I can finally show what I've been building over the last weeks: Barely a Detective, a seated VR puzzle game you play with your bare hands. I'm making it first of all for the Meta VR Start Developer Competition, and it's coming to Meta Quest in Early Access in December.
Your job
You sit at a desk in a rainy office made of wood and brass. Everything is within arm's reach, and everything is done by hand:
- Call a case. Type a case number on the brass keypad that slides out of your desk, and a conveyor belt brings the box up from the archive.
- Solve it. Press, tap and slide until it gives in. Its drawer opens with a note, and on the note is the number of your next case.
- Order your own keys. Hold the magnifying glass over a keyhole to reveal its hidden marks, look them up, and order the key from the Lockworks downstairs. It arrives in a brass capsule through the pipes. A wrong key gets spat back out.
- Ask for help. The hint station has a task and tiered hints for every case. The narrator has opinions about how many you use.
Real history, slowly earned
The first boxes are practice. After that, the puzzles are built around real finds from Bulgaria:
- St. Theodore: a sliding-picture puzzle of the 10th-century ceramic icon from medieval Preslav.
- The Goat Rhyton: rebuild a gold rhyton from the Thracian Panagyurishte Treasure, piece by piece.
- Three unbeatable games, seized from a private collector and each played with a single row of brass keys: Thief & Constable, Tomb Run and The Sleepwalker.
- Grave 295: a grave at the Varna Necropolis that officially doesn't exist, holding the oldest worked gold ever found.
If that last one sounds familiar, it should. Barely a Detective started from the first office scene of Oldest Golden Treasure, and it follows the same idea: puzzles first, with real history you pick up along the way.
Why hands-first
The Meta VR Start Developer Competition is an eight-week challenge for hands-first apps on Meta Quest and the new Meta VR Glasses, and its main rule is simple: your app has to be fully usable with hands, from start to finish. Submissions close on November 18, and the winners are announced around December 11.
Puzzle boxes on a desk are a natural fit for that. Barely a Detective is built around what hands do well while you're sitting: press, slide, turn and tap. Everything works with tracked hands alone. Controllers work too, but you never need them, and you never have to stand up or walk around. It's also my first game built for hands from day one, since Oldest Golden Treasure and Bank Robbery Gone Wrong are both played with controllers.
Early Access in December
The game already runs from your first day as an intern all the way to Grave 295, with overtime cases for anyone who wants more. Optional. Unpaid. Early Access on Meta Quest is planned for December 2026, and from there I want to keep adding new cases and keep improving the game based on what players tell me.
Terms of employment
- Position: seated. Everything is within arm's reach.
- Tools: your bare hands. Controllers work too.
- Headset: Meta Quest 2, 3, 3S and Pro.
- Narration: spoken in English, written in English, German, Spanish, French, Bulgarian, Polish and Japanese.
- Breaks: progress saves after every step, in one of three save files.
Get hired
If this sounds like your kind of puzzle game, wishlisting it on the Meta Horizon Store helps a lot, and you'll get a notification when Early Access opens. You can see more on the game's page, or join the Discord and tell me what you think. Creators can find the press kit on the creators page.