The Key is a short, three-room escape style puzzle game for the Oculus Quest. Players must enter each of the rooms and “unlock” them by solving a unique puzzle that would require a key to be completed.
With no discernable story or plot, The Key instead focuses on its puzzles and their difficulty, however, none of the puzzles are particularly difficult.
The game starts off in a room with three doors, one locked door and two ‘puzzle’ doors. Players must search around the room for clues to complete their respective puzzles, after both of which players can advance to the next area.
Upon entering the second area, players need only look up at the ceiling to see their final destination. This final section is unique because it requires playing with gravity in unique ways that make use of Oculus Quests 6DoF capabilities specifically, however, this part isn’t very challenging compared to all previous puzzles.
The game features no story or plot, just three puzzles.
The Key is very short with each location only taking about ten minutes to complete (when you know what to do), however, the game does force players to find their own way around rooms and use logic to figure out how to progress, which can be challenging in its own right despite the games linearity.
This game lacks any sort of narrative or story outside of a framework that sets up the premise for each room. While this may not be an issue for most people, it provides no context or incentive for completing enough rooms to unlock more rooms beyond “you need all 3 keys” without any explanation as to why.
Additionally, there are no incentives of any kind besides optional leaderboards for speedrunning, which personally I find unimportant and unworthy of forcing players to compete against each other for the best time.
The Key is a short puzzle game with no story or narrative. The only goal is to get all 3 keys and if players want to play more they can try getting onto leaderboards for the fastest completion times. Despite this lack of incentive, the puzzles are fun in their own right and require players to think logically in order to progress through each room despite being linear in nature.
I would give this 3 out of 5 stars. It’s short, but it’s also cheap at $4.99 USD ($0.62 per minute) so it’s hard to complain too much about it unless you don’t like puzzle games.
If you want a short puzzle game that doesn’t really overstay its welcome and has no story, The Key is a decent buy.