Most students benefit more deeply from guided learning than discovery learning. Even so, not all students are alike. Our research contention is that offering differentiated instructions that better fit students’ educational needs in a narrative virtual reality (VR) environment will give them renewed hope for learning success. This paper presents such a development that augments an existing learning game, Gridlock, with an adaptive learning engine that assesses what really happens when a student’s capacity is sabotaged in problem solving and to provide the help that is tailored to his/her needs. The game was deployed in a Computer Architecture course at Rowan as a replacement to the traditional laboratory experiments. Its thorough assessment confirms the values of the game in promoting student learning.