Spymaster is one of those games that makes you feel clever for about ten seconds before it makes you feel like an idiot again. It doesn’t hand you a checklist and a nudge in the right direction; instead, it asks you to think like a proper agent, rewind your mistakes, and try again until it clicks. Moreover, it has a time-manipulation gimmick that genuinely changes how you approach every room. Yes, it borrows plenty from the “immersive sim meets puzzle box” playbook, but that’s no bad thing when it’s executed this confidently. The sense of tightly designed missions with a real “one more go” pull is what keeps you coming back. Additionally, the low-poly, tongue-in-cheek presentation stops any of it feeling too self-serious.
Innerspace VR developed and self-published this one, and if that name rings a bell, it’s because the studio also made A Fisherman’s Tale and Maskmaker. It is a solo VR title where you infiltrate a shadowy corporation called Protocore on behalf of an agency named NODE. There are guards to dodge, terminals to hack, and vaults to crack. You can also swap agents mid-mission, rewind the clock, and choreograph three separate operatives like a one-person heist crew. As I said, it borrows familiar ideas, but it stitches them together in a way that feels genuinely its own.
Spymaster throws you into a proper spy fantasy.
You play as the handler of three agents working for NODE, tasked with bringing down Protocore before its plans go public. Your goal each mission is straightforward on paper: get in, get the intel, get out. However, this isn’t a game about brute-forcing your way past every obstacle. No, it’s a game about patience, planning, and knowing exactly which agent to send in first. Moreover, you must juggle limited ammo, cooldowns, and camera sightlines while the clock (quite literally) keeps resetting around you.
This is the most distinctive element of Spymaster. It demands that you think several steps ahead rather than reacting on instinct. Your three agents form the backbone of every mission, and if you try to brute-force a level with just one of them, you won’t get the best out of it. How you sequence your team and when you rewind is largely up to you. This freedom makes for a refreshing change from the usual “hide behind a crate and wait” stealth formula.
One wrist-mounted gadget does a lot of heavy lifting.
I mention sequencing because the C.A.S.S.E.T.T.E., the game’s rewind device strapped to your wrist, is the whole reason any of this works. Rather than restarting a mission from scratch after a mistake, you rewind to a chosen point and send in a different agent, or the same one with better timing. These choices all ripple forward, but you get a real sense of ownership over every run as you refine it. This reflects nicely in the post-mission replay, which plays your finished heist back from multiple angles like a highlight reel.
I adore this sense of control, but it’s the mission variety that makes the game click. Some rooms want stealth, others want speed, and a few want you to burn every trick you’ve got just to scrape through. Moreover, the third agent (I won’t spoil what they bring to the table) opens up entirely new routes through levels you thought you’d already solved. Additionally, optional side objectives reward you for going back and doing it all again, faster and cleaner.
Spymaster is charmingly low-poly.
I feel that “charmingly low-poly” gets thrown around a lot these days. After all, blocky visuals can just as easily look lazy as they can look deliberate. However, Spymaster mostly makes it work. The world is stylised, colourful, and a bit cheeky, closer in tone to a Saturday-morning spy cartoon than a grim Cold War thriller. There are slick agency interiors and gaudy corporate offices to explore. Moreover, the character animations carry a lot of personality even without a single polygon of detail on their faces. It isn’t going to win any graphical awards, but I appreciated the confident art direction throughout.
The audio leans into the same knowingly silly spy-movie energy. There’s a proper theme tune, snappy voice acting, and just enough dramatic sting to sell the tension of a mission going sideways. This is complemented by satisfying little sound cues whenever a rewind snaps you back into position.
Controls need a bit of practice.
Playing Spymaster wasn’t quite a walk in the park, at least not at first. Despite a fairly gentle tutorial, juggling agent-swapping, rewinding, and combat all at once took me a good hour to get comfortable with. The game does offer smooth and snap turning, a seated mode, and a motion vignette, so most VR veterans should be fine, but this is not the game to hand a total newcomer. Additionally, there’s no teleport-only locomotion here; you’ll be climbing, running, and zip-lining your way through missions, so budget your VR legs accordingly.
I can’t put an exact figure on how long this will last you, since it depends entirely on how many optional objectives and speedrun times you chase. Theoretically, you could keep shaving seconds off your best runs for a very long while. However, if I had to put a number on my first pass through the current build, I’d say I sunk around six hours into it.
Spymaster is inventive, stylish, and a little unfinished.
Spymaster’s only real downside right now is that it’s still in Early Access, with a full 1.0 release pencilled in for early 2027. This may put some people off, but I like what’s here already, rough edges and all, and the roadmap suggests there’s more agents and missions still to come. If you love clever, replayable VR puzzle-action, you’ll enjoy the confident mechanics, the cheeky spy-movie tone, and the genuine “just one more mission” pull. Accordingly, I think it’s well worth a look, and I recommend picking it up on the Meta Store! Can you bring down Protocore before it’s too late? Grab your watch, assemble your agents, and find out!
