A new puzzling game called Jigsaw Night should debut this week for Quest 3 and 3S headsets with an assortment of features so impressive it could draw in new VR buyers.
I tried out the single player version of the experience at AWE in Long Beach from long-time developer Steve Lukas and found myself immediately impressed with the depth of the work. You have your choice of hand tracking or controller tracking, for instance, and you can select both the number of pieces and their shape.
“Jigsaw Night was built based off that feeling building Lego and jigsaw puzzles with my kids. And so we wanted to replicate that whole experience, and what we’ve done here is we’ve created a social multiplayer jigsaw puzzle game,” Lukas said in a brief face-to-face interview. “What you can do is build jigsaw puzzles anywhere around your house, you can do more than one at a time, and you can play with multiple people at a time.”
The big feature here that might draw entire families together for Quest game nights is co-location using Meta’s Shared Spatial Anchors. You can play remotely with friends too, but Jigsaw Night first and foremost aims to create a digital version of puzzling in the same room with someone, with very few of the downsides. If you don’t finish a puzzle, for instance, you can put your pieces back in the digital box and then open up that box later and everything will expand back out to where it was.
The video below shows how Jigsaw Night looks and feels, with the option activated to show the puzzle’s picture to players on both sides.
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Lukas says they’re pricing the game for launch at $18 with DLC packs available. Buyers, however, won’t be forced to buy DLC for additional content to piece together because the base game includes Facebook integration, so you can grab a photo from there to “build old memories and create new ones.”
“You can cluster [the pieces] however you want, different family members can even cluster different colors. One person can take the edge pieces, the whole collaboration aspect is key,” Lukas said. “It’s about connecting families, connecting friends through the power of mixed reality.”
We’ll plan to interview Lukas soon for a more in-depth discussion and test the co-location features. You can wishlist Jigsaw Night on the Meta Quest store now, with Lukas telling us the game is compatible with Quest 2 and Quest Pro, as well as the 3/3S line. There’s no firm release date, but it could debut later this week.
