Tammuz: Blood And Sand Is A Rubik's Cube On Steroids

If I had hair, this stationary fantasy box-puzzle adventure would make me pull it out. In a good way.

VR puzzle games tend to fall into two types: escape rooms like Fixer Undercover and the I Expect You To Die series or ‘stare and experiment until you figure it out’ scenarios like House of Da Vinci VR. Tammuz: Blood & Sand falls in the latter category, centered on a single pillar in the middle of a desert that produces new challenges to work through.

From a mechanics standpoint, Tammuz is fairly straightforward. You are in the middle of a desert with a pillar in front of you. This pillar can be raised, lowered, and rotated to a preferred viewing angle to solve puzzles. Some are external objects like a tablet with a piece arrangement challenge or a dial with individual turning rings like in this clip:

There’s a story of gods at strife interspersed between puzzles, with the titular Tammuz seemingly playing the villain. The game breaks up into five separate trials (chapters) with generous autosaves allowing you to step away mid-puzzle and return to it later. The story is delivered through still images of the gods that appear periodically with serviceable voice acting. Admittedly, most of the interplay between the gods went over my head as I was already looking at the new puzzle opening in front of me when they spoke. There were also glitches where two gods would be speaking at once, with their audio and subtitles piling on top of one another.

The puzzles themselves are not too difficult and are only hamstrung by some unstable interactions. Hovering over interactable objects gives a helpful blue outline, but if two objects are too close together, it was too easy to grab or trigger the wrong one. This happens quite often and made a few puzzles in the game frustrating to complete. One puzzle involving two marbles on the top of the pillar stands out as an early game example of this. It’s the same sort of grab jank you would experience in a physics-based game, but when a puzzle requires any sort of precision, those mistakes are more annoying. Turning small knobs and dials was equally shaky. Everything works, but the interactions can use some fine tuning.

Visually, Tammuz looks fine, albeit in a limited capacity. The desert is, as expected, very brown along with the main pillar, so the pops of color in certain puzzles were a welcome change. Being that this is a mostly stationary game that takes place in one area, there’s not a lot to look at, but everything is clean with a fair amount of detail. Sound design is functional and gets the job done, though I was looking for a more satisfying ‘completion’ sound when clearing a puzzle to accentuate the sense of accomplishment.

Tammuz is a puzzle game that challenges your logic and reasoning rather than your creativity and ability to think outside the box. Trial and error (and luck) will lead to some solutions, but this is not a game with multiple avenues to get the job done like the I Expect You To Die games. I appreciate its simplicity, but the lack of different environments may be off-putting to those looking for a more dynamic experience.

Tammuz: Blood & Sand is out now on Quest and Steam for $19.99.