Floor Plan Review (PS4 / PSVR)

Floor Plan is far from the first puzzle game to release for PlayStation VR, with Statik, GNOG, and Wayward Sky all being notable releases from earlier in its lifecycle. What makes Floor Plan different to the others is its setting and its new concept of multi-layered puzzles across multiple floors. Set entirely within an elevator, you cannot move from the spot but can instead ride up and down in it visiting various floors to look around. You’ll be tasked with collecting all the parts for a spacesuit on the top floor. These spacesuit parts – boots, gloves, helmet, trousers, etc – are all scattered throughout the floors and require you to solve puzzles to collect them.

Each of the floors you can visit is completely different: there’s a floor entirely covered in lava, there’s a snowy floor with a snowman, there’s an office floor with a plant, and so forth. The vast variance in settings is very interesting as you never know what you are going to open the elevator doors to find. The puzzles rely on these different environments working together with each other. For example, the plant on the office floor requires watering and is just below the floor with the snowman; there just so happens to be a vent in the floor and so you must find a way to melt the snowman to water the plant on the floor below. Throughout the 45-60 minutes it’ll take you to play through the game you’ll encounter several puzzles that require interaction between floors and this can be achieved by picking up and interacting with various items using either the DualShock 4 or the PlayStation Move controllers.

The puzzles are multi-layered and although you’re left entirely to your own devices to work out the solutions, there is also a hints system available if you get stuck. In the lift you can hit the help button and you will be greeted by a voice that will give you tips on how to progress from your current situation. Often these will tell you which floor to be on or which item to use and you’ll be progressing again in no time. You’ll no doubt use the hints at least once during your first play through as a few of the puzzles don’t make logical sense and certainly left us scratching our heads.

Throughout the game we encountered a few irritating bugs that are certainly worth mentioning as they stopped us from progressing and often required us to reload the game to fix. The first of which were items that you can pick up got stuck, dropped out of reach, or disappeared entirely. The other issue was on starting up a new game, we’re still unsure if this is potentially an ironic intentional bug but the elevator actually got stuck. We hit the button for the 12th floor and the doors closed, the lift went up and the doors never opened. We were stuck in the lift with no way to open the doors to continue our game and a reload was required. If this is an intentional bug the developers have coded into the game then well played, they have certainly captured the reliabilities of an elevator in their game.