Another year has passed, and here we are again—celebrating the best VR games that kept us coming back for more. Now in our seventh annual Game of the Year Awards, we’ve seen several high budget, multi-year projects come to fruition, which is something only a more mature VR games industry could ever hope to support. We’re there. That’s today.

This past year, we’ve also played games that continue to push the medium forward, not by the virtue of giant production budgets, but by sheer sweat equity. Small but highly capable teams are making an impact by creating things that might not all be “safe bets”, but still manage to attract hardcore fan bases thanks to innovative gameplay and continued developer support well after launch. Be it big or small though, every team is standing on the shoulders of the collective VR community, who continue to experiment and create the sort of hard-won best practices that, to this day, help make VR games comfortable, immersive, and most of all, fun.

Without further ado though, we present Road to VR’s 2023 Game of the Year Awards:

Vertigo 2

Vertigo 2 is the sequel to the hit PC VR shooter, this time returning you to the belly of its Half-Life-inspired science facility which houses a vast Quantum Reactor. It’s not all blasting away at baddies and making your way back home; the Vertigo series injects a ton of heart and good humor to go alongside a cast of weird characters that feel so patently meme-worthy, funny and imaginative.

Underlining the madcap action are some very smart mechanics, the biggest standout of which being its VR-native gun controls and unique reloading for each weapon, which are so immersive their design language should be used widely across VR. The summation makes for an adventure that will not only keep you guessing as to what’s next, but immersing you into an absolutely massive universe that truly feels solid and alive.

You’d be pretty surprised to know that this 10-hour VR-native was essentially created by a single person, Zach Tsiakalis-Brown. That’s certainly not why we gave Vertigo 2 our PC VR Game of the Year award; we’re honoring it purely on its own merits for delivering the whole package—smart design, engaging VR-native mechanics, and a fun and memorable story that will stick with you well beyond the end credits.

Want to learn more about Vertigo 2? Read our full review to find out why we gave it [9.5/10].

Asgard’s Wrath 2

Asgard’s Wrath 2 is massive in every measurable dimension. It’s bigger, deeper and basically everything we hoped it would be when Meta first announced in September that Quest would be the exclusive platform to host the game’s sequel, the original of which landed on Rift in 2019.

Besides being a behemoth at 100+ hours in gameplay length, the sequel serves up an incredible depth and scale that is unrivaled on Quest, raising the bar for what you might consider “full-length” content on Meta’s fleet of standalones. Essentially, Asgard’s Wrath 2 is to the Quest platform what Half-Life: Alyx (2020) is to PC VR headsets.

To boot, Meta-owned studio Sanzaru Games have potentially also created the most expensive Quest game to date in terms of development dollars. It definitely shows in the game’s dense and detailed visuals, which although somewhat flatter than a game with the horsepower of a dedicated GPU, nearly approaches what you might see on PC VR headsets. Some might argue that speaks to more about what’s typically available on Quest, and less about what can actually be done with the standalone hardware.

Whatever the case, Asgard’s Wrath 2 not only stands out from the pack on Quest, but it’s a excellent game in any context and on any headset.

Horizon Call of the Mountain

Horizon Call of the Mountain is the first major first-party IP that Sony offered up as a VR game. And the company doubled down by making it not just a launch title for the newly launched PlayStation VR 2, but they even offered it up as a bundle launch bundle with the headset itself.

Lucky on not, Horizon Call of the Mountain turned out to be the perfect launch title to show players what the company’s new headset was capable of. Not only does it offer an immersive buffer of rich VR gameplay with some of the best looking visuals in any VR game to date, it also takes advantage of PSVR 2’s most unique features, like eye-tracking, reactive triggers, and head-haptics.

Though it didn’t capture the open-world gameplay of its brethren, Horizon Call of the Mountain found compelling gameplay in now-classic VR mechanics like climbing and bow shooting while managing to innovate in its own right with immersive crafting and a unique locomotion system during combat sequences.

Perhaps the only big flaw with Sony’s plan to launch its headset alongside this exciting adventure is that there hasn’t been any games of quite this scale on the headset since!

Want to read more about Horizon Call of the Mountain? Check out our full review of the game and our behind-the-scenes feature article on the title’s development.

Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR

Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR had the daunting task of figuring out how to bring one of the franchise’s staple elements—parkour—into VR in a way that’s comfortable and compelling. And as it turns out, the solution meant leaning into Ubisoft’s existing parkour tech that was never designed with VR in mind.

From the outset, the Assassin’s Creed games were defined by their awesome third-person locomotion that gave players unprecedented freedom to traverse the world as well vertically as horizontally. That’s thanks in no small part to a carefully crafted system that determines which parts of the game’s geometry constitute valid handholds and how the character should animate from one position to the next.

Though it was conceived long before the age of modern VR, the developers of Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR cleverly adapted the concept for VR such that players can hold down a button and automatically leap between obstacles as easily as looking in the direction they want to go—any movement done with your legs is accomplished this way. But to fuse this with VR gameplay, anything involving the arms—for instance, grabbing onto a hold that’s higher than your feet can reach, pulling yourself up over a ledge, or swinging from a pole—must be done by manually reaching out and making it happen with your own two hands.

Couple that with carefully crafted comfort considerations (say that three times fast)—like the precise speed and trajectory of automated leaps—and Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR delivered that classic franchise feeling of seeing almost anything as climbable and anywhere as reachable, while staying mostly comfortable in VR.

Dungeons of Eternity

As a co-op fantasy dungeon crawler, Dungeons of Eternity seems like the last place you’d go looking for an innovative VR interface. But that didn’t stop developer Othergate from trying anyway.

While the game does ultimately fall back on basic laser-pointer menus at the foundational level, the studio fleshed out the game’s ‘menu’ system into an immersive lobby that’s shared by you and your friends.

Common game functions like selecting a level, crafting weapons, and readying up have all been effortlessly translated into this immersive space. Selecting a level means approaching the map table and picking your mission. To craft weapons you’ll want to run down to your equipment room where you’ll find your workbench. And readying up isn’t a button press, but physically walking over to the teleporters to beam up with your teammates.

In many games, all of this would happen purely with text on a screen, but manifesting those functions as a physical lobby feels natural, especially because of the social aspect. If your friend is in their equipment room, you know exactly what they’re up to. Same thing if you see them looking over the map table. That’s contraty to many multiplayer flatscreen games where menus are wholly individual affairs and you’ll often find teammates asking each other “are you ready?” “are you picking a level?”.

That idea of sharing information between teammates carries into the game’s mini-map system too. Rather than pressing a button to make a flat map appear on your screen, mini-maps are physical items—little spherical projectors—that you first have to find inside a level. Once you do, you can pull the projector out and toss it on the ground to project a 3D map of the dungeon that you and your teammates can collectively see.

This not only feels way more immersive than summoning a flat map with a button, but it also makes for natural collaboration as players can simply point to one part of the map as they’re talking about it.

Arizona Sunshine 2

For the first time we’re giving a double-award to a single title. Arizona Sunshine 2 earns both Excellence in Immersion and Excellence in Co-op—and here’s why.

We really appreciated the game’s attention to immersive detail. Most things that seem like they should be interactive consistently are. Doors, cabinets, drawers, and even ovens all open as expected. Windows shatter. TVs break. Shopping carts roll. Swivel chairs spin. And on top of that there’s a healthy dose of simple but fun interactive props like basketballs, ping pong balls, and cigarettes that you light and even put in your mouth to take a puff. And your dog companion, Buddy? Not only will he fetch tennis balls that you throw, you can even pet him to make sure he knows who’s a good boy.

All of this is interactive goodness is amplified thanks to the game’s co-op capability which allows two players to play the entire campaign together. Discovering the game’s many interactive props and immersive details is that much more fun when you’re doing it with a friend. And thanks to the game’s wide release on all major VR platforms, and cross-platform co-op, it’s very likely that you can actually play with the friend you want to without having to convince anyone to buy a new headset!

The Light Brigade

The Light Brigade is a single player roguelike shooter that you might compare to In Death: Unchained, the critically acclaimed bowshooter from Sólfar Studios and Superbright. Developed by indie studio Funktronic Labs, The Light Brigade lets you step foot into an eerie, shattered world, pitting you against demon soldiers using a variety of World War weaponry. It’s a highly stylized, lower-poly affair that is all works really well visually, creating an ambiance that’s memorable and feeling like some spooky lovechild of Dark Souls and Wolfenstein. 

While procedurally generated levels in other games can leave you feeling like you’re running around in circles or retreading the same old places, The Light Brigade does an excellent job of blending varied and unique environments to make them challenging every single run.

This roguelike is of course mostly about blasting dudes in the head, although the upgrade tree has a good number of pathways and bonus features—all of which is important to build up stats capable of meeting the final boss. More than not, you’ll end up dying another untimely death, as baddies get harder relative to your growing strength, offering good challenge. In the end, The Light Brigade well balanced, appropriately bitey, and addictive in a way only truly great roguelikes can be.

Hotdogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades

Hotdogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades (H3VR) is the definition of a game that keeps on giving. Developer RUST LTD could have abandoned the VR shooter sandbox long ago and still made its over 18,000 Steam reviewers happy with the breadth of content available.

Still in Early Access since its entrance on Steam in 2016, the game presents PC VR players with extremely realistic models of basically every firearm on the planet. Although one of the big focuses initially was plinking at the range, over the years the studio has added a dizzying number of shooter game modes, including things like a sci-fi action roguelite, a zombie shooter, a VR adaptation of Team Fortress 2, and other stuff that feature puzzles, mazes and over a dozen more individual modes to explore. Wherever you go though, you won’t be blasting away at humans: only wibbly hotdog people who shatter into mushy little bits when you shoot them.

As a testament to H3VR’s staying power, the game’s most recent update came earlier this month—over seven years since it launched into EA—introducing new firearms and a host of improvements and quality of life updates. And it’s not showing any signs of stopping either. The studio says it doesn’t know when it will leave Steam Early Access, just that it’s “still having a blast adding things,” and that the sandbox format allows them to grow organically “through a series of experiments, varying from freeform sandbox to more traditionally structured games.”

LEGO Bricktales

LEGO Bricktales didn’t start out life as a VR-native, but if you’ve played the plucky little brick-building adventure for a minute or two, you’d swear it wasn’t a port at all.

As a Quest-exclusive, the port feels at home in both pure VR and Quest’s optional passthrough MR, as the big focus here is adding more tactility to building models than you might with keyboard and mouse. With a horizon locked ‘snap-in’ building guide, Bricktales makes it easy to create nearly anything with your own two hands with minimal fuss you might otherwise associate with guiding tiny bricks into place.

Granted, you can’t go completely wild and build just whatever, as you’re tasked with focusing on objective-based builds to do things like getting across rivers, building helicopters, and completing sculptures. Still, you’ll have plenty of pieces though to let your imagination take over.

The family-friendly story may feel at times a little too aimed at kids, but I dare anyone not to look at the little dioramas made of true-to-life Lego pieces and think to yourself “if I had this as a kid I would flip!” In fact, we’re flipping even as adults, as LEGO Bricktales provides a nostalgia rush for anyone who’s put down the plastic blocks long ago.

Note: Games eligible for Road to VR‘s Game of the Year Award must be available to the public on or before December 15th, 2023 to allow for ample deliberation. Games must also natively support the target platform as to ensure full operability.

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Developed by Novelab and published by Meta, Demeter is slated to launch on Quest 2/3/Pro next month, giving you not only an intimate background for the game’s narrative to unfold—it is after all a mixed reality game—but also bringing along with it procedurally generated environments that adapt to your room.

Novelab says this allows you to tackle “levels and challenges in real time that adapt to the environment you are in,” letting you guide the tiny protagonist Atalante to climb, jump, fly and run using your walls and furniture as you explore the game’s narrative.

“For the first time in history, humans will be able to interact and play with a miniature fantasy world that adapts and reacts to their actual physical environment,” the studio says on the game’s website. “Everyone’s experience will be different: because my home layout is not the same as my neighbor’s, I will not play the same game as them.”

You may recognize the name Novelab from their work on a host of award-winning XR narrative projects, including Notes On Blindness, SPHERES, and On the Morning You Wake. Since 2021 the studio has been developing original games and IPs for VR, AR and other new media.

Demeter is set to launch on the Quest Store on January 25th, 2024—priced at $20. There’s currently a 10% off pre-order deal, bringing the game to $18.

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Arizona Sunshine 2 Details:

Gameplay

There’s no shortage of zombie games in VR, and to that end, Arizona Sunshine 2 doesn’t do much to upend the ‘zombie game’ formula, but it does the basics quite well. You’ll find the classic dumb and slow zombies all over the campaign which individually aren’t much of a threat but can overwhelm you if you aren’t careful.

While the game has an unfortunate lack of enemy variety, I at least found that popping heads (with a gun or melee weapon) was mostly fun up until the end of the game.

That probably wouldn’t have been the case if the game didn’t manage to deliver a solid combination of visuals, sound effects, and enough weapon complexity to make it a joy to hit headshots every time.

The game could certainly be better paced. The middle third feels like essentially the same encounters over and over, and your strategy rarely needs to change. Encounter design gets better in the last third, with some more fun and memorable moments, but it would have been nice to have those more evenly scattered throughout the game.

Similar to not mixing up the zombie formula, Arizona Sunshine 2 also doesn’t do anything particularly novel with its weapons, but they got the details right. Manual reloads, including bullet chambering, are the norm for every gun, along with some really satisfying pump-action shotguns. I quite appreciated the feel of reloading the pump-action shotguns, which felt easy but also satisfying. And I liked the detail that some of the game’s SMGs had an open-bolt design compared to the closed-bolt of the rest of the pistols.

While the weapon details were solid, I didn’t feel there was enough functional difference between them (likely because the enemies are almost entirely identical). All pistols felt like they had the same head-shotting power and accuracy, which means the one with the biggest magazine is always be the best.

And because of the effectiveness of headsets, automatic firing weapons felt like an invitation to waste your ammo—especially because of their poor iron sights. I played the game at its default difficulty, so it’s possible that weapons better differentiate themselves at higher difficulties.

There’s a handful of more unique weapons like a grenade launcher, gatling gun, and flamethrower which helped to spice things up later in the game.

The one place where Arizona Sunshine 2 is really doing something novel is with your dog companion, Buddy. As clunky as his animations can be at times, it’s fun to have a capable NPC companion with you in VR (and a clever narrative excuse to make sense of the main character talking to themselves). You can pet Buddy, tell him to sit, fetch, and attack zombies, which he manages to do well enough to be consistently helpful.

Speaking of narrative, the game offers a straightforward zombie apocalypse story that’s light on character development, but interesting enough to want to know where things are headed. The character that you play has a crass sense of humor and just enough memorable quips and one-liners to give him a bit of charm and personality.

At one point the game really seemed like it was setting up the player to have to answer an interesting moral quandary, but then just… didn’t. I can’t quite tell if this was an unintentional red herring, or if the idea had to be scrapped for some reason during the development process. For me personally, I like when games ask players to make real choices, and this would have been a very memorable one—especially because of VR’s added immersion. Unfortunately it will go down merely as a missed opportunity.

So, Arizona Sunshine 2 has fun-to-kill zombies, solid weapon details (even if they lack differentiation), and a unique and generally well-executed companion pupper. It’s a solid game.

But what pushes it over the edge from ‘good’ to ‘great’ for me is co-op. Being able to bring a friend along for this apocalyptic journey makes for memorable moments and laughs that just wouldn’t happen if you were alone. In particular, having a friend with you often converts janky moments to funny moments. The game also does a good job of scattering interactive objects and a handful of playful scenes which encourage goofing around between players.

And it’s worth noting that while Arizona Sunshine 2 is definitely a zombie game, it’s definitely not a horror game; I don’t recall any ‘horror’ moments or jump scares. And while I personally would have enjoyed that as an additional element, players who don’t like horror can play the game with confidence that it’s more of a fun romp than a spooky shooter.

As for game length, it took me around 7 hours to play through Arizona Sunshine 2, and I must have been fairly thorough because my ammo counts were consistently maxed out and I seemed to have enough materials to make more explosives at the game’s minimal crafting stations than I could carry.

As a nice co-op bonus, there’s also a ‘Horde’ mode which supports up to four players. It’s a fairly standard wave-based holdout situation, but reasonably well put together and worth a few sessions with friends.

Immersion

Arizona Sunshine 2 does a good job of filling the game with a variety of physics-props and making most things that appear obviously interactive, in fact, interactive.

Cabinets and drawers with handles will pull open. Glass breaks. Some objects have destroyed states when you shoot them. Basketballs bounce. Lighters work, and you can even put a cigar in your mouth and light it up. It’s clear that attention was paid to interactive details.

We’re not talking Half-Life: Alyx levels of detail, but it definitely exceeds what we see in the average VR game.

And again, this is all amplified with co-op. Interactive ‘set-pieces’—like a beer pong table—invite friends to take a breather from the apocalypse and just play around with what the game puts in front of them. Like the various hats and masks scattered throughout the game which serve no purpose other than giving players something fun to find, wear, and laugh about.

While the interactive details in Arizona Sunshine 2 are solid, I found the game’s holster system was cumbersome and detracted from my immersion.

The worst offender was definitely the ammo pouch which essentially sits in your chest. That’s where you stash ammo when picked up and where it’s pulled from when you need a mag. But it frequently was in my way when trying to put a mag into my gun. Often I would pull out a mag and move to put it into my gun, but it would get sucked back into my inventory because it came too close to my chest.

Weapons are also ‘bound’ to you automatically. If you grab a gun with your left hand, it is now associated with (and will automatically return to) your left holster. If you grab another gun with your left hand, it is forcibly swapped with the one that was previously bound to you. This also means you can’t hand or toss a gun to your friend, which is a big bummer for a co-op game.

It’s also easy to drop items because many can only be grabbed or targeted at specific points; sometimes slight deviations would cause the force-grab targeting to flicker and miss. And the cherry on top is that every time you drop something it’s a pain in the ass to reach down and pick up. A more functional force-grab system like that of Half-Life: Alyx would have been a welcomed addition.

These holster and targeting issues also made it annoying to try to hand objects from one person to another. Just go watch any footage from this game where two people try to exchange objects and I guarantee you will see them drop the object to the ground at least 50% of the time.

For a studio that has been around for so long, it’s strange that these issues are so apparent when there’s so many better examples to work from at this point.

Another immersion issue (which seems to be much less of an issue on non-Quest headsets) is that the game’s physics system appears to run at half framerate (or maybe even lower). Not only does this make moving or thrown physics objects less convincing as they stutter through the air, but it also leads to your hands frequently clipping through things.

This often led me to the dreaded ‘hand clipped through the door’ issue that’s always a nuisance because trying to remove your hand from the other side of the door almost always means pulling it directly back into your face.

The physics issue also significantly blunts the interactions between fast moving objects. If you try to swat something off of a table, there’s a good chance that your arm passes directly through the object and never interacts with it. Or maybe it just barely grazes it, making your slap feel like nothing more than a gust of wind.

Those physics issues might have been a necessary conceit for other goals the studio wanted to achieve; I was impressed with how many zombies and ragdoll bodies the game could display at once.

At one point I was practically wading through a pile of dead zombie bodies, and Quest 3 managed to keep up.

Graphically, the game definitely appears built for tethered headsets first—and certainly looks best on them—but Vertigo Games did a serviceable job crunching the game onto Quest. And the experience appears to be one-to-one (in terms of physics objects and enemy count) even when one player is on standalone and one is on a tethered VR headset.

Comfort

Arizona Sunshine 2 supports a fairly standard set of comfort options and is generally good about designing levels around comfort. There are a few sequences where the player is on a moving platform which was fine for me but could be a trigger for more sensitive folks.

While I’d say this could be circumvented by turning on the game’s peripheral blinders, the blinder implementation seems problematic. I play most VR games with some blinders enabled, but the ones in Arizona Sunshine 2 actually make me feel less comfortable.

I think the issue is that the implementation shrinks each eye’s view from all sides, resulting in a ‘binoculars’ view that hinders your stereo overlap, instead of simply appearing in your left and right periphery. This might even just be a bug, but in any case I hope it’s fixed soon for players who rely on blinders.

Arizona Sunshine 2′ Comfort Settings – December 7, 2023
Turning
Artificial turning
Snap-turn
Quick-turn
Smooth-turn
Movement
Artificial movement
Teleport-move
Dash-move
Smooth-move
Blinders
Head-based
Controller-based
Swappable movement hand
Posture
Standing mode
Seated mode
Artificial crouch
Real crouch
Accessibility
Subtitles
Languages	English, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Spanish
Dialogue audio
Languages	English
Adjustable difficulty
Two hands required
Real crouch required
Hearing required
Adjustable player height

Summary: Arizona Sunshine 2 is a decent zombie romp with all the usual elements, plus your dog friend, Buddy. Though sometimes clunkily animated, having an NPC companion that generally feels helpful and interactive adds a new flavor rarely seen in VR. While weapon handling and feel is above average, the clunkiness of the holster and inventory system is unfortunate considering there are many better examples to draw from. The game’s pacing is fairly slow but gets more interesting in the last third. With a pleasing number of interactive items and details, Arizona Sunshine 2 gets a big boost to fun thanks to its cross-platform co-op which lets friends enjoy the zombie apocalypse together.

Gameplay: 8 | Immersion: 7.5 | Comfort: 8

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Unveiled at WWDC in June, Apple has repeatedly confirmed that the long-awaited mixed reality headset will release in “early 2024,” although there’s been no mention of specific launch date yet.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that staff training is being scheduled for mid-January, which would see select employees travel to the company’s Cupertino headquarters for a two-day seminar.

The report maintains that Vision Pro’s setup process will be complex, requiring customization for each user. Additionally, unnamed sources informed Gurman that while customers will be able to reserve Vision Pro online, the company may be pushing in-store pickup to help guide customers through the process.

Considering the ‘pro’ price tag of $3,500, it makes sense Apple will be taking every precaution to make sure customers don’t make some of the mistakes new VR users typically face. Things like getting a snug (but not ‘too snug’) fit for long-term use and getting the headset’s lenses into what is called the ‘sweet spot’ where the display is most clear are all important when trying on a headset for the first time, Apple Vision Pro included.

Meanwhile, Apple is quietly preparing developers to create apps for Vision Pro by letting them go hands-on with hardware, having opened so-called ‘Developer Lab’ locations in Cupertino, London, Munich, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York City, Sydney and Singapore.

Despite some early access to hardware, getting a critical mass of developers to stock the App Store with MR content will undoubtedly be a long and iterative process, as the company still has a ways to go before it can introduce a cheaper, more consumer-friendly headset that packs in all of the goodness we saw in our hands-on with Vision Pro back in June.

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While Thumper was a flatscreen game first with an eventual VR mode, the upcoming Thrasher will be the reverse—Thrasher is being built with motion controls in mind and will launch first as a VR-only game on Quest and PC VR next year, with a flatscreen version coming at some point further down the road.

It’s a bit hard to tell exactly how the gameplay will work from the initial trailer, so here’s some context going in:

THRASHER is a mind-melting cosmic racer and an essential audiovisual experience. Swoop, dash and thrash across the void, taking on wild bosses in a race for survival that begins at the dawn of time.

Immerse yourself in a dazzling adventure across space, where music, visuals and gameplay mesh into one transcendent experience.

Thrasher is being developed by indie studio Puddle, which is comprised of Thumper co-creator Brian Gibson and Mike Mandel (Rock Band VR, Fuser, Fantasia: Music Evolved).

From what we gather, players will guide the ‘eel’ around using their motion controller, almost like waving a ribbon around on the end of a stick. It doesn’t sound exactly like a rhythm game proper, but something of an audio-visual extravaganza.

We love seeing creative VR gameplay and Thrasher certainly looks intriguing!

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First showed off as a prototype at CES 2020, MeganeX bills itself as an “ultra-high-resolution, ultra-lightweight, 6DOF-capable VR headset for SteamVR,” coming equipped with dual 2,560 × 2,560 1.3-inch micro-OLED displays (120Hz) from Kopin, proprietary pancake lens from Panasonic, and both SteamVR tracking and inside-out optical tracking.

It all makes for a pretty compact PC VR headset, which you might compare to its biggest competition, Bigscreen Beyond ($1,000).

While Shiftall quietly launched MeganeX in Japan back in September via a lottery system, it wasn’t sure when we’d see the headset release outside of Shiftall’s home country.

Now Shiftall tells Road to VR that it’s currently working to increase production capacity before releasing in the US, although it’s not certain when.

“Regarding the U.S. market, we are indeed planning to introduce MeganeX there,” a Shiftall spokesperson told Road to VR. “As soon as we are able to manufacture sufficient quantities to meet the high demand in Japan, we will commence sales in the United States.”

According to its website, the consumer version is set to launch at $1,699, while the price for the Business Edition has yet to be determined for the US market. This tracks with the headset’s September soft launch in Japan, which was priced at ¥249,900 (~$1,700 USD), tax included. In Japan, the Business Edition sells for ¥198,000 (~$1,350 USD), tax excluded, as it doesn’t include the modular SteamVR tracking unit, instead solely relying on the headset’s less precise optical tracking.

Meanwhile, the Panasonic-owned skunkworks is releasing a number of other VR products, including its FlipVR SteamVR controller which allows users to fold the controller into a position that doesn’t interfere with using your hands normally for tasks such as typing or grabbing things. FlipVR went into pre-order in the US in November with shipments estimated for April 2024.

The company also produces HaritoraX Wireless, an IMU-based full-body tracking device, and mutalk, a voice-muffling Bluetooth microphone for private conversations in and out of VR.

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Oculus Link / Air Link has for years allowed any Quest headset to connect to a PC to play PC VR content, but it requires users to install and use the long-outdated Oculus PC software. In many cases, that ends up just being a bothersome extra step to finally ending up at SteamVR which has a much more active library of VR apps and users.

To streamline this process, Valve today released the Steam Link app on the main Quest store (which means it has been given Meta’s official blessing). Using Steam Link, the app makes it dead simple to connect Quest directly to SteamVR without the Oculus PC software as a middle layer.

All you need to do is have a capable PC running Steam on the same network as your headset. Then launch the Steam Link app in your Quest and you’ll be greeted with a pairing code. Enter the code on your PC and… voila, you’re looking at your SteamVR library.

And it isn’t just PC VR games—you can also play any game from your Steam library on a big screen in front of you. Again, this has all been possible before, but Steam Link makes the process easier than ever.

To use Steam Link, Valve says the minimum requirements are:

• Wi-Fi: 5 GHz minimum, wired connection to PC
• GPUs: NVIDIA (GTX970 or better)
• OS: Windows 10 or newer
• Headset: Meta Quest 2, 3, or Pro

There’s indications that Steam Link on Quest may also support eye-tracking and face-tracking for those using Oculus Pro, but we haven’t had a chancre to test it just yet.

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Released back in 2021, Varjo Aero is the company’s first and only prosumer-positioned headset. Though high-end, it has also been a lesser-speced headset than the company’s flagship devices.

The new Varjo XR-4 is the latest headset from the company that has focused on creating the highest-fidelity tethered headset on the market. While the headset’s $4,000 price tag is surely targeting high-end enterprise use-cases, for the handful of prosumers out there who have cash to burn, XR-4 is actually the cheapest of the company’s enterprise-positioned headsets yet. It’s also the first of Varjo’s XR-series headsets that the company will sell directly to consumers and without a required annual fee.

For now the company is soliciting invitations to join the consumer waitlist for the XR-4, saying those on the list will be alerted when the headset is available in their given country.

Varjo XR-4 with SteamVR Tracking

While XR-4 has its own inside-out tracking system, the company is also making a variant of the headset which ties it into the SteamVR Tracking ecosystem (as its prior headsets once relied upon).

Unfortunately it’ll bring the price of the base variant of the headset up by another $1,000. Varjo has confirmed that this variant of XR-4 can switch back and forth between SteamVR Tracking and the headset’s own inside-out tracking.

It’s potentially also possible to eschew the $1,000 addition and instead add SteamVR Tracking to the base variant of XR-4 by attaching something like the Tundra Tracker and configuring it to represent the position of the headset. Though this will take a few extra steps compared to having SteamVR Tracking built right in.

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You can find the complete video below, or continue reading for an adapted text version.

Intro

Now listen, I know you’ve almost certainly heard of Half-Life: Alyx (2020), it’s one of the best VR games made to date. And there’s tons of reasons why it’s so well regarded. It’s got great graphics, fun puzzles, memorable set-pieces, an interacting story… and on and on. We all know this already.

But the scope of Alyx allows the game to go above and beyond what we usually see in VR with some awesome immersive details that really make it shine. Today I want to examine a bunch of those little details—and even if you’re an absolute master of the game, I hope you you’ll find at least one thing you didn’t already know about.

Inertia Physics

First is the really smart way that Alyx handles inertia physics. Lots of VR games use inertia to give players the feeling that objects have different weights. This makes moving a small and light object feel totally different than a large and heavy object, but it usually comes with a sacrifice which is making larger objects much more challenging to throw because the player has to account for the inertia sway as they throw the object.

Alyx makes a tiny little tweak to this formula by ignoring the inertia sway only in its throwing calculation. That means if you’re trying to accurately throw a large object, you can just swing your arm and release in a way that feels natural and you’ll get an accurate throw even if you didn’t consider the object’s inertia.

This gives the game the best of both worlds—an inertia system to convey weight but without sacrificing the usability of throwing.

I love this kind of attention to detail because it makes the experience better without players realizing anything is happening.

Sound Design

Note: Make sure to unmute clips in this section

When it comes to sound design, Alyx is really up there not just in terms of quality, but in detail too. One of my absolute favorite details in this game is that almost every object has a completely unique sound when being shaken. And this reads especially well because it’s spatial audio, so you’ll hear it most from the ear that’s closest to the shaken object:

This is something that no flatscreen game needs because only in VR do players have the ability to pick up practically anything in the game.

I can just imagine the sound design team looking at the game’s extensive list of props and realizing they need to come up with what a VHS tape or a… TV sounds like when shaken.

That’s a ton of work for this little detail that most people won’t notice, but it really helps keep players immersed when they pick up, say, a box of matches and hear the exact sound they would expect to hear if they shook it in real life.

Gravity Gloves In-depth

Ok so everyone knows the Gravity Gloves in Alyx are a diegetic way to give players a force pull capability so it’s easier to grab objects at a distance. And practically everyone I’ve talked to agrees they work exceptionally well. They’re not only helpful, but fun and satisfying to use.

But what exactly makes the gravity gloves perhaps the single best force-pull implementation seen in VR to date? Let’s break it down.

In most VR games, force-pull mechanics have two stages:

1. The first, which we’ll call ‘selection’, is pointing at an object and seeing it highlighted.
2. The second, which we’ll call ‘confirmation’ is pressing the grab button which pulls the object to your hand.

Half-Life: Alyx adds a third stage to this formula which is the key to why it works so well:

1. First is ‘selection’ where the object glows so you know what is being targeted.
2. The second—let’s call it lock-on’—involves pulling the trigger to confirm your selection. Once you do, the selection is locked-on; even if you move your hand now the selection won’t change to any other object.
3. The final stage, ‘confirmation’, requires not a button press but a pulling gesture to finally initiate the force pull.

Adding that extra lock-on stage to the process significantly improves reliability because it ensures that both the player and the game are on the same page before the object is pulled.

And it should be noted that each of these stages has distinct sounds which make it even clearer to the player what’s being selected so they know that everything is going according to their intentions.

The use of a pulling gesture makes the whole thing more immersive by making it feel like the game world is responding to your physical actions, rather than the press of a button.

There’s also a little bit of magic to the exact speed and trajectory the objects follow, like how the trajectory can shift in real-time to reach the player’s hand. Those parameters are carefully tuned to feel satisfying without feeling like the object just automatically attaches to your hand every time.

This strikes me as something that an animator may even have weighed in on to say, “how do we get that to feel just right?”

Working Wearables

It’s natural for players in VR to try to put a hat on their head when they find one, but did you know that wearing a hat protects you from barnacles? And yes, that’s the official name for those horrible creatures that stick to the ceiling.

But it’s not just hats you can wear. The game is surprisingly good about letting players wear anything that’s even vaguely hat-shaped. Like cones or even pots.

I figure this is something that Valve added after watching more than a few playtesters attempt to wear those objects on their head during development.

Speaking of wearing props, you can also wear gas masks. And the game takes this one step further… the gas masks actually work. One part of the game requires you to hold your hand up to cover you mouth to avoid breathing spores which make you cough and give away your position.

If you wear a gas mask you are equally protected, but you also get the use of both hands which gives the gas mask an advantage over covering your mouth with your hand.

The game never explicitly tells you that the gas mask will also protect you from the spores, it just lets players figure it out on their own—sort of like a functional easter egg.

Spectator View

Next up is a feature that’s easy to forget about unless you’ve spent a lot of time watching other people play Half-Life: Alyx… the game has an optional spectator interface which shows up only on the computer monitor. The interface gives viewers the exact same information that the actual player has while in the game: like, which weapons they have unlocked or equipped and how much health and resin they have. The interface even shows what items are stowed in the player’s ‘hand-pockets’.

And Valve went further than just adding an interface for spectators, they also added built-in camera smoothing, zoom levels, and even a selector to pick which eye the camera will look through.

The last one might seem like a minor detail, but because people are either left or right-eye dominant, being able to choose your dominant eye means the spectator will correctly see what you’re aiming at when you’re aiming down the scope of a gun.

Multi-modal Menu

While we’re looking at the menus here, it’s also worth noting that the game menu is primarily designed for laser pointer interaction, but it also works like a touchscreen.

While this seems maybe trivial today, let’s remember that Alyx was released almost four years ago(!). The foresight to offer both modalities means that no matter if the player’s first instinct is to touch the menu or use the laser, both choices are equally correct.

Guiding Your Eye

All key items in Alyx have subtle lights on them to draw your attention. This is basic game design stuff, but I have to say that Alyx’s approach is much less immersion breaking than many VR games where key objects a highlighted in a glaringly obvious yellow mesh.

For the pistol magazine, the game makes it clear even at a distance how many bullets are in the magazine… in fact, it does this in two different ways.

First, every bullet has a small light on it which lets you see from the side of the magazine roughly how full it is.

And then on the bottom of the magazine there’s a radial indicator that depletes as the ammo runs down.

Because this is all done with light, if the magazine is half full, it will be half as bright—making it easy for players to tell just how ‘valuable’ the magazine is with just a glance, even at a distance. Completely empty magazines emit no light so you don’t mistake them for something useful. Many players learn this affordance quickly, even without thinking much about it.

The takeaway here is that a game’s most commonly used items—the things players will interact with the most—should be the things that are most thoughtfully designed. Players will collect and reload literally hundreds of magazines throughout the game, so spending time to add these subtle details meaningfully improves the entire experience.

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Keep in mind: some of the best results we’ve had over the years tend to be with very noob-friendly games and apps. Your Thanksgiving Day guests probably won’t have enough time (or inclination) to learn complex mechanics, and keeping things quick and simple is usually the right way to go to make sure everyone not only gets involved, but doesn’t have to wait around a bunch either.

Above all, one of the best ways of getting everyone gawking is by making sure you can see the action on a TV screen or monitor, which you can do easily with any headset out there. It’s fairly straight forward on SteamVR and PSVR 2 since you already have a monitor/TV hooked up. For Quest, you can mirror your view to your Meta App-connected phone, or cast to a smart TV.

Now, let the arm flailing and requisite safety briefing begin!

Beat Saber

• What: This incredibly addictive and easy to pick-up game is one of the best entry points for VR firstimers, but has enough depth to appeal to anyone along their way on the pro VR gamer skill tree.
• Who: Everyone will want to get up at least for a song to slice blocks to the beat. Thankfully there’s plenty of difficulty settings to satisfy even the most musically disinclined.
• How long: 5 – 15 minutes per person
• Why: Most songs last around five minutes, but you’re bound to encounter failures along the way, and also family members that just can’t help themselves for a second go at another song.
• Platforms: Quest 2/3/Pro, PSVR/2, PC VR

Store links: Meta Store (Quest, Rift), PlayStation Store, Steam

Pistol Whip

• What: Like Beat Saber in addictiveness, but instead of slicing blocks to the beat, you’re shooting dudes John Wick-style. It’s all very stylized, so there probably won’t be much, if any pearl-clutching.
• Who: Older kids, teens and adults of all ages.
• How long: 5 – 10 minutes per person
• Why: Like Beat Saber, most songs (called ‘scenes’) last around five minutes. Remember to lower the difficult to easy mode so most anyone will get to the end of the level.
• Platforms: Quest 2/3/Pro, PSVR/2, PC VR

Store links: Meta Store (Quest, Rift), PlayStation Store, Steam

CREED: Rise to Glory

• What: CREED: Rise to Glory (2018) is a highly polished arcade boxing game that puts you in the shoes of Adonis Creed, the protagonist of CREED (2016) and CREED II (2018). Punch, punch, punch, block and dodge.
• Who: Everyone with some caveats. Make sure your family member is physically fit enough to go the distance for a full match, and kids may have problems hitting their much taller targets.
• How long: 5 – 10 minutes
• Why: Freeplay matches against AI can last anywhere from 2 – 5 minutes, but depending on how much fun everyone is having, this might be a good opportunity to let your family members really flaunt their dodging and punching prowess for a few sessions.
• Platforms: Quest 2/3/Pro, PSVR/2, PC VR

Store Links: Meta Store (Quest, Rift), PlayStation Store, Steam

Blaston

• What: This room-scale is a free-to-play shooter that puts you in a ring to go 1v1, giving you multiple weapons to shoot and dodge around. While online matches are great for seasoned players, pop into single player mode for some quicker and easier human vs. AI action. Also, if you have two headsets, you could set up 1v1 duels!
• Who: Everyone will want a turn, as they see you grabbing guns and Matrix-diving out of the way of oncoming bullets.
• How long: 5 – 10 minutes
• Why: Individual matches can be shorter than 5 minutes, although you may want to dedicate more time to each player, as they quickly build expertise with the game’s various weapons.
• Platforms: Quest 2/3/Pro, PC VR

Store Links: Meta Store, Steam

Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs

• What: This VR version of the hit mobile game Angry Birds is exactly what it says on the tin, putting the slingshot in your hand to take the fight to the evil piggies, who hide in increasingly elaborate wooden structures.
• Who: Everyone should find this one an easy choice; it’s dead simple and super fun to smash blocks and knock down stuff. Serious name brand recognition should also perk up an ear or two with the older crowd.
• How long: under 5 minutes
• Why: It’s easy to get lost in this one, as you trudge ahead to harder levels, or continuously retry a level to get the best score. Pass this one around the room quickly and keep the masses snacking.
• Platforms: Quest 2/3/Pro, PSVR/2, PC VR

Store links: Meta Store (Quest, Rift), PlayStation Store, Steam

Puzzling Places

• What: Puzzling Places brings relaxing and wholesome 3D jigsaw puzzling to VR, letting you put together hyper-realistic miniatures of beautiful places from around the globe.
• Who: Everyone. While it doesn’t have a ton of crowd-pleasing wow factor, this is great for quieter moments where you want to show off how ‘neat’ VR can be, especially to older family members.
• How long: under 5 minutes
• Why: Keep difficulty low to get people through fast enough
• Platforms: Quest 2/3/Pro, PSVR/2

Store links: Meta Store, PlayStation Store

Wooorld [Quest]

• What: It’s like Google Earth for Quest. Browse an immersive, 360 Street View photospheres, or look down at a tinker toy map of 3D cities. It’s social, but you can also do private single-player sessions so people don’t have to deal with multiplayer.
• Who: Everyone. We’ve all had places from our past that we either haven’t or physically can’t return to. This gives you and your loved ones a trip down memory lane that is sure to set off some long conversations and stories.
• How long: 10 – 20 minutes per person
• Why: You can easily spend hours alone revisting places, but make sure to set the expectation early on that not everyone can hog the headset. Ask someone to show you their childhood home, or favorite vacation spot and move on to the next person.
• Platforms: Quest 2/3/Pro

Store links: Meta Store

SUPERHOT VR [No PSVR 2 Support]

• What: Insanely stylish, easy to pick up and play, Superhot VR (2017) tosses a little time-bending cartoon violence your family’s way that shouldn’t receive too many odd glances from the older generation.
• Who: Younger, more game-savvy players are sure to love the concept, letting them live out their dreams of being an action hero. The concept is simple and slow enough to get anyone in the mood to punch some red crystal dudes in the face.
• How long: 5 – 10 minutes
• Why: A single stage can go by pretty quickly. It may be best to do a round-robin style match that lets everyone have a go when one player fails a level, or relegate a person to two to three of the smaller sections a piece.
• Platforms: Quest 2/3/Pro, PSVR (no PSVR 2), PC VR

Store links: Meta Store (Quest, Rift), PlayStation Store, Steam

Richie’s Plank Experience [No PSVR 2]

• What: Walk the plank! Literally! Get a wooden board from your garage and line it up with the game’s virtual plank to really scare the bejesus out of people as they teeter over perilous heights.
• Who: Everyone, with a few caveats. Make sure the person is healthy enough to take a self-induced tumble. Tell kids they can’t jump off the ledge and skydive, because… floor.
• How long: 5 minutes per person
• Why: This is a classic experience that will have everyone watching and wanting to take a go themselves, putting your VR headset at the center of attention.
• Platforms: Quest 2/3/Pro, PSVR/2, PC VR

Store links: Meta Store (Quest, Rift), PlayStation Store, Steam

Gran Turismo [PSVR 2]

• What: Drive fast in cars you can’t afford.
• Who: Older kids, teens, and adults. Although speeds can be excessive, the driving experience is comfortable enough for most anyone.
• How long: 5 minutes per person
• Why: You can easily put someone in the corner with this one, as they progress to more difficult tracks, although it’s an easy game to pass around as people get the immersive feel of driving faster than they ever have in real life.
• Platforms: PSVR 2

Store Links: PlayStation Store

Don’t Miss

• Quest Intro Apps – Oculus First Contact, First Steps, and First Encounters (Quest 3) are great ways to ease in newbies if they’re looking to learn more about the headset and common control schemes. Not a ton of crowd wow factor, but it might be just the thing for a smaller gathering with more dedicated neophytes.
• Space Pirate Trainer – Pew pew pew. It’s fundamentally just a wave shooter, but it’s by far one of the best looking and best feeling out there. Find it on Meta Store (Quest, Rift), Steam, PlayStation Store.
• Half-Life: Alyx – It’s not going to be the easiest to show off, since you’ll need to have a specific safe state in mind to drop players into, but it’s tough to beat if you’re looking to wow anyone with the best-looking VR games out there. Find it on Steam.
• Red Matter or Red Matter 2 – Again, story-based stuff with a ton of tutorial-worthy VR control mechanics won’t be the easiest to show off, but if you happen to have a good save state, it can’t hurt to pop a non-believer into this extremely polished adventure game. Find both on Steam, PlayStation Store, Quest, and Rift.
• Moss or Moss 2 – Try plopping the kids down into this family-friendly puzzle platformer that will have you awwwing to nearly the same degree as Astro Bot. Find both on Steam, PlayStation Store, Quest, and Rift.
• Google Earth VR – This PC VR-only app is a good replacement for Wooorld. Giving a loved one the opportunity to travel, especially if they aren’t physically able, is going to really be a special moment. Travel the sights and revisit distant places you never thought you’d see again in the flesh. Find it on Steam and Rift.
• ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission – Maybe not great for the crowd-pleasing wow factor, but after you show off some of the fan favorites above you might park a few more of your curious family members in a chair and let them experience the best platformer PSVR has to offer. Find it on PlayStation Store (No PSVR 2).
• The Lab – Valve’s PC VR-only collection of mini-games and photogrammetry scenes isn’t really the “future” of VR anymore, but kids and adults alike will love the app’s snackable mini-games Longbow, Core Calibration, and Xortex. Find it on Steam.

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