Imagine holding a flashlight in one hand and casting a shadow on the wall with the other. Suddenly, small creatures start crawling through your shadow, trying to reach the other side of the wall. This is the premise you can expect if you play Silhouette, a game that tries to make the most of Quest’s lame hand-tracking capabilities.
Unfortunately for Silhouette, hand tracking isn’t the most fun technology to use with the Oculus Quest 2. (opens in new tab)As you may know, if you’ve played other great hand tracking games, (opens in new tab) Requests themselves have a very hard time keeping track of hands and all the different ways they need to be used while playing the game. Because the game is truly incredibly beautiful underneath that frustration.
In Silhouette, players cast shadows using only their hands to guide tiny creatures known as Shadowies to their final goal. There is absolutely no controller support here, so setup is pretty straightforward.
Roam a beautifully styled world inspired by games like Rime, Patapon, and The First Tree, looking for puzzles to unlock the next area.
At just $10 on Quest, the game is a very reasonable price, especially since it takes at least several hours to solve all 28 unique puzzles.
Most hand-tracking games try to use your hands as you would a controller, which usually ends in frustration, but developer team Panoptes has flipped the script. Most puzzles rely on using the entire hand to get the job done rather than trying to grab things with individual fingers.
The Quest’s camera struggles to really see your fingers when they’re in the best grab position, so that part is important when it comes to reducing hand-tracking frustration.
I also love the themes and concepts put forward here. Making shadows with your hands is probably a basic human behavior that has been practiced since the earliest days of humans.
Your hand-cast shadow becomes a platform for these little shadowy characters to stand on. Once they’re on board, you can move your hand to guide them to different parts of the puzzle. You can also use your shadow to lift shadow obstacles, or craft a finger gun to clear obstacles that get in your shadow’s way.
I also love the themes and concepts put forward here. Creating shadows with your hands is a basic human behavior that has probably been practiced since the earliest days of humans. Shadow puppets are used to tell the story.
Silhouette takes advantage of the simplicity of creating what you want out of a shadow, such as being able to move closer or farther away from the light source in-game to change the size of the shadow. It’s incredibly smart, and when it works, it’s one of those things that feels only possible in VR.
If it weren’t for the occasional glitches from Quest’s hand-tracking system, this would be a bliss.
Later, we use our hands to interact with the water, such as using the back of our hands or palms to change the direction of the water and change the flow.
Many of the puzzles don’t require much thinking — much of the game revolves around the use of unique mechanics rather than making you think too much — this is the way Cubism can make this semi-relaxing It would have been blissful if it weren’t for the occasional glitches caused by Quest’s hand-tracking system. If there is a dedicated depth sensor or something like that, it could be used in future headsets.
If you’re a fan of puzzles, I wholeheartedly recommend the well-designed Silhouette.Hand tracking can be tedious at times, but it was fun finding the next puzzle and figuring out how to solve it.
