Infinite Inside Review - A Surreal VR Puzzle Game With Passthrough

Infinite Inside is a game that the puzzling part of your brain will enjoy greatly, and it makes great use of Virtual Reality, and the passthrough capabilities of the Quest headset to deliver a unique puzzling experience.

That is, combining Mixed Reality and Virtual Reality to create an impression of a tower in whatever room you are playing in, and you teleporting inside and exploring that tower. Deeper and deeper you go, and the game becomes more surreal and draws you into its atmosphere.

All the while there are enjoyable 3D jigsaw puzzles to complete, and always the question of how to get to the next area to get more puzzle pieces to solve. Infinite Inside is unique for its combination of Passthrough Mixed Reality and Virtual Reality, but even more so for how well it uses Virtual Reality to convey the sense of traveling deeper into a different and mysterious world.

There are some fantastic 3D jigsaw puzzles in Infinite Inside.

Before we get any deeper into the Infinite Inside review though, let me tell you how the game actually plays.

What Do You Do In Infinite Inside?

The first order of business is to set up your playspace, which is quick, easy, and done with the Meta Quest’s superb passthrough. That is, assuming you are using a Meta Quest 3 or Pro.

Using the more inferior passthrough on the Meta Quest 2 might make Infinite Inside a far less enjoyable, and visible, experience. Though fortunately you can turn off the use of passthrough and have the game take place entirely in Virtual Reality, though the passthrough Mixed Reality exterior of the tower you explore does make the whole experience more wonderful and interesting.

You tell the game where the center of your playspace should be, and this is another game where having a larger playspace to work with is definitely beneficial, though you’ll be alright as long as you have an area large enough to just walk around the square you place in the center.

Placing the area where the tower appears in Passthrough.

You don’t need a massive room, and the game does feature a stationary mode if you don’t have one. Playing in roomscale mode, and with enough space to walk around the center of your playspace, is much more enjoyable though.

Then you get to the game, which is puzzling and exploring really. Explore to find 3D puzzle pieces, and then do your best to stick them together. That’s the core of Infinite Inside.

The game starts with the Mixed Reality portion, a massive plinth arises in the center of your playspace. Three empty compartments open up in front of it, and you can quickly intuit that something needs to go into these slots.

The first VR puzzle. Assemble the pieces and place them in the slot.

So you search around the monolith and discover some handles on it that you can slide open, revealing puzzle pieces. You put these pieces together so they fit in 3D space, and then place the finished object inside of the plinth.

Soon after some of this we get to the VR section, which caught me completely by surprise.

Exploring inside the tower in VR involves a lot of teleporting around. That’s the biggest negative takeaway from this Infinite Inside review.

Placing a statue of a little man inside the Plinth causes you to go inside as well, and in there you can collect more puzzle pieces to put together and solve outside of it.

Then later on you can move through larger environments by grabbing these geometric objects to teleport around inside. If you’re wondering, yes unfortunately the only way to move and explore is through teleport movement. More on that later on in this review.

You explore these stone rooms, sometimes dotted with vintage objects from our world, and get more puzzle pieces so you can leave and assemble them back in Mixed Reality.

Explore inside the plinth to get all of the 3D puzzle pieces you will need.

Is Infinite Inside Fun?

If you like 3D jigsaw puzzles and are intrigued by the idea of breaking them up with some VR exploration, then Infinite Inside holds up pretty well.

What’s odd about the game is that it doesn’t lean far enough into either the Mixed Reality Passthrough or Virtual Reality elements for them to complement each other greatly. Rather the Mixed Reality beginning to the game is merely just a way to anchor the monolith at the center of the experience in the real world. This is cool, but not necessary. It could just as easily be a VR scene as well, and you can make it that way in the options menu.

Using this small figure of a man to move inside and outside this monolith, or tower, or plinth, or whatever you want to call it, is a great way to make the world feel immersive. The transition between the two modes of play makes traveling inside of the game a significant change in gameplay. The exterior space is for putting puzzle pieces together, and going inside to the interior is for exploring to find puzzle pieces.

That’s mostly what Infinite Inside amounts to, changing gameplay between these two modes of play. Exploring in VR feels much different from poking around the outside of the plinth and putting puzzle pieces together in MR.

Infinite Inside shines when the puzzles combine the inside and outside of the tower.

Where the game really shines is actually more in the VR sections inside of the monolith, and where the exterior of the structure briefly interacts with the interior. As the game progresses there are portions where you can actually move puzzle pieces around the tower that will change the environment as you explore.

This way you can create new pathways and explore new areas in order to find all of the puzzle pieces. Occasionally you need to dip back out of the tower to change a piece of the environment around, and give yourself a new area to access. In this way the exploration becomes a whole new set of puzzles alongside the 3D jigsaw puzzles that you complete once you get all of the puzzle pieces.

It gets even more intense and surreal when you find even smaller areas to teleport into while you’re already inside of the monolith, creating layers upon layers of different exploration and environment puzzles in a single level. It’s fantastic, and provides many moments where you can wonder at the surrealness of it all.

Infinite Inside’s surreal look and mysterious tone are well executed and fitting.

Moreover the reliance on teleportation movement in the VR exploration portions of the game was the biggest disappointment of the whole experience. A Virtual Reality game on the Meta Quest relying completely on teleportation movement feels very pre 2020 and hopelessly outdated today.

Teleporting from place to place feels tedious and unimmersive, and is bad for all of the reasons that developers no longer base their games around it except as an option for the hopelessly motion sick.

In this entire Infinite Inside review I’d have to say the reliance on teleport movement is the one element that was truly disappointing and entirely negative.

Eventually you will uncover layers of worlds to explore. Puzzles within puzzles. Infinite Inside slowly escalates its mechanics.

I’ve had fun with Infinite Inside though, and found it to be a very calming and mysterious experience. The austere visuals of the game look fantastic on the Quest 3. They really shine when the simple geometry at the beginning of the game starts to dip into the more surreal.

The look of this game combined with the simple yet elegant and mysterious music give a feeling of mysterious calm that put you in the mood for solving some puzzles and poking around a digital tower in the middle of your living room. The aesthetic and mood of the game are perfectly executed by the developer.

So Infinite Inside is a surreal puzzler that feels like a journey into a dream, and it’s much more fun for how well it commits and pulls of that theme and feeling. Though beware that the puzzles are pretty difficult, and only get harder as the game goes on. If you’re not prepared to scratch your head for a while while trying to figure things out then don’t test your patience here.

That’s all for this Infinite Inside review. If you like 3D jigsaw puzzles in Mixed Reality or Virtual Reality, and are intrigued by the idea of combining that with a little VR exploration then this is a game that is easy to recommend for its pacing, ambiance, and creativity.