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Cue soothing music!
Carpe Lucem drops you right into a pastoral scene, where you are confronted with colored beams of light and several mechanical flowers. The goal is to open each flower by shining the correct color of light onto it, using curved pipes to direct the light.
The benefits of room-scale virtual reality are obvious in puzzle games like this. You can physically walk around the puzzle, examining it from every angle. At the beginning of the game, you might not need to make full use of this. The puzzles increase in complexity though, and later puzzles will completely surround you as only virtual reality puzzles can.
In one puzzle which you can see in this video, I had to send beams of light criss-crossing through the play space, until I was practically standing in a web of light. As you advance different tools are introduced, including orbs that change the color of the light, as well as mirrors, magnets, and teleporters.
As a side note, puzzle games like this are super hard to capture. Part of the experience of being in virtual reality is an awareness of where things are in relation to your body. You know, just like in the flesh world. What doesn't translate in video is the spatial awareness of all the little tools that I had at my disposal in Carpe Lucem.
Carpe Lucem - Seize the Light was designed for virtual reality, and is available on Steam for the HTC Vive.
