improve from now, so I definitely want to see another game in the same genre from them. I really love puzzle adventures in VR, and this was a good one to scratch that hitch while waiting for Wanderer Fragments of Fate coming soon.