Puzzle Sculpt from Schell Games leaves the minesweeping of Windows desktops behind and exchanges the idea for spatial puzzling on Apple Vision Pro.
The object of Puzzle Sculpt is to carve out a shape from a floating block using logic and maybe a bit of luck. The app is accessible only with passthrough views on and it doesn't allow multitasking, at least not at the time of writing, so Puzzle Sculpt expects your focus here and there's a quick tutorial to walk you through the game's mechanics.
In short, the number on the face of any block indicates how many of the blocks in the row behind it remain in the final sculpture. You can immediately clear any row of blocks with 0 on the face, for instance, because there's nothing to keep in the whole row. You just pinch your fingers together and then move your hand in the direction of the row of blocks to wash them away from existence. The interaction is incredibly satisfying, like clearing a line of Tetris by physically wiping it off the tower.
The clearing interaction even works when the entire row is occluded at the back of the object, adding a subtle but important sense of presence to the sculpture itself as an object inside your space. You can also pinch inside the object anywhere to grab it and move it around to get a look at it from all angles.
The idea is to whittle away a sculpture by clearing blocks you can deduce don't belong while marking off ones you're sure will be. If there are three blocks total in a row that has a number three on the front of it, for example, you can mark those off as you know they're all part of the final shape.
We've barely scratched the surface of the title, with Schell Games saying there's over 50 puzzles in total to solve. I've lost hours to Minesweeper on plenty of old PCs from the 1990s, and I've solved my share of sudoku puzzles on paper, and Puzzle Sculpt fits right into those experiences. This is perhaps the first game I've played on Apple Vision Pro that's been both good enough, and original enough, to suggest folks with the headset consider trying out an Apple Arcade subscription to feel that satisfying mechanic of clearing a line.
Puzzle Sculpt is available now on Apple Arcade from Schell Games.
