Unloop Hands-On: Sci-Fi Puzzling On Repeat

Unloop is a fresh, time-bending VR puzzle game from the creators of Into the Radius, launching you into a clever self-co-op experience with a dash of sci-fi espionage.

The team at CM Games seems confident of its intuitive game loop – so confident that the game begins with neither tutorial nor preamble. With only the most rudimentary of instructions players will begin their adventure and begin to piece together the mechanics at the heart of Unloop, so be warned: do not expect your hand to be held as you proceed.

At its core, Unloop tasks players with proceeding through a series of compact, room-based puzzles. Your goal: get from one side of the area to the other. In order to do this, players will need to avoid laser turrets and use key cards, batteries and other devices to lower barriers, open doors and otherwise circumvent assorted obstacles. Sounds simple enough, right?

Wrong.

Each room is designed so as to be impossible to pass. Well, at least on your first try.

Each time you die or run out of time, a clone of your last actions will play out before you, allowing players to choreograph sequences of interactions between their now selves and their past selves. It’s a great premise for a puzzle game and while not an entirely original concept (see excellent titles such as We Are One and even The Last Clockwinder) it is still novel enough to hold your attention.

The trick is to think ahead and orchestrate your movements to enable your clones to carry items to and fro as needed. It’s a lesson in paying it forward – literally.

As you would expect, the initial few hours of gameplay see Unloop layer in new mechanics to raise the difficulty. However, my early impressions are that the pacing falls into a halting rhythm early on: new obstacles and mechanics are a little too sparse, so the novelty can wear off and repetition starts to creep in. That said, there are a lot of levels and I would not be surprised if the difficulty continues to escalate throughout.

Each room is timed, typically giving players between 30 and 60 seconds, although this can be adjusted in the options to create a difficulty setting of sorts. Every time you end a sequence and embody your next clone, the timer resets, so sequencing your moves with precise timing becomes essential for those chasing the best scores. In early levels the timer is barely relevant but as the complexity of the sequences increases, finding the shortest way to the end becomes increasingly important – and rewarding.

Despite demonstrating the foundations of a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle game, a few awkward design choices undercut the satisfaction somewhat.

Take handing off items, for instance. Simply standing and holding a key card in front of you so that a future version of yourself can just grab it from your hand is maddeningly clumsy. Instead, most of the time you end up just dropping it to the floor so the next you can pick it up. In short order this becomes incredibly frustrating, particularly as there’s no way to ‘force grab’ an item. If the keycard ends up on the floor (which it will – trust me) then you’re bending all the way down to get it. Every. Single. Time.

Throwing isn’t always reliable either: key cards sometimes bounce unpredictably, or fly out of your hand in unreliable directions, so often it’s quicker to walk the long way and gently place the item where you want it. In what should be a slick element that fuses the mental and physical ballet that is clearing a room, these minor gripes start to stack up quickly. Particularly with leaderboards designed to encourage the quickest, most elegant solution. Speed running the solutions in Unloop should in theory be wholeheartedly rewarding, but after a few hours I found that these inconsistent mechanics completely doused my desire to move at pace.

It’s also worth noting that there is a potential trigger here that comes without any warning or alternate option. Once you achieve what you need to in a given loop and want to reset to your next incarnation there are only two options available to you: either wait out the clock (zzzzzz) or kill your current self. While many won’t be fazed by this, the idea that you can’t move forward without repeatedly shooting yourself may be a bit grim for some. That said, if you can get past it, there is a certain dark comedy to be had as you pace through the middle of a montage of your own destruction.

All told, Unloop looks to be a promising head-scratcher for players who love time-looping puzzles and self-orchestrated hijinks. Its core concept is compelling and clever, but a few rough edges keep it from being a standout recommendation just yet. With a bit of polish and hopefully some patches, this could be one to loop back to.