There’s something to be said for the compact, well-priced, and straightforward single-player VR game. With the brand new PlayStation VR port of Eclipse: Edge of Light, the light puzzle-platformer finds a stable and slick home on Sony’s hardware, bringing crisp visuals, an immersive ambient soundtrack, and a great jetpack-jumping adventure that can be pleasantly completed in a single sitting. With almost two years since its original launch, it’s not the slickest or most ambitious VR release, but it definitely wears its age well.

If there’s one thing the lion’s share of PS VR games are absolutely guilty of, it’s this: an overwrought intro sequence. Players want to get into the game already, not spend five minutes or more frozen in place, swiveling their heads during a long bout of exposition or tutorial. Eclipse: Edge of Light’s intro is swiftly delivered and gets right to business, putting you in the shoes of a marooned space explorer who finds a magical orb known as The Artifact. You’ll use this orb to solve puzzles—and break a ton of glowing statuary—while uncovering an ancient alien civilization, discovering how your appearance factors into its fate.

Interactivity is generally focused, which means players won’t spend very long toiling around a single area before making progress. Most every puzzle here can be briskly solved through some quick activation of an environmental cue with The Artifact, a situation-specific telekinesis ability, or the occasional floor switch. A tablet may also sometimes appear in the player’s right hand which reveals hidden objects in a room, but moving it around with the controller’s gyro is hard to manage.


Truly, the secret sauce in the recipe here is the jetpack. Right from the start, players have a jetpack that quickly regenerates energy over time—in some ways, its movement mechanic feels very similar to Pharah’s thrusters from Overwatch. Although you spend the start of the game creeping through caves and tunnels, Eclipse quickly opens up with a wonderful verticality, with players navigating across bottomless canyons or scaling ledges in cathedral-like alien temples. It’s one of those aspects that just clicks and make sense right away, and the increased frequency of jetpack-platforming as the game goes on is more than welcome. Thankfully, dying from a misplaced jump (or the rare laser turret) always spirits you back to a closely-positioned checkpoint.

Visually, Eclipse: Edge of Light features a decent level of detail in its textures—they’re seemingly upgraded from its original launch for the PlayStation 4—but it’s the broader design sense applied to the environments which deserves special praise. Some of its most dazzling vistas are reserved until about an hour into the game, but they’re definitely worth the wait, and manage to impress and one-up themselves, up until the finale. It’s nothing quite on the level of finer detail like what can be found in a game like Golem, but it’s always clean, readable, and does quite a few impressive things in terms of scale. Explaining this any further risks spoiling some fun surprises, but a few late-game areas make the earlier cave exploration feel like the vegetables that need to be finished before having desert.

Eclipse actually doesn’t make use of the Move Controllers at all, something which seems highly unusual considering the frequent Artifact-chucking gameplay. Instead, you’ll use the DualShock 4’s gyro, holding down the right trigger while flicking it in the air. This really never feels totally right, something the game then compensates for by guiding your aim whenever you’re a likely target is nearby. It’s functional in that respect, but incorporating Move Controllers just seems like it would be a no-brainer, and the developers have mentioned that this feature may arrive in a future update.


Andrew Prahlow of Outer Wilds fame composed the music here and, while the two games don’t share a whole lot of additional DNA, the soundtrack works hard punctuating specific moments of splendor throughout the adventure. Sound mixing, however, is another entirely different matter, with most sound effects pushed far higher in the mix than they should be—one particular scene on a trippy lake quickly devolves into a cacophony of whooshing water sounds. The scant options menu offers no music/sound effect adjustment, so this is simply an aspect of the game that players will have to deal with.

It should also be mentioned that quite a few bugs wormed their way into the current build. It’s nothing staggering—again, a constant churn of considerate checkpoints helps these issues—but we encountered two hard crashes which required a restart, as well a strange, repeatable bug that fused the secrets-finding tablet to the characters right-hand. It’s nothing that should prevent anybody from completing the game, but hopefully these bugs are squashed by the time Move Controller functionality is added.


It’s hard to imagine wanting to quickly replay its two-hour campaign upon completion, but Eclipse: Edge of Light’s simplicity and focus makes it the perfect title to push on all your non-VR playing friends. Technically, of course, they can also play it sans headset, but this sacrifices a considerable portion of the experience, with its eerie alien visuals less spectacular on a flat TV. No, this was a game built for VR that works best on it, and owners of PS VR are lucky to have this port, with an attractive price-point that feels absolutely accurate to its value.

Eclipse: Edge of Light is available now on PlayStation VR for $14.99.