Reach VR review – Mirror’s Edge with a bow and arrow

A new VR game manages to make first person parkour seem effortless, with another ambitious new title for PSVR2 and Meta Quest.

Despite the concept having been around for decades, VR still feels like a nascent medium for video games, with developers still discovering what works and, just as crucially, what doesn’t. In that time, various publishers have begun to specialise solely in VR, with nDreams amongst the most prominent. They’ve had a few recent hits, the best known probably being Vendetta Forever and Synapse, which features enjoyable gunplay and amusingly effective telekinetic powers.

The latest release from nDreams is Reach, a parkour and puzzle game that’s a little more cerebral than its rather overwrought trailers would have you believe. You play as Rosa, a movie stuntwoman, who begins the game with a training sequence that takes in climbing, jumping, and shooting – mostly with a bow and arrow, although she does get the occasional opportunity to purloin a pistol and squeeze off a few rounds.

For some reason, the introductory section looks oddly low res, its buildings not featuring much in the way of texture or detail, with buildings not having a fully rendered interior but instead a photo of an apartment painted onto a 2D backdrop. You get the feeling it’s not low effort so much as low budget, because the way you move through that slightly basic looking environment is consistently compelling.

As well as climbing, you can jump from ledges by throwing both hands in the air, a movement that feels absurd the first time you do it, before becoming wonderfully intuitive. Between the pace of climbing, your ability to sprint, and jumps that you rapidly get a feel for, you’re soon throwing yourself around the game’s exteriors at speed, taking leaps off well flagged ramps, and generally feeling thoroughly in control of Rosa’s aerial exploration.

Accompanied by jaunty flamenco music, the cityscape gives way to snow-capped mountains in the background and the whole escapade feel fun and frivolous, despite the slightly primitive graphics. All that comes to a screeching halt when what appears to be a massive earthquake sends you plummeting underground, where things take a turn for the weird.

Attempting to escape to the surface, Rosa ends up going deeper and deeper, soon bumping into living statues that turn out to be the last survivors of Ferra, a lost subterranean civilisation. Most of them just want to kill you, but one’s quite helpful, acting as a guide, alongside a miniature drone that leads you forward when the way ahead might not be obvious.

You also gradually get access to the equipment you’ll need for puzzle solving and self defence. Your bow from the intro sequence makes a return, along with glowing insects that charge your stocks of special arrows. You also get a shield, which can be used to fend off energy pulses from the environment and enemy fire – although since you need both hands to use your bow, it’s not particularly useful in battle.

Where it’s more useful is Reach’s puzzles. In those, you can Frisbee it, Captain America style, to break open certain locked doors and to lodge it in special slots in the wall, giving you a platform to stand on. It also happily ricochets off floors, ceilings, and carefully positioned deflectors that let you target things that would otherwise be out of range.

The puzzles themselves are mostly built into gargantuan, cathedral scale underground caverns, their foundations stretching downwards into the surprisingly well-lit abyss. If you suffer from a fear of heights, this is likely to cause palm sweating to the point of dehydration, although the fear is mitigated by how sure footed you get to feel with Rosa’s parkour skills.

To prevent you getting too comfortable, you’ll still come across loose handholds that shift alarmingly when you’re hanging off them. Initially these are just cosmetic, but soon enough they start actually falling away, sending you hurtling to your doom. Well, not doom exactly, because there are no checkpoints, you just instantly reappear on the ledge you fell from.

In common with many VR games, the environments are winningly tactile. As well as climbing ledges, swinging from poles, and zip-lining, you’ll need to shimmy through cracks in walls, duck underneath parapets, and fling yourself across gaps, reaching out to catch opposing ledges. If nothing else, this supplies some wholesome upper body exercise that usually sedentary gamers may appreciate.

Its puzzles benefit from the grandeur of the vast rooms they inhabit, which all look significantly sharper and more detailed than the surface training level. It helps create an atmosphere of mystery that at least partly makes up for lacklustre combat, that involves shooting arrows at living statues, who return fire with guns and grenades. The glowing insects you sometimes acquire can be thrown as naturally occurring grenades, and you can also steal enemy guns, but they only ever contain three bullets, making them fleetingly useful at best.

Luckily, fighting is not Reach’s focus, which remains those giant puzzles. They prove to be quite engaging, offering enough challenge not to feel like busy work, but rarely holding you up for more than a few minutes. That lets you power through the game’s roughly eight hours, the intuitive control scheme letting you move rapidly around its vertiginous rooms, looking for secret areas that contain power-ups that are fun to find but don’t make all that much difference to gameplay.

Although we didn’t come across any major technical issues, Rosa does fairly regularly fall through floors, sinking to approximately waist level before popping back up and continuing on her way. Online reports suggest that the Meta Quest version has considerably more problems. These things are often patched in the weeks following release, but early adopters may need to be cautious.

Once it gets into its swing, and apart from the odd minor hiccough, the well-designed locomotion, triumphant subterranean architecture, and satisfying puzzles make for a pleasing experience, if one that doesn’t match the trailers’ all out action.

Formats: PlayStation VR2 (reviewed), PC VR, and Meta Quest 3/3S
Price: £32.99
Publisher: nDreams
Developer: nDreams Elevation
Release Date: 16th October 2025
Age Rating: 12

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