Tumble VR lets you stack blocks like an adult

At a Sony press event yesterday, Supermassive Games — best known for horror soap opera Until Dawn — revealed Tumble VR, a sequel to the block-stacking PS3 PlayStation Move puzzle game Tumble.

Essentially an adult version of a child’s pre-school test, each stage of Tumble VR gives you a set of cardboard blocks and a task, and it’s up to you to combine those blocks in a way that accomplishes the task without letting physics get in the way. In one scenario, for instance, you have to place six blocks on a table but place them low enough that a floating "limbo" bar doesn’t knock them over. So you rotate the blocks, find the proper orientation to make them all fit and complete the stage.

In another stage, you have to stack all the blocks vertically at just the right angle to balance them and reach a certain height. Basically it's this, as a video game.

In other stages, you may have to use blocks to shine light in a specific way, or blow up your blocks at specific angles. The developers have taken the idea of stacking blocks and tried to come up with as many permutations as they could on what that means.

You can use either a Move controller or a DualShock 4 to rotate blocks, and for the latter the game provides options to let you use an analog stick or the built-in motion sensing to place a piece at a precise angle. During a demonstration of the game, I ran into brief issues with moving the DualShock out of the camera’s view and not realizing it, thus temporarily losing control over the controller and my piece, though it was easy to find a solution by resetting the shapes in front of me and rotating the table they were sitting on.

The final version of Tumble VR will contain more than 80 stages, as well as two-player cooperative and competitive modes with one player in the VR headset and one player watching the TV screen. The game is on track for release later this year.