Legendary film sound effects editor Ben Burtt, the guy who came up with how a lightsaber sounds, has a saying: “Films are not released, they escape.”

If anything this is even more true for games, which have the luxury — or is it curse — of getting patches and fixes after release.

Once upon a time such things were the subject of fan uproar but now, after Fortnite went from being a massive flop on release to at one point (and maybe arguably still) the most valuable video game on the market, a post release evolution is seen as a feature, not a bug.

Which brings me to Tender Claws’ Virtual Virtual Reality 2, which released today. The review code version I’ve been playing, or at least attempting to play, over the past two weeks has been buggy as hell to the point where linear progression was no longer possible. On multiple occasions I managed to subvert the critical path of the game and jump ahead and around of sequences without consequence, until finally I just got auto-killed for being in the wrong place.

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According to the team behind the game a patch is coming in a couple of weeks, their first window for dropping one. Hopefully that will fix some of the many issues, which include character dialogue piling up on each other in a way that makes discerning objectives next to impossible. Honestly: if I knew what the game wanted out of me I probably wouldn’t have broken it so often. But even rolling back to early save points and replaying sequences to see if I missed key information or a clue was no help.

There are moments I’m tempted to be generous and say that this might just be the game’s writing being too clever for my silly self. After all, the original Virtual Virtual Reality is very witty and still one of the best character-driven experiences in VR.

Yet given how obtuse some of the core mechanics and challenges are — piloting the mech is almost comically perverse, and the idea of having to physically debug the mech you are piloting is clever, but the reality of it quickly becomes tedious after you’ve bashed the tenth worm to death — I fear that we’re dealing with fatal errors of either programming or design.

The former can be patched, the later not so much.

A flip through the walkthrough provided during the review period made it clear to me that something wasn’t being communicated in key sequences. An in-game quest log would certainly help with this, and given the scope of the game I’m somewhat surprised there wasn’t one. It is far too easy to come back to the game and have no idea what it is your were supposed to be doing. Worse: it can sometimes be unclear if you accomplished the task at hand even in the moment.

Yet I’ll hold final judgement until the patch drops, but I’ll be coming in fairly skeptical based on what I’ve already seen. This means that I can’t recommend getting VVR2 right now. But I can recommend picking up the original Virtual Virtual Reality, which I fired back up this week to make sure I wasn’t misremembering how much I liked it. If anything, I appreciate it even more now. It’s a cult hit from the early days of the current VR era that deserves a bigger audience.

Virtual Virtual Reality 2 is now available on Meta Quest and Rift for $29.99. It is scheduled to release on Steam VR on February 17th.

Disclosure: NoPro Executive Editor Kathryn Yu worked for Tender Claws during the production of this game, and had duties related to its production. She has had no input into this review whatsoever.