Concrete Genie is basically unplayable without VR

Sony went and got a little tricky with our Playstation Plus games this month as one of them was a game that I did not realize was meant to be played with the ill-selling VR headset add-on that I do not have. Technically, you CAN play the game without the headset but it relies on the gyros (or whatever they are called) that are inside the controller to determine where your character "looks". Unfortunately, this is a frustrating experience and makes the game basically unplayable.

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Don't get me wrong, this games looks like it would be pretty wicked if you actually owned a Playstation VR headset, but very few people actually do have one. I am one of the people that does not have it. Sony claims to have sold 5 million of the VR headsets but since a refurbished one costs around $300 and a new one costs around $500 it was more money than I was willing to pay for a subsect of games that there are so few of.

I don't know how many games their are, but compared to the rest of the library, there are very few. I would imagine that few developers are interested in making games that can ONLY be played using the VR headset, and games like Concrete Genie had to figure out a way of making the game playable without the headset.

They tried, but instead it is just awkward, and you are now on your sofa swinging your controller around like a madman, attempting to simulate what a human head looking around would be like. This is a maddingly frustrating process that results in the game not being any fun.

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In the game you play as a artistic (not autistic) kid who gets bullied by some jerks who destroy your book of paintings just because that is the sort of stupid crap that bullies do. For some magical reason, the magic world of i dunno, art genies reach out to you and now you travel around your dilapidated city beatifying it with magic ink. It is mostly a question of solving rather simple puzzles, that I presume become more complicated as you move onward, but I didn't make it very far into the game because simply keeping your curser where you want it to be is so damn frustrating

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When you do complete a mural, the genies will move onward in the world and help you to progress to the next stage. Knowing what to actually paint is another frustrating part of the entire process, since there aren't many visual clues indicating exactly what you are supposed to paint and where. Mostly, I just painted everything, everywhere, until I eventually got it right. Perhaps I wasn't paying attention during the "tutorial" well enough.

I wanted to enjoy this game and trust me, I tried. The game appears as thought it would be flat out amazing if you are one of the few people out there that was willing to pay nearly double the price of an actual PS4 in order to get one of their premium accessories (which, I've been told, is actually pretty amazing when you are using it) but without it the controls are just an exercise in extreme frustration that I am not willing to tolerate and therefore will not play any longer.

I don't know if including this as one of the "free" games for PS Plus members was an effort on Sony's part to frustrate players into purchasing the VR headset in lieu of the still quite scared PS5 that everyone wants, but it certainly feels that way.