Hands-on: "ArtPuzzle" is a relaxing jigsaw puzzle game for Meta Quest
Artpuzzle is a jigsaw puzzle game for Meta Quest that lets you piece together famous works of art in a relaxing environment.
I tried Artpuzzle on Meta Quest 3 and was immediately reminded of Puzzling Places, whose design clearly inspired this game.
While Puzzling Places lets you piece together 3D scans of real places, Artpuzzle focuses on paintings and artifacts. The game features more than 50 puzzles from different eras, from Renaissance masterpieces to modern art. You can puzzle in three virtual environments, passthrough is not supported.
As in Puzzling Places, puzzling is simple: you aim at individual puzzle pieces with the controller and drag them towards you. The puzzle pieces float in front of you, allowing you to puzzle at your leisure. The complete artwork floats to the right, which you can also pull towards you to see up close if you're not sure where a piece belongs.
Hand tracking is not supported, a feature that will hopefully be added later in addition to a passthrough mode.
Admire works of art in high resolution
Before you start, you can adjust the difficulty level by settings the number of puzzle pieces (12 - 450) and choose from different puzzle shapes (classic puzzle pieces, hexagons and custom shaped puzzles).
The game comes with a selection of works and artifacts, and additional collections can be downloaded separately. The studio has released a number of new collections since the app launched, most recently one featuring four paintings by Paul Gauguin.
The artworks are rendered in high resolution. You can touch them with your hands, look at them up close, and notice details that you wouldn't see on your smartphone or in an art book.
Accompanying text tells you more about the artist and the artwork, so you can learn a bit of art history along the way.
A relaxing jigsaw puzzle game
Artpuzzle makes a solid first impression, and the pretty environments and background music add to the relaxation.
Speaking of relaxation: Artpuzzle cannot be played lying down by default. The lying down mode introduced with Quest update v63 may be a remedy on Quest 2 and Quest Pro, but Quest 3 users will have to wait a little longer until that feature arrives.
You can purchase Artpuzzle for $12 in the App Lab. The studio published a code on Reddit that gives you a 50 percent discount on the game.
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