Tammuz: Blood & Sand

Tammuz: Blood & Sand is a VR puzzle-box adventure from Bad GOAT Studio and Clover Bite, a creative alliance whose debut collaboration this is. It reached Meta Quest on October 15, 2025 and Steam on March 19. You are trapped in a mysterious cube that is both prison and riddle, and you solve more than twenty physical trials to uncover a forgotten war between gods and free a trapped goddess. It is built for seated play, and the studio’s own listing describes it as using mixed-reality passthrough as well as full VR.

I should say up front how little there is to go on. Steam shows a single user review and no score, and the one detailed outlet review I found, from UploadVR, is from April. Nothing below comes from hours of play, and nothing here is a verdict on how the game feels today.

One pillar, many trials

The setup is simple. A pillar in a desert can be raised, lowered and rotated, and each trial opens a new puzzle on or around it: a tablet with a piece-arrangement challenge, dials with turning rings, switches and gears. The game is split into five chapters with generous autosaves, so you can stop mid-puzzle and return. UploadVR put it in the stare-and-experiment camp of VR puzzlers, closer to House of Da Vinci VR than to escape rooms like I Expect You To Die, and found the puzzles themselves not too difficult. The studio’s BitSummit page adds that the experience ends in a game of the Royal Game of Ur against Tammuz himself.

Where the reviewer got frustrated

The complaint is the hands-on part, which matters in a game built around tactile mechanisms. UploadVR found that grabbing the wrong object was too easy when two sat close together, and that turning small knobs and dials was shaky. The reviewer called it the same grab jank you’d expect in a physics game, and noted it was more annoying when a puzzle needs precision. Dialogue between the gods also glitched at times, with voices and subtitles overlapping. Visually it looked fine but limited, a mostly brown desert with colour pops in some puzzles, and the sound design was functional but missing a satisfying completion sound. The reviewer also noted that trial and error and luck can solve some puzzles, and that the lack of different environments may put off some players.

Verdict

Tammuz has a neat, comfortable concept and a setting you don’t often see. The one outlet review I found liked the puzzles and the simplicity, but found the interactions in need of fine tuning, and it is more than six months old. At $19.99, with a free demo on Steam, the sensible move is to try the demo and see how the grabbing feels on your headset before paying. If you want a firm recommendation, wait for more reviews or a patch note about the interaction problems.