You know, I have a big backlog of games and it's getting harder and harder for me to accept a request from a developer to try out their game. But there are 4 little words that always makes me cave in and super curious to give a game a try. And these 4 words are Story Focused Puzzle Adventure. To me, these type of games simply work so well in VR, and I just love playing them.

After watching the trailer, it definitely made me curious, and I had to play it. So here we are, with the game completed, and it's time to give you guys my thoughts on this adventure. So let's get into it.

Selina Mind At Large released on February 20th and is available for the Meta Quest 2/Pro/3 and 3S. The developers are Trotzkind, a studio based in Berlin, Germany and was founded back in 2014. They've been doing a lot of VR experiences in the past, including a few games that I'm not familiar with. Selina is their biggest project so far, so the future is very promising for them.

Gameplay

As I already mentioned, this is a story focused puzzle adventure. You'll be following the story of Selina, and you have many nice segments in there. The game kind of follow a certain flow. You first start with a cutscene with Selina, then you travel into her mind to find her next location. Like her home, her school, an amusement park, and things like that. When you enter these locations, you are then followed by a series of water flowing puzzles that you have to complete to progress to the next series of events.

Early in the game, you will acquire 2 types of power. The first one is teleportation, but the cool thing about it is that if you teleport on a wall, for example, the gravity will shift to that wall, putting you to that angle. To teleport, you need to point at the direction that you want to go, hold the trigger button, then give a quick backward yank, and then you'll be teleported.

The second power that you encounter is the freezing ability. This will be used to be able to direct the water flow to another angle when you switch the gravity. During every segment, you will only have a certain amount of freeze that you can do, which will be acquired from a small fountain.

So yeah, the main focus of the game are these water flowing puzzles. This will be where you'll be spending most of your time. You know, when I started realizing this, I thought "Man this will become pretty repetitive". But I was wrong. The reason is because of how well crafted they made the puzzles. I personally had some fun throughout. They made them unique enough for me to enjoy every single one of them. That's what differentiate a game between someone who's good at designing good levels and someone who doesn't.

The game is advertised as a 6 to 8 hours campaign. But it personally took me a little more than 4 hours on my end. But that's alright. I find that this was the perfect length for the type of game that it is. And I consider myself semi-decent at logical puzzles. I could definitely see some people taking 6 hours if they take more time and struggle a little more. If you do get stuck, you can ask Selina for help in the menu. My tips are that you sometimes have to think outside of the box. Some puzzles might trick you to where you actually need to guide the water flow. Another good trick is sometime start from the ending instead and try to make a path to get to the beginning. That helped me a few times.

Story

You start the game with a light guiding you through Selina's story. She's a little girl who, one day, was given a book. She was then suddenly chased away from her home by smoke and dark monsters and ended up in a forest where she met her friend Aniles. Before the light could finish its story, you are then overcome by the dark creatures and start your journey without knowing the full story. You get transported inside Selina's mind, where many things will happen!

You appear where Selina is at the moment, and for some reason, Alines is trying to destroy everything around her. Selina, losing hope, then notice you and find out that you can help her out by restoring some of her things, and putting an end to Alines' destruction.

I enjoyed the story, it was a pretty cozy and light hearted one, but the game was very clear that this is what it was going to be. So I had the proper mindset jumping in the game. Since you are inside Selina's mind, you get to learn a lot about her, and some locations that she visited in the past. The game also focus a lot into the management of emotions. It's kind of cool, and by the end of the game, it kind of gave me a new perspective towards that. So yeah, a story that's very easy to follow, but works very well.

Music

Guys, the music stands out so much in the game. I was pleasantly surprised by the soundtrack as soon as the menu music kicked in. You really get some nice composition throughout the game. Honestly, it's one of the highlights for me and this increased my enjoyment of my playthrough by a lot. The first song that you hear reminded me a lot of the soundtrack of Wavetale, an excellent indie adventure. And I thought for a while that it was the same composer. But it wasn't! That soundtrack was composed by Federico Truzzi, which I'm not too familiar with, but I definitely want to see more of him in other video games. I would definitely buy this soundtrack if it becomes available separately.

The voice acting and the choreography of Selina is also excellent. You can see that they've put a lot of effort and they did not cut corners in this one, which really helps with the immersion. She speaks a lot throughout the game, but never in an annoying way, and it is a light hearted game, so even if sometimes I missed out on what she was saying, it did not stop me from understanding what's happening.

Other remarks

You know, there were a few bugs here and there in the game, but it's not bad enough to go in detail about it. The game autosaves pretty frequently, so restarting the game after a bug brought me exactly where I was at and didn't need to redo anything that I did before. Plus there is a week 1 patch planned out, which will most likely fix the issues that I've had. So that's something to look forward to.

The environments that you'll find in the game are also pretty versatile and nice to look at. They are all pretty well crafted and keep the environments interesting to explore. It's just nice having different scenery.

I mentioned that the puzzles are always the same, but there are sections in the game that are different that I don't want to spoil. So there are some nice change of pace once in a while.