Challenge Your Solving Skills in this 3D Puzzler

Nirvana: The First Travel is a first-person puzzle game that offers a dialogue-driven story and out-of-the-box puzzles. The game is designed to break barriers and change the way the players manipulate and approach the various possibilities in a given environment. Designed with cool 3D graphics and an interesting gravity mechanics, this game aims to offer an experience quite different from other puzzle games. 

The story

Nirvana: The First Travel was set in a laboratory called Nirvana. It is a company that specializes in gravity research with the desire to manipulate space-time. At first, the research is going swimmingly, but, as with every game, everything goes awry. And their research ended up with the dimension colliding with someone else. The collision led to opening an unexpected gateway, and chaos ensues. 

In the game, players will take control of Tom Walker, a security guard from the lab who found himself alone in an empty room of the facility. With the instruction from Doctor Lestrade, he will need to find his way out of the building. Players will need to go through various puzzles that the facility presents. Each of the puzzles will present you with a situation with no obvious way out, and it is up to you to use all the resources available to proceed and keep moving forward. 

The game is also very scientific. Not only because the premise is a laboratory, but because it involves gravity. The puzzles involve interesting gravity shifts, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself in a room that rotates. Also, there will be moments when you will need to move heavy objects, create anti-gravitational spheres, and teleport Walker around.

The game

Nirvana: The First Travel may seem like a unique game with a very futuristic approach. But if you are a fan of 3D puzzle games, then you will see that the game has an obvious resemblance to Portal. Both games have laboratory as their premise, and both require players to solve physical puzzles by maneuvering objects and themselves.

Nirvana: The First Travel even comes with the same weapon as the character in Portal. A gun that can control objects and can make the character defy gravity. But, to be honest, the gravity gun is not seen first in Portal. Half-Life 2 already used the weapon before Portal was released.

Aside from the glaring similarity with Portal, players will also notice that Nirvana: The First Travel is relatively short, with the game duration set at two hours at most. The controls also feel slow and do not follow your movements, like in most games. It lags behind a bit, and the jumping is a little dodgy.

There is also no way to disable mouse acceleration, and there are broken interactions here and there. Lastly, for a dialogue-driven game, Nirvana: The First Travel has a poor voice acting. The delivery was lackluster, making the story seem bland and uninteresting.

The verdict

All in all, Nirvana: The First Travel is not really the unique game it aims to be. While the mechanics and the story are quite different from most puzzle games, it is not the first game to have such an offering. It also doesn’t help that there are various aspects of the game like controls and voice acting, that needs more improvement. But, if you are only looking for challenging puzzles, this game has it. It also comes cheap and does not take up much memory space.