Audi's Motorsport Legacy Gives the Story Its Foundation

Before joining the team’s preparations for Formula 1, you are given a brief look at Audi’s motorsport history and trophy wins, including with Michèle Mouton, the only woman to win a World Rally Championship event. Being in the same room with a driver sharing her story immediately sets the tone that the documentary is about the passionate people behind the wheel and behind Audi’s journey, not just the vehicles.

As you learn more about Audi’s story, you visit a few special locations including inside Audi’s secret garage in Germany, where you have an up-close look at their inventory of vehicles from over the decades. While the backstory is only a few minutes, you understand the significance of entering F1 after so many years.

In Switzerland, you meet some key members of the Audi Revolut F1 Team as the vehicle is assembled and then tested just months away from its debut at the Australian Grand Prix. You meet driver Nico Hülkenberg and feel like you are there with driver Gabriel Bortoleto in the driver-in-the-loop simulator. You are even there to take in some of the behind-the-scenes conversations.

Masterful Camera Placement Creates Presence

The TARGO team are masters in immersive documentary storytelling. The choices that director Chloé Rochereuil made around the camera placement give you a seamless feeling of presence throughout the experience, even as you travel between locations. From wide shots to close-ups with the car components, you are consistently positioned where you can best appreciate what's happening around you as the story unfolds. And, there is just the right amount of time to let you take in the moments from each position.

In some other Immersive Videos, it bothers me when I feel more like I’m simply sitting where the camera was placed as shots unfold. In Entering Formula 1 Racing I feel invited into each scene. When team members are speaking about the journey, it feels like they are speaking to you. And when they are not speaking directly to you, where you are placed makes you feel like an observing member of the team.

Whether you're an F1 enthusiast, motorsport fan, or simply appreciate great immersive storytelling, I recommend that you experience Entering Formula 1 Racing. It is one of my favorite immersive sports documentaries to date.

Somnium Space, which was originally built around cryptocurrency and the buying and selling of virtual land as NFTs, and which launched its own CUBE token a year later, was removed from Steam sometime after Valve's 2021 decision to ban games from Steam which featured crypto-based economies and NFT commerce. Valve's policies forbidding NFTs and crypto games have not changed, so Somnium Space's Steam re-release must therefore be blockchain free.

The non-Steam PC VR release still touts blockchain and NFT integration as a defining feature, with land parcels and purchases through traditional fiat rails like Stripe, or linked crypto wallets.

Somnium Space is a free-to-play social VR platform for adults 18 and older. The app's persistent virtual universe allows players to meet, explore, and create their own new experiences to share with one another.

We went hands-on with the social VR platform in March of this year.

Checking In On Somnium Space, The Blockchain-Based PC Social VR Platform

We took a fresh look at Somnium Space, the blockchain-based PC social VR platform that continues to receive impressive feature updates.

UploadVRK. Guillory

Somnium Space will land on Steam as a free-to-play app. SteamDB lists the new app's release date as "December 2026." You can wish list it now.

At Meta Connect 2026 in September, alongside the reveal of Meta VR Glasses, the company announced that Quest owners in the US would be able to rent or buy "hundreds" of movies in late 2026. The company said that this catalog will eventually expand to "thousands" of titles available internationally by the time Meta VR Glasses launch in 2027.

Now, some Quest 3 and 3S owners have spotted a limited selection of 3D movies in the TV app, while Meta has also added new support articles describing the ability to rent or buy media.

The movies listed so far appear to consist primarily of Disney-owned content. Notably, they can be purchased directly through the Meta Horizon Store without an active Disney+ subscription.

Separately, the Disney+ app is set to receive its own overhaul on the platform this month, bringing a new spatial UI, support for 3D media, and several of the immersive environments also available in the Disney+ app for visionOS on Apple Vision Pro.

Meta Expands SDKs To Boost Spatial Apps On Quest & VR Glasses, Including NBA, Disney+

Meta announced several new SDKs and features to enhance spatial apps on Quest and Meta VR Glasses, alongside major spatial updates for the NBA and Disney+ apps.

UploadVRLuna

Additionally, a page discovered in the TV app by user Nikita and shared by dataminer and programmer Nori suggests that Meta may begin offering 3D movies as part of the Horizon+ subscription service. The page also suggests that the service may be rebranded as Meta VR+.

Such a rebrand would fit with the company's broader efforts to separate Horizon Worlds and related branding from the Quest platform, which began earlier this year.

If you're unfamiliar, Meta Horizon+ is the company's $8/month (or $60/year) subscription service for its VR devices. Subscribers get access to a Games Catalog of around 50 major VR titles, as well as an Indie Catalog of around 50 smaller titles, for a total of around 100 games.

Subscribers are also offered two specific games each month, pre-selected by Meta. Redeeming them lets you play those games while your subscription is active. If you cancel, you can regain access to previously redeemed games by resubscribing.

In February 2026, Meta reported that the subscription service had crossed 1 million "active subscribers" in 2025. In July, the company also added a starter edition of Xbox Game Pass to Horizon+, giving subscribers access to 50+ games and 10 hours of cloud gaming each month. More recently, the service has started regularly offering subscribers exclusive game discounts and free add-ons for games.

Quest's Horizon+ Subscription Adds 10 Hours Of Xbox Cloud Gaming

Quest's Horizon+ subscription added 10 monthly hours of flatscreen cloud streaming for 58 Xbox titles, furthering Meta's partnership with Microsoft.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Adding 3D movies to Horizon+ would align with the media focus of Meta VR Glasses and recent Horizon OS updates, as well as the strategy outlined by Meta Director of Games Chris Pruett at GDC in March.

Pruett stated that the company expects "more Mainstream Adults to enter VR through media consumption first, then discover games once they are in-headset" over the next couple of years. He described the demographic as people who "are mid-core, love Meta Horizon+, and probably play seated without controllers".

The update adds 60 3D movies, including films from the Marvel and Star Wars catalogues including Black Panther, The Avengers, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Other properties such as Avatar are also available in 3D, as well as 3D versions of Disney's more traditional offerings like the live action remake of Beauty and the Beast.

The update also brings immersive environments to Quest users. These immersive environments can best be described as 3D spatial theaters in which you exist and watch a film. For example, you can watch Star Wars on Tatooine or catch Monsters, Inc. on that film's famous "Scare Floor."

Quest Now Has A Disney+ App With Downloads & Dolby Atmos

Quest headsets now have an official Disney+ app, with support for downloads and Dolby Atmos immersive audio — but not for 3D.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Prior to today's update, Disney+ on Meta headsets had been simply an app that allowed you to watch 2D media. Disney+ 3D experiences had previously been exclusively available on Apple's Vision Pro.

This new Disney+ functionality will also land on Meta's upcoming VR Glasses headset when it debuts in spring of 2027.

An active Disney+ subscription is naturally required to access the app's content, and availability of 3D, Dolby Vision, and Dolby Atmos playback varies by region and subscription plan. You can grab the Disney+ app on Quest today.

Following last week's release of Payday: Aces High, the game's developers have updated the game to include "Restart Heist" and "Abandon Heist" options. Restart Heist restarts the current heist without leaving the map, and Abandon Heist brings the whole crew back to the safe house (lobby) together.

The developers have also unveiled a roadmap for the rest of 2026.

November 19th will see the game's first major update, which will be loaded with bug fixes, a haptics intensity slider, and the "addition of paper trail to toilet rolls."

November 26th will see the game's first Community Challenge come through, which will grant everyone who tries it a free pair of unique in-game gloves. A new pack will hit Gage's shop at this time as well, adding new masks and more.

December 10th sees yet another community challenge, this time with a festive reward to claim.

December 14th brings a brand new (free) heist called "Coup de Grâce." The update also brings new weapons, masks, and more as part of "The Bank Robber Pack."

Lastly, the devs have announced that all new heists will be free for all owners of the game, with no hidden fees and no battle pass required to play the new content.

Payday: Aces High is available now on Meta Quest 3 and 3S, PC VR via Steam and Steam Frame (crossplay enabled).

Payday Aces High Review: Lootin' & Scootin' In VR's Best New Co-Op Shooter

With Payday: Aces High, Fast Travel Games has combined the most thrilling parts of the best heist films with the most hectic parts of the Payday series to make a truly invigorating VR Payday.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

VR Spotlight is UploadVR's live interview series, which streams to YouTube from an in-VR virtual studio and syndicates to podcast platforms to bring audiences firsthand insights from the developers and creators building XR hardware and software every day. For the series premiere, UploadVR's Mike Johnson sat down with Stockman to discuss how Ultrawings Remastered and Ultrawings 2: Gold Edition came together for Quest 3, the history of Bit Planet Games, his thoughts on PlayStation VR2 and Valve's Steam Frame, and questions from the live audience.

If you prefer to listen on the go, VR Spotlight is also available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or you can read the full edited transcript of the conversation below.

The Origins of Bit Planet Games and Ultrawings

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

Welcome to the inaugural edition of VR Spotlight. My guest today is Christopher Stockman, the CEO of Bit Planet Games, whom you know best for the Ultrawings series. Chris, thank you for being the first guest on this new series. Before we get into the Ultrawings remasters, for the people who aren't familiar with your company and your background, could you give a little history of how you came to form Bit Planet and how you got into VR?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

Thank you for having me. I'm super excited. Bit Planet will have been open for 13 years in February. I started it in 2014 before the VR craze happened because I wanted to make indie games. I've been making games for a very long time and it [Bit Planet] is not the first company I've started. It's actually the second. I'm best known, for old-school gamers, as the design director on the very first Saints Row. I left and started my first company after that and made some Xbox Live Arcade games and a Wii game using original IP.

So I started the second company and about a year into it, I saw a demo of Job Simulator at Alex Schwartz's garage and house, and I pivoted and decided that I wanted to do VR stuff. I loved Pilotwings, so Ultrawings was my original brainchild of doing Pilotwings in VR. That was the pitch. I went to Meta, got a little bit of money, and we were off to the races. Here we are 12 years later and still at it.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

That's incredible. I know Ultrawings launched in 2017, but what year did your team first start working on it full-time?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

This was probably mid-2015. It took about a year and a half to make. We were a tiny team. It launched in 2017 on PC and then, I'll be honest with you, it did not light the world on fire. In the first month, I think it made around $30,000, which was certainly not enough to support a team.

We were criticized for various things that were accurate, but what happened was we got a little bit of money from Samsung and we ported it to Gear VR. Then we got a little bit of money from Sony and we started the original PlayStation VR version. From there, we just kept signing deals. We got money from Microsoft. It was these smaller deals that kept us afloat. It wasn't until it came out on Gear VR and then [Oculus] Go and when Oculus put us on the Go box. Samsung heavily promoted it. Oculus heavily promoted and then everything really took off when we ported it to the original Quest.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

And it was a launch title for the original Quest in 2019, right?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

Yeah, and then COVID happened and sales really took off for the first one. Then Ultrawings 2 came out, which was light-years better than the first one in every way imaginable, and that did incredibly well.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

Ultrawings was one of the first flying games in VR that didn't rely on a gamepad or traditional controller. You were actually hands-on with the throttle and stick, flipping switches to start your ignition and get the propeller going. You didn't really have a blueprint for that sort of interaction when you built it, and I think people underestimate how long it takes to make something as simple as reaching out your hand and flipping a switch feel natural. How long did it take you to get those mechanics figured out?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

When we first started working on it, we only had a gamepad because the Oculus Touch controllers weren't available yet. Once we got early access to those, it took maybe three months or less to get something up and running. I wouldn't say it felt good right away, but it was fairly quick. I will say this, when we first put it in, I've said this many times, but I'm really susceptible to motion sickness.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

That is fascinating given the games that you make.

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

I didn't know this until our first playable build. I couldn't play it for more than five minutes and then I was out for the rest of the day. Here's the odd thing though. Motion sickness affects everybody differently, but as soon as we got motion controls working, it cured it for me completely.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

Really? Just the simple fact of being hands-on with the controls tricked your brain? That's interesting too.

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

Yeah. I could play it then for hours and do crazy things like barrel rolls and somersaults.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

Did your susceptibility to motion sickness encourage you to put both realistic and more constrained arcade flight controls into the first game, or was that always the plan?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

It wasn't because of me; it was suggested to us at the time, along with the various comfort blinders. At the time, there were huge concerns around motion sickness, whereas nobody really talks about it as much anymore. We didn't even put arcade settings into the sequel because it would have been impossible to complete the game. You can't dogfight when you can't actually do any maneuvers.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

Was bringing dogfighting into Ultrawings 2 always part of the plan, or was it driven by player feedback from the first game?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

That was a natural evolution. It's funny because we partnered with Meta again on the second game, and they wanted to see a playable demo. The very first thing we built was the ultralight aircraft with the grenade pistol. We had the Hawaii island built and what we demoed was firing on a convoy. And we thought this was crazy. You'd never do that in real life. Grenade pistols don't even exist! Getting the dogfighting itself right, though, took a long time. It took about a year just to get the AI feeling fun and engaging.

Why 2026 Was the Right Time for the Quest 3 Remasters

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

Moving to the remasters that just launched here in 2026: when Quest 3 first came out in 2023, there were well over a hundred games that received Quest 3 updates, ranging from simple render resolution bumps to higher-resolution textures or more enemies on screen like in The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. That was all several years ago. Now we're in 2026 with Ultrawings Remastered and Ultrawings 2: Gold Edition. Why was now the right time to put these out?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

Well, we were in the middle of developing another game that we put out last year and diverting attention to anything else wasn't possible. When that game came out, it just wasn't very good. I mean it was okay for a certain audience, but the core loop suffered. I basically sold that off and tried to figure out what I wanted to do next. I signed a deal with a company for another game.

While that new project was spinning up, I had a hunch that I could get the PC VR version of the original Ultrawings running on Quest 3 using some tricks up my sleeve. And I didn't want to just port it without improvements, so I went above and beyond: new skyboxes, new music, new water, ambient life, a photo mode, new achievements, and a collection system mechanic in free flight, just to see if it could be done.

In tandem, I was poking around with Ultrawings 2. I'd been working on this for a while. I love the game, but I always had a problem with the static skyboxes. It just bugged me that I never saw any variety. There were different times of day, but they never changed. So I went off and explored that and wondered what I could do. That's how both editions materialized.

Sales Ratios, Sequels, and PlayStation VR2

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

We have a question from the audience asking what sales figures were like on Quest compared to PC VR for the first game. You don't have to give exact figures, but if you can share a rough ratio since you mentioned it didn't light the world on fire until it launched on Quest.

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

For the first game, the Quest version made seven figures, whereas the PC VR version made low six figures. And Ultrawings 2 has made more than Ultrawings 1, which is actually pretty rare for a sequel on the Quest market.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

A friend of mine actually asked why you didn't just make Ultrawings 3. My response was that threequels haven't typically done well in VR. There's a point of diminishing returns. Just checking review counts and reading the tea leaves, the deeper you get into a franchise, you start having people drop off. There's a natural attrition.

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

I'm also of the mindset that when you continue a franchise, there has to be a reason to do one. It can't just be new environments and a couple of new aircraft. There has to be a fundamental reason to come back to it. Ultrawings isn't about story or characters you know and love and want to see continue. There has to be other reasons you want to come back. The delta between the first and second game was huge because we added combat, a helicopter, and a full open world on Quest 2 that hadn't been done before, that sort of scale. For a third game, we have to ask ourselves what we can bring to the table that will get people to buy it. That will make it feel like it's not just a 1.5 or 2.5. That is truly a new product that you want to sink your teeth into.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

I love that because that feels more like a creative decision than "this game did really well, so we should make another one." Coming from a CEO, that's really refreshing.

Another viewer in chat asks: "Loved Ultrawings on my original PlayStation VR. Do you think PlayStation VR2 has not been supported properly by Sony?" David Heaney and Kyle Riesenbeck just had a long discussion on The VR Download about PlayStation VR2 winding down as Sony removed it from direct sale on its website. Don't get yourself in trouble though.

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

This guy knows my history. I've gotten in trouble with some of my comments from some hardware manufacturers. I don't have any allegiance or ties to Sony, so I'll just say this: I knew pretty early on that Sony was not going to support PlayStation VR2 in any meaningful way when they decided to launch with basically only one exclusive VR game—not counting Gran Turismo 7 since that's a VR mode. When that launch title came out and they weren't doing more, and weren't supporting a lot of developers with deals, I had a feeling that the writing was on the wall. Actions speak way louder than words.

I think it's a shame because it's great hardware. I love PlayStation VR2. We ported Ultrawings 2, on our own dime, to PS VR2 because we thought there was a market for it, and we more than tripled or quadrupled our money back, so I have no regrets there. But if you release hardware and you have a plethora of IP to pull from that wouldn't even take crazy budgets to make, you have to trickle out exclusive content to support that platform. And they didn't.

I begged them to let us make a Colony Wars game, if you remember Colony Wars on the original PlayStation. I have history making space combat games and cockpit games, which is not that much of a stretch at all, and they didn't give me the time of day. They were not interested in talking about that at all and I thought they were crazy.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

I will say this. I've talked to multiple developers both on and off the record, and you're not the first person I've heard that from. You're not even the tenth I have heard that from. I've heard that quite often.

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

I was very disappointed.

Inside Ultrawings Remastered and Ultrawings 2: Gold Edition

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

Let's get specifically into the remasters, starting with Ultrawings Remastered. Walk me through what is different in the Quest 3 remastered version compared to the original Quest release.

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

I want to talk apples to apples. Let's talk about the difference between the original Quest version and the Quest 3 version of Ultrawings. The original Quest, the world was not open to the players. We couldn't do it at the time. We had to remake all of the islands. We had a lot of corners to cut and things to trim. The world was just one island at a time, you had to load one island at a time and then you could spawn to another island and that's how you progressed in the world. For this, I wanted to see if you could get the whole world in like you could on the PC version. Another thing is the assets. I wanted to use the PC VR assets.

Another thing you could see is shadows and real-time lighting. Having the shadows actually move in the world in real-time and not just be projected shadows like we did in the Quest version. Another thing you'll see is photo mode and then we added the ability to zoom in. We didn't have that in the PC version and didn't have it at all on the Quest version. We couldn't do that, there's no way. You're essentially rendering the world three times.

I wanted to add more life to the world. There's a cow, there's dolphins. New achievements for taking pictures basically. The other thing that is not in the trailer and is really kind of an Easter egg is if you take a photo in Free Flight in the ultralight, you have to be in the ultralight because you can grab the tablet unlike the other planes where the tablet is permanently attached to the plane. Every picture you take is saved to your device and not only that, but it adds a little postcard overlay over it showing what island you were at. I just thought that was a neat little thing to do.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

In a relaxed game like that, whereas the second game has dogfighting, but the first is much more relaxed, so it makes sense for the player to think "I want to document this."

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

It's cool. It's really cool. And then you can share the postcards on social media. I don't know if anyone will do it, but I thought it was really cool. We also added the balloon hunt where balloons spawn in the world and you have to pop them and you get achievements for that.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

Because Ultrawings Remastered is exclusive to Quest 3, the original version is still available on the store for Quest 2 and Quest Pro owners. We recently learned that Meta is winding down Quest 2 and Quest Pro support. When that happens, do you see yourself retiring the original version, or keeping it up?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

I don't know yet. That's probably TBD right now. I'm not sure yet what we'll do.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

Between Ultrawings the original and Ultrawings Remastered, would you say that is a bigger leap than between Ultrawings 2 and the Gold Edition?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

That's a good question. It is kind of remarkable that we got the PC VR version that was not at all optimized for mobile to actually run on a Quest 3 at essentially what feels like 90 frames per second. It's pretty remarkable and feels great. It just depends because the gold edition has so many visual things that we did that it almost feels like you want to play through it again because of what the new things bring to the table in terms of immersion and making you feel like you're in a living, breathing world. They are good for different reasons.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

When I spoke to someone from the now-defunct Polyarc Games, I was told that they hadn't updated anything in the first Moss game since the original Quest build until the Quest 3 update. They didn't do an uplift for Quest 2. So I was curious since Ultrawings started with the Gear and the Go in terms of standalone, so were we still working on the base Gear VR build?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

Yeah, this was not from Quest at all. This was literally the PC VR version brought in and I decided to add a bunch of stuff to give people a reason to buy it. It's a huge delta. There's a gigantic difference.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

What about the changes between Ultrawings 2 and Ultrawings 2: Gold Edition?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

First, the Gold Edition includes the Kodiak DLC aircraft and all of its associated content right out of the box. The other thing I wanted to put in was a time of day system. Now, I was highly skeptical that this was going to work. I wanted to put in a dynamic cloud system where you could see different cloud types spawn and different weather conditions, which we had in the original second game, but I wanted to see how far we could push it to make it look good. The time of day system I'm especially proud of.

Being able to take off at sunrise and see the sun arc through the sky, watch it change from morning to noon to late afternoon to dusk to night and then to see the moon come out, with different phases, from full moon to an eclipse and back again. To see all that in real-time and see all the lightmaps blend, I'm tooting my own horn and maybe I am biased, but what Quest game has ever done this? It's performant and it looks stunning. Getting the clouds working, they look pretty darn good and they move, they're not static. To see the storm system and see the lightning streaking across the sky and hear the thunder and you see the raindrops on your canopy.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

We were talking offline before we started this interview and I told you I was racking my brain when I was playing the Gold Edition and the day/night cycle happened, I totally lost track of time. When that happens in headset, it's different. I used Ocarina of Time as an example because you're running across Hyrule Field and it changes from day to night, it doesn't have that same effect because I'm staring at a monitor. I kept trying to think of an example like that in VR, unlike in Saints and Sinners where there is a scene load and a hard transition between, but I've never seen it done seamlessly in VR. When the day cycle changed while I was in free flight, I had to stop and check how long I had been in the headset.

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

The Gold Edition is free to try and I am incredibly biased, I know, but how could you not be impressed by that? I went through probably six iterations of the cloud before I was happy with the look and the same thing with the rain. To see the rain on the canopy slide and the drops refract on the glass on Quest 3! What the hell? They bead and move as raindrops would do naturally on a fast-moving plane.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

Coming from the Gear, that had to be a fist-pump moment when you got it working, given you've been doing this for over twelve years.

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

On standalone! This is happening in real-time. The trailer was filmed entirely on Quest without doing anything fancy.

Development Challenges, Pricing, and PC VR Plans

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

A viewer in chat asks what engine and tools you used, and what the biggest development challenges were on the remasters.

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

We use Unity 6, incredibly more performant than the previous versions. Development challenges? The biggest challenge was iteration. The game is largely done, but going back and getting the look and getting something performant was crucial for me. We did release an update a couple of months ago, but it wasn't performant and people were not happy with it, so we pulled it. We went back to the drawing board and made sure it was extremely performant and having that time of day system that didn't require some kind of fade or transition sequence or a hard stutter. I'm not saying it's a hundred percent perfect, but it is damn near close.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

Was this when you updated to the Universal Render Pipeline?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

No, it shipped with URP. We were one of the first games to do it. And iteration really, you should see what the first clouds looked like. They were very abstract looking and they looked weird, they had weird edges. It wasn't until we started doing a more procedural element to them to make them look wispy. We used to have them morph, meaning the clouds would form in different shapes, but it was way too expensive. Maybe for a platinum version in a later headset.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

For those who don't know developer terms, when he says expensive, he means computationally. He means performance overhead. Another viewer asks: "One of my favorite VR games is Walkabout Mini Golf, and I love how they bring out new courses to keep the game fresh. Could Ultrawings do something similar with new maps?"

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

Yes and no. The issue is you would have to go to an entirely new location in the world. We actually built Ultrawings 2 with room in the world for about seven additional islands, but adding more into the same seamless world would make it run like a slideshow. Doing it would require a hard load into a separate world, which would feel weird to do one island at a time. So it isn't in the cards for this title. However, we are hard at work on our next project, and we're experimenting with something early on that may allow us to expand on Ultrawings 2 in a different way.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

Our producer and games writer, James Tocchio, asks if you encountered any funny bugs during development that made the team laugh.

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

Honestly, no because I mostly find bugs annoying! In the first Saints Row, there was a lot of physics stuff that was entertaining and fun. We put a whole mode in the game based on a bug that we discovered with physics: Insurance Fraud. I can't think of anything off the top of my head. There was stuff spawning in the world or if you crashed, especially in multiplayer, you could see other people in the crash sequence. That was weird. Spawning outside the map was a common thing.

One other cool thing I want to say about Gold Edition is we added more ambient life into the world, so when you're flying around, you'll see boats and cars and stuff like that. We added police cars and ambulances that can spawn. Rarely when one spawns, they can trigger their lights and you'll see the lights spawn. We have sailboats in the world on the Hawaii Island, they float on the water. We didn't spend a lot of time on the live system and I wanted to spend more on this. It's the little tiny details that I'm incredibly proud of.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

A couple of people in chat asked if you are working on a Steam Frame version.

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

I'm working on the PC VR version right now. I'm highly skeptical on a standalone Frame version. I don't know if there's value in a standalone Frame version versus just doing a PC VR version and supporting the Frame. I am working on the PC VR version and I'm happy with how it's going. It's not a straight port. It's an enhanced Gold version with real-time shadows, a real wave system. It's going to require a beefier video card for sure.

I'm trying to go the extra mile on a PC VR version because so many people complain saying it's just a port of the Quest 2 version. What people don't realize is the Quest 2 version is a port of the PC VR version. We made two different versions of the game. They have to share assets or we would never be done. It took us four years to make the second game which is a long time for a VR game.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

This came up earlier, and I specifically remember this because I was going to write an article when you announced the Quest 3 update. So I remember seeing the message and then you pulled it back. What went into the decision process behind nixing the Quest 3 update and going with the Gold Edition?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

I thought that the amount of time we had put into it and wanting to improve on multiplayer, which we have and continue to do so and probably going to add a new mode, but I thought we had spent a lot of time and effort on this and wanted to get a return on that investment. Originally it was going to just be a Quest 3 update and we got emails from Quest 3 players saying they could no longer play multiplayer with friends on Quest 2. Later, someone pointed out that we could let original owners switch back to the legacy Quest 2 build via the release channel selector if they wanted cross-play with Quest 2.

So what I did, out of the kindness of my heart, and I really care about our fans, is I just released the Gold Edition as an update to the original version of the game on Quest 3. It does not have the DLC. You have to buy that as you would normally. So it's a thank you. I don't want to be accused of being greedy and that I gave something and then pulled it back.

If you buy the original version, you go on the store, go to the release channel dropdown and select Legacy. It will not be getting any updates, to be clear.

The State of the VR Industry in 2026

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

To wind things down, I want to talk about the broader VR ecosystem. Since James and I came on full-time in February, we've written over 30 articles about studio layoffs and games shutting down. Where does Bit Planet Games stand right now, and how do you view the VR market today compared to when you first got in?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

Well, the market has dramatically changed and I'm mostly talking about the player base. Is it still possible to make a lot of money in VR? Yes, for a certain type of game right now. It needs to be free-to-play, and yes there are outliers before someone says I Am Cat makes a lot of money. Yes, there are outliers. They tend to always be around $14.99, these outliers. I Am Cat is a good VR game and appeals to a wide variety of people. Everyone loves pets and being a cat and doing cat things. I get why it's super successful, but by and large, if you are not free-to-play, you are buried. You're not going to make a dent. That's the market that we're at right now.

So Steam Frame comes out, and I love that Valve decided to make another headset and support the VR ecosystem, but the reality is where's the content? PC VR games? Okay, sure but the question begs, where's the content? It feels like a device trying to be a jack of all trades and master of none. Is it a standalone device? Sure, but it's also a streaming device. It's weird, like they compete with each other. Are there people using standalone more than streaming? My hypothesis is that they are not. Valve fans buying that headset are already in the Valve ecosystem and likely have a PC. How many people have a Steam Deck and no PC? My guess is very small. I find that hardware to be value adds and Steam Frame is the same thing. Valve has even stated publicly that they expect more flatscreen games to be played on Steam Frame than VR games. The fact that there's no exclusive games made for it, again, actions speak louder than words. The VR industry is severely hurting because the market has shifted to free-to-play social games and ones that cater to 14 and 15 year olds. My hope is those kids will age out and want to play more mature content.

As for me, I could go make flatscreen games. I love Ultrawings. It is near and dear to my heart, but the only way to continue it is in VR. I love making VR flight games, and I'm going to keep doing it until I can't do it anymore. I just really want to make Ultrawings games. That's all I want to make. Also, right now, in our Discord at discord.gg/bpg, we have discount codes for fans who want to grab the new editions and support what we do. They are limited use, so they'll expire in March and there's a limited number of times they can be used. You can get the game for very cheap and you're supporting us.

Mike Johnson (UploadVR):

One last question I love to ask every developer: when you're not making games, what are you playing in your spare time to unwind?

Christopher Stockman (Bit Planet Games):

I am one achievement away from platinuming Balatro on the PlayStation 5, and I'm about 4,000 hours in so far. Thank goodness for the PlayStation Portal streaming handheld, because that's how I can chip away at it before and stay married! I'm trying to get that done before November 19th.

Arvore is best known for the Pixel Ripped trilogy and also developed bullet-hell roguelike Yuki and this year's The Boys: Trigger Warning.

Fabula Rasa's comedic story is told through real-time conversations with AI-driven NPCs, using Large Language Models (LLMs) to dynamically respond to you as opposed to traditional pre-written branching dialogue systems that games and experiences like this have typically employed. We saw a similar experience to this in AstroBeam's sci-fi experience Stellar Cafe.

Here's the trailer:

You play as a prisoner trapped in a cage at the center of a medieval town trying to save yourself from being dropped to your death in the monster pit below. To free yourself, you must convince nine locals to assist you. Everything about the story including your crimes and the responses of the townsfolk is shaped by your choices to ensure no two playthroughs are the same.

To further incentivize multiple playthroughs, Fabula Rasa has a mix of different costumes to help spark your interactions and prompt different responses from the NPCs. The team at Arvore also consulted with improv comedians to help shape the LLMs driving the NPCs.

Fabula Rasa won this year's XR Experience Audience Award at the SXSW Film & TV Festival and the Best of Tech award at Miami Filmgate Interactive.

You can wishlist Fabula Rasa for Quest now ahead of its December 3 release.

Theater Environment

Consistent with UploadVR's previous reporting, Horizon OS 2.10 PTC introduces a brand-new environment called Theater. It features a large home theater-style room with high-resolution textures.

Rather than being a traditional VR Home environment, Theater is selected from the Control Bar of the window you want to display on the center screen, using a new button labeled 'Theater', separate from the existing Focus View.

Selecting it switches the system to Theater, and exiting the space returns you to the traditional VR Home environment or Passthrough. The environment appears to be compatible with most media-focused window apps. So far, I've confirmed that it works with the system Media Player, Browser, YouTube, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video.

The current version of Theater appears to use real-time dynamic lighting based on the content being played. However, it does not appear to include the hue-backlight-style Dynamic Ambiance feature that UploadVR previously reported was in development, so it's possible Meta plans to add it in a future release.

Simplified Navigator

Another change rolling out with Horizon OS 2.10 PTC, though not listed in the release notes, is a reorganization of the system launcher overlay, known as the Navigator. The Navigator has gone through many iterations since it first entered the PTC over a year ago, some of which have drawn criticism for their layouts and visual styling.

When Meta unveiled VR Glasses at Connect in September, interface images and footage provided by the company showed a new version of the Navigator with a streamlined layout. Now, Horizon OS 2.10 PTC seems to be rolling this out to a small number of users.

Codenamed 'Simplified Navigator' in firmware, this redesign removes the Me, People, Quick Controls, Show/Hide Windows, and Environment/App buttons. It also removes the left-hand filters from the Library tab. This consolidates the interface into three tabs: Search, Library, and Notifications.

Quick Controls can now be accessed by pressing the Clock-Wi-Fi-Battery display at the top of the overlay. The page has also been reorganized into a grid of larger buttons, and now includes a new option for switching between your VR Home environment and Passthrough.

The Library has also received major changes. The smartphone-style app folders that started rolling out with Horizon OS 2.4 PTC seem to be the default in Grid View, and there is a dedicated folder for sideloaded apps labeled 'Unknown Sources'.

A major regression in the current implementation is that there is no option to filter the Library to only show installed apps or check which apps have updates available. As a result, you'll see all content your account has access to, whether installed or not. This is somewhat mitigated by a new List View, accessed by pressing the Library button again. The older filters are still available in this view.

The new Navigator also revises the design of its privacy indicators, with active and recently used permissions now appearing in green instead of the previous muted purple. When you're in an immersive app, a new bubble appears prominently above the Library button, providing an option to quit the app. This addresses a common complaint with the previous design.

Although changes of this magnitude may be jarring, I would expect more changes as Meta continues to refine and polish the operating system, especially as Meta VR Glasses get closer to launch.

Additional Changes

Improved Window Resizing

An undocumented change in Horizon OS 2.10 PTC improves window resizing behavior.

This appears to primarily benefit apps with locked aspect ratios, such as YouTube. The system now handles their scaling more smoothly, minimizing large visual stutters or jumps as the window changes size.

Avatar Video Calls In Chats

Meta says that Horizon OS 2.10 PTC allows you to make video calls as your avatar in the Chats app. During a call, selecting the video icon in the active call bar switches between an avatar video call and an audio-only call.

The company first introduced this 'Selfie Camera' functionality in v76 PTC over a year ago, and it is now used by third-party apps such as Discord and Zoom. Meta's implementation of the feature in its first-party Chats app could lay the groundwork for the upcoming Hologram Calling feature on Meta VR Glasses.

Quest v76 PTC Lets You Use Your Meta Avatar As A Virtual Webcam

Quest's Horizon OS v76 PTC lets you use your Meta Avatar as a virtual webcam in video calling apps.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

External Microphone Changes

Another undocumented change in Horizon OS 2.10 PTC removes the External Microphone toggle, which was added to the Experimental menu back in April 2024 with v64. The toggle enabled the use of an external microphone on Quest 3 through its USB-C port, supporting both microphones with a USB-C connector and those connected through a USB-C adapter.

In my testing, external microphone support still works without the toggle. However, it is unclear whether Meta plans to make it a default system feature or remove support entirely.

Quest 3 Gets Improved Passthrough Quality & New Features

The Quest v64 update is all about Quest 3. It brings improved passthrough quality, external microphone support, and lying down mode.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Security Updates

Meta notes that Horizon OS 2.10 PTC improves how Quest verifies the authenticity of websites and online services before you visit them. It is unclear whether this refers to the Browser or is part of the system-level anti-malware service introduced in Horizon OS v85.

Project Hail Mary: Journey Among the Stars, a mixed reality experience that expands the story of author Andy Weir's sci-fi novel and film, is coming to Pico, Android XR, and Meta Quest 3 and 3S on November 12.

Preorders are open now, and early adopters will receive three exclusive digital sculptures featuring Rocky, Grace and the Hail Mary ship, which can be displayed in mixed reality.

A previously released gameplay trailer shows what to expect from this experience:

In Project Hail Mary: Journey Among the Stars you play as Ryland Grace, the main protagonist of Weir's novel and the character played by Ryan Gosling in the novel's film adaptation, as you experience a critical moment in the Hail Mary mission. The ship's systems are failing, and it's up to you to diagnose and solve the problem with the help of your friend Rocky, the alien intelligence whose partnership with Grace defines the story's emotional core.

You'll build a relationship with Rocky, bond over the course of the experience, and use your science and engineering skills to keep the Hail Mary spaceship intact so that it may deliver you and your world-saving cargo to Rocky's home planet.

Project Hail Mary: Journey Among the Stars will launch on Meta Quest, Pico, and Android XR on November 12.

The new pack is available now for $13.99. Alternatively, you can buy select tracks for $1.99 each.

Here's the trailer:

The full tracklist is as follows:

• Kim Wilde – Kids In America
• The Outfield – Your Love
• Bryan Adams – Run To You
• Twisted Sister – I Wanna Rock
• Yes – Owner of a Lonely Heart
• The Cars – Shake It Up
• Duran Duran – Rio
• Cutting Crew – (I Just) Died In Your Arms

Synth Riders has been active with new content in 2026 with its new progression system introduced in March and new music packs featuring Dua Lipa, Linkin Park, and the soundtrack from Crypt of the NecroDancer.

Synth Riders is available on Quest, PlayStation VR2, Apple Vision Pro, and Steam.

Darts VR2 launched in Early Access in April on Quest, PlayStation VR2, and PC VR with crossplay support and a roadmap that included league play. The first weekly qualifier tournament is today with subsequent rounds on November 12 and 19 followed by a monthly final on November 26.

Here's the full schedule breakdown with associated prizes:

• Qualifying rounds - November 5, 12, 19 with a $100 prize pool.
• Monthly final - November 26 with a $250 prize pool.
• Championship final - February 2027 with a $500 prize pool.

Tournament times are 7p-9p GMT for the European League & 6p-8p PT for the Americas League. This loop of weekly qualifiers and monthly finals is expected to continue until the championship final in February 2027.

League Mode hosts tournaments for up to 16 players with online leaderboards and in-game cosmetics as additional rewards to the cash prizes. You can learn more in the Darts VR2 Discord.

Darts VR2 is available for Quest, PlayStation VR2, and PC VR.

It is a little odd to think about competition in Bootstrap Island's usual isolationist atmosphere, but developer MaruVR is switching things up with Cargo Master.

Here's the trailer:

The potential rewards include items with mystical powers that you cannot find in the main game. The challenges escalate as you complete more runs, forcing you to balance the pre-existing survival elements and resource management mechanics to complete the delivery.

From Maru's press release, here are some of the items you can earn:

• Boots of Jumping – Dramatically increase jumping ability, eliminate fall damage, and allow players to make huge, sliding leaps across the island.
• Infinite Flintlock Pistol – A special pistol that never requires bullets or gunpowder, although it still needs to be cocked after every shot.
• Infinite Bow – A unique bow with an unlimited supply of arrows.

There are 19 tasks currently available in Cargo Master and completing all of them unlocks the final reward: the Golden Seashell. When you complete the mode, your time is recorded on global leaderboards where you can see how you stack up against other players.

Bootstrap Island is available on Steam and PS VR2.

It was at that moment that a single thought ricocheted like red hot lead through the squishy meat of my mind: this game is awesome!

With Payday: Aces High, Fast Travel Games has lifted the most thrilling parts of the best heist films and combined them with the most hectic parts of the Payday series to make a truly invigorating VR Payday.

What is Payday: Aces High?

For all you dorks who have never robbed a bank, Payday: Aces High is the latest entry in the popular co-op heist series, and the first to be built from the ground up for VR. The series began in 2011 with Payday: The Heist, followed by the hugely successful Payday 2 in 2013, which sold over 40 million copies, leading to the most recent entry, Payday 3, in 2023.

As in previous Payday games, you play as a professional crook working with three other criminals to plan a heist, get the loot, and get out by any means necessary.

Aces High's particular set of thieves are the titular Aces, a team of four heisters who have been framed for a crime they didn't commit by the shady businessman Warren Jupiter. After five years in the slammer, they've broken out and made it their sole mission to systematically loot everything Jupiter owns, and to bring his empire crashing down around him.

The plot is deliberately basic, and it mostly stays out of the way for players who may not be totally interested in backstory or criminal lore. But what exposition does exist is deeply designed and presented through excellent voice acting by a talented cast of well-directed actors. Payday: Aces High may not be banking on its storytelling, but it tells a good story for those who want it.

If the plot takes a backseat, it lets the game's great design hook take the wheel. Payday has always presented missions that can be completed in a variety of ways, and Aces High is no different. You might utilize special gadgets to quietly break and enter, hack security systems to meander through secure areas with total nonchalance, or put on a grotesque facemask and smash your way through the front doors. You can stealth your way through missions, go in guns blazing, or employ a more nuanced combination of sly wits and brute force. Whatever you choose, there's always a way to win (and lose), and it's this interesting quasi open-endedness that makes Payday worth playing over and over again.

What's the (Game) Plan?

The game contains six heists at launch (a seventh free heist is already road-mapped to release in December), and each contains several sub-objectives in addition to the main score. You'll convene with your crew in the safehouse to choose a heist, get briefed, formulate a plan, and gear up. There's a briefing table, a lounge, a shooting range (with tons of guns), a practice area (not available in shared lobbies), a shop to buy stuff (with in-game currency, reputation, and real-world cash for cosmetics), and a character select and customization area.

Each heist is performed with four players (fairly intelligent bots fill in any unoccupied roster slots, and if a player drops mid-session they're instantly replaced by a bot), and each can be equipped with whatever weapons, gear, gadgets, skills (earned through rep) and deployables you like. This refreshingly gives players agency and freedom that's missing in games where classes are more rigidly defined.

Once you've partied up, briefed, planned, and kitted, it's time to smash and grab. Once you're in a heist, you'll find a game that's gorgeous to look at, sounds phenomenal, is deftly designed, and feels damn good.

Hands-On Heisting

Much of what's so far been described will be familiar to Payday veterans. But what makes this particular Payday so invigorating is the immediacy brought by the hardware through which it's experienced. If playing flatscreen Payday is watching a heist film, Aces High is pulling one yourself. It's a visceral, lived in, cinematic experience that can only exist in a VR headset.

You'll sling your weapon over your shoulder, pull a magazine and slam it into the gun, peek around corners and crouch under fire, manually operate your gadgets and gizmos, and physically hoist duffel bags of loot. When a teammate goes down, you grab a syringe and plunge it into their body. When you need to crack a safe, you twist the dial with your fingertips. When you've got to hack a terminal, you flick your wrist and tap your watch with your opposite finger. And all of this happens while ten other things are vying for your attention.

When a heist goes wrong and you're ducking for cover behind a museum display case, bullets whirring by and glass shattering around you; when you're shouting to a friend to grab the loot and run; when you're rifling through papers or hacking a computer while one buddy drills through a bank vault and another holds the cops at bay by the blistering flash of an M16; there's really nothing like it.

Best Laid Plans

So, it's a very good game. But even the best of us have a few warts.

Do I wish there was more variety in the heists? Sure. Would a perfect game have more enemy types? Yes. Would objectives be a bit easier to decipher in the heat of battle? That would be nice. And while it's true that it's an exhilarating experience when a heist goes wrong, the fact that every heist I played went wrong at some point eventually made each run a bit predictable.

When we chatted with Fast Travel Games' Chief Creative Officer Erik Odeldahl back in August, he told us in no uncertain terms that completing a heist using stealth (that is, triggering no alarms or firefights) is essentially the game's de facto hard mode (there are selectable difficulty modes, too). After spending a week heisting, I doubt I'll ever pull off a job that doesn't involve me pulling a trigger. This could be a skill issue, I admit, but I also think that, despite the game's inclusion of grappling hooks and other devices ostensibly made to facilitate stealth completion of heists, Payday often ends up feeling like more of a wave shooter than a burglar sim or thief puzzler.

The co-op nature of the game design is also potentially problematic. While the game's friendly bots are well programmed and mostly do what they're supposed to do, they can't really replace human-controlled co-op pals. If you don't have friends to play with you'll be relying on strangers, bots, or playing solo.

This shouldn't pose a major problem from a player base standpoint. Payday: Aces High is cross-play enabled and it's included on day one for subscribers to Meta's Horizon+ subscription service. There's also a useful option to avoid "reported players," which may improve the overall quality of the player pool.

But if you struggle to find a partner (or two or three) there's no denying that Payday just isn't as fun as a solo experience.

Payday: Aces High - Final Verdict

Why beat around the bush? I love Payday: Aces High. It's one of the most fun VR games of the year, and an incredibly engaging experience that could only exist in VR. Planning a heist with pals and then figuring out how to stay alive when it all hits the fan is as exhilarating as any experience I've ever had in a headset. For shooter fans, heist film fans, or anyone craving a thrill, Payday is a must-buy.

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.

YouTube has received modest updates on Meta's standalone VR devices over the years. However, the app's core design is still very similar to the Oculus Go version of the app that launched back in 2018.

Some of the most significant additions include support for higher video resolutions, Mixed Reality wall anchoring on Quest 3 and 3S, and a 'Panel Mode' that lets you open the app in a 2D window to use alongside other system-level apps. Google and Meta also experimented with co-watching at one point, but that was removed from Horizon OS as part of the move to the Loft VR Home Environment, which began with the rollout of Horizon OS v81 PTC. 

While the interface within Panel Mode was updated to offer an experience broadly similar to YouTube on various Smart TVs, the app's immersive view was left largely unchanged.

Now, Google appears to be working on a major overhaul of the app's full-space immersive view, bringing it more in line with other modern spatial experiences.

The new immersive view features a redesigned UI, with a main window that is consistent with the existing Panel Mode experience. It introduces a Horizon OS-style Control Bar, with options for changing the environment and switching to Panel Mode.

Notably, the new interface also allows users to open an additional window for browsing while a video is playing. Videos selected in this window will then play in the main window.

The app now uses additional Meta-specific integrations, including the OS-level Virtual Keyboard overlay. The main window has grab handles and dedicated corner handles for resizing, similar to other windows across Horizon OS, and also automatically adjusts its size to match the aspect ratio of the content being watched.

These changes closely resemble the Android XR version of YouTube, which is designed for Google's own XR operating system, as well as the visionOS version of the app that debuted earlier this year.

On those platforms, YouTube features a Smart TV-like interface for standard browsing, then switches to a spatialized UI during video playback. This playback UI includes additional controls for adjusting the viewing area when watching 360° and 180° 3D content. The in-development Quest version does not currently include those controls.

References to this overhaul were first added to the YouTube app for Quest back in late August, and it surfaces as Meta has been working to improve its spatial app tooling and encouraging developers and partners to optimize their apps for spatial operating systems ahead of the launch of Meta VR Glasses.

Meta Expands SDKs To Boost Spatial Apps On Quest & VR Glasses, Including NBA, Disney+

Meta announced several new SDKs and features to enhance spatial apps on Quest and Meta VR Glasses, alongside major spatial updates for the NBA and Disney+ apps.

UploadVRLuna

Silent North launched in Early Access for Quest and PC VR in April 2025. Set in a post-apocalyptic Swiss Alps, you scavenged, crafted and fought for survival against zombies, other players and the elements while trying to build out a base and potentially form alliances.

It launched to a cold reception from players, currently sitting at a Mostly Negative rating from 101 reviews on Steam and a 3.1 score from 494 ratings on Meta Quest.

Combat Waffle acknowledged the reception in its announcement:

Today, we are announcing that we are retiring Silent North from all platforms.

This means Silent North will no longer be available for purchase on any storefront. The servers will remain online for now, as we want to give our players the chance to continue making memories before we fully sunset the game down the road.

At Combat Waffle Studios, we have big ambitions and tackle big projects, but sometimes we miss the mark. Silent North was our attempt at creating a large-scale survival game set in a persistent world infested with zombies. Sadly, we were pushed to launch earlier than we would have liked. That led to a high refund rate early on and quickly gave the game a poor reputation. Ultimately, we haven't been able to overcome that initial setback and rebuild momentum.

Leaving this project behind is painful, but it is necessary for us to keep moving forward.

Thank you to everyone who supported this project, it truly means the world to us. We are grateful for all the great moments shared in the game, and we hope you enjoyed your time surviving with us.

As the saying goes, 'first impressions are lasting' and games are rarely able to recover from a poor launch. For every No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk 2077, there are scores of titles that, for one reason or another, miss the mark at release and never earn back the trust of consumers. Oftentimes, developers do the work to address player feedback, fix the raised issues, and make the product more viable, but with the speed the news cycle and consumer attention moves, any follow up coverage, if it happens at all, does not capture the same audience.

Combat Waffle did not specify the date servers will be shut down. We will update this article when that information is available.

Superbright CEO Wojtek Podgorski made the announcement via Discord, saying the decision stems from a lack of visibility for Unchained's more accessible gameplay mode, a new potential revenue source to fund further game development, and allowing for game upgrades deemed too risky for Unchained.

More Accessible Gameplay

As Podgorski puts it:

The problem is that outside of our community, almost nobody on Quest knows Siege of Heaven exists. Because the main mode of Unchained is our flagship experience, all of the store presence is focused on that and the dark, intense setting and demanding controls can be intimidating for more casual VR players who would actually love Siege. Giving Siege of Heaven its own spot on the store lets us finally put it in front of those players.

Per Superbright, Siege of Heaven is played by forty percent of Unchained's players who have shared stories of putting friends and family into that gameplay mode to allow them to enjoy In Death's signature archery combat without enemies in close proximity and having to learn the teleport navigation. Siege of Heaven has a skill-based scoring system and the standalone game will have its own separate leaderboards, allowing veteran players to start fresh from the first season.

In Death – Siege Of Heaven: Undeniable, Accessible Wave-Based Fun

There’s something alluring about the entire creepy feel of In Death: Unchained. When that haunting chorus of voices starts up over the Superbright logo, the tone is set perfectly and you know you’re in for a good time. This isn’t a new revelation for me – In Death

UploadVRHarry Baker

Alternative Revenue Source

By this point, we hopefully should not have to recount the numerous job layoffs and studio closures that have been happening in the VR ecosystem over the last few years. Multiple studios have been seeking alternative sources of income to supplement lower VR revenue and fund new projects.

In his post, Podgorski says the IDU community has been requesting Superbright to release paid DLC or other means to continue supporting the studio:

There's one more big reason we're doing this, and it goes back to the messages you've been sending us. So many of you have asked us to release a paid DLC or give you some way to buy the game again just to support us and keep development going. As a smaller team, building a whole new DLC from scratch right now is a huge undertaking and we just don't have the manpower to do it.

Releasing Siege of Heaven as a standalone title is a realistic way for us to reach new players and help fund our ongoing work - and if you're one of the people who asked for a way to support us directly, picking up the standalone version (or grabbing it for a friend or family member who found the main game too intense) helps us out massively. And of course, if you'd rather just keep playing Siege inside In Death: Unchained as you always have, you don't need to buy a thing.

This isn't the first example of VR developers spinning off sections of their games into separate applications. The immersive putting mode in GOLF+ will get its own application soon. Combat Waffle Studios released Ghosts of Tabor: Legacy, a time-locked 2024 version of the popular extraction shooter, earlier this year. Soul Assembly also spun off Home Invasion, the mixed reality mode for co-op zombie shooter Drop Dead: The Cabin.

Mitigating Risks In Upgrades

Superbright did update some of In Death: Unchained after the Quest 3 launched, but Podgorski said some of the upgrades the team wanted to do were too risky for the full game:

Building it as a standalone app also let us make some upgrades under the hood that would have been impossible (or way too risky) to do inside the massive main In Death: Unchained build - most notably a new rendering setup with Mobile HDR for richer lighting and glow, a redesigned lobby menu, and new gameplay music.

The post does not clarify when Siege of Heaven expects to launch and at the time of this article, it is not listed on the Meta Horizon Store. We will keep an eye out.

On top of those great additions, the mind-bending adventure game Reach and the physics-based sandbox I Am Monkey are the Meta Horizon+ Games of the Month for November.

Payday: Aces High is coming to Horizon+ when the game launches on November 5. It's one of the most anticipated VR games to release this year, and a game that we at UploadVR have been looking forward to ever since our preview play session with Payday's creators back in August.

Payday: Aces High puts you and three friends (or matchmade acquaintances) into the shoes of a crew of thieves who have been framed by a former partner, Warren Jupiter. You'll get your revenge by robbing Jupiter's many business interests, using stealth, gadgets, explosive gunplay, (or all of the above) to get even.

Another giant game looms this month, too, as Assassin's Creed Nexus VR parkours its way onto the catalog. In Assassin's Creed Nexus VR you'll sneak your way through cities across three different time periods as you hunt down and eliminate the nefarious Templars using stealth, gadgets, weaponry, and your wits.

Assassin's Creed Nexus VR Review: Stands Proud With The Series

Assassin's Creed Nexus VR proudly stands alongside the main series. Our full review:

UploadVRHenry Stockdale

Meta Horizon+ subscribers also get exclusive deals. November's deals include:

• The 7th Guest VR - This updated VR version of the classic puzzle game is 70% off this month.
• Down the Rabbit Hole - This curious puzzler brings you into Wonderland, and it's 55% off.
• Escaping Wonderland - This followup to Down the Rabbit Hole is a whole new adventure, with new puzzles to solve, yours this month for 55% off.

Horizon+'s monthly add-ons this month include in-game rewards in the free-to-play soccer game VRFS - Football (Soccer) Simulator, which adds a brand new kit for your character, a new soccer ball, and in-game currency to spend. Ironstrike players can grab a unique armor and helmet, as well as 150 units of in-game currency, and Orion Drift players continue to get new cosmetics and in-game cash.

Horizon+ Games Catalog Games

Horizon+ continues offering a Games Catalog of Quest titles that any subscriber can access. Meta can add new games to and remove games from the catalog at any time.

Here is the current Horizon+ Games Catalog in the US:

• Action Hero
• After the Fall®
• Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs
• Asgard's Wrath 2
• Assassin's Creed® Nexus VR
• BattleGlide
• Blacktop Hoops
• Breachers
• Cave Crave
• Cooking Clash
• Crime Shop Simulator: A Prison Boss Game
• Deadly Delivery
• Demeo
• Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked
• Dragon Fist: VR Kung Fu
• Dungeons Of Eternity
• Elements Divided
• Fruit Ninja
• GOLF+
• Green Hell VR
• I Am Cat
• iB Cricket
• I Expect You To Die 2
• In Death: Unchained
• Into the Radius
• Job Simulator
• LES MILLS BODYCOMBAT: Fitness workouts
• Maestro
• Medieval Dynasty New Settlement
• Moss
• Onward
• Outta Hand
• Pets & Stuff
• Pistol Whip
• Premium Bowling
• Project Demigod
• Puzzling Places
• Racket Club
• Real VR Fishing
• Shave & Stuff
• Synth Riders
• The Climb 2
• The Thrill of the Fight
• Thief Simulator VR: Greenview Street
• Titans Clinic
• Vacation Simulator
• Walkabout Mini Golf
• War of Wizards
• Zero Caliber: Reloaded

Horizon+ Indie Catalog Games

Meta continues to add new games to the separate Indie Games Catalog, and you can see the entire list here.

Meta Horizon+ is a subscription service that gives players access to a monthly selection of games for $7.99 USD per month, or $59.99 USD a year. New Horizon+ users can enjoy a one-month free trial.

Horizon OS 2.13 is the final OS release for Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro. It is scheduled to begin rolling out in January 2027 and reach all devices by March 2027. Meta VR OS SDK v213 will also be the last supported SDK version for these devices, while quarterly security patches and critical bug fixes will continue through the end of 2027.

After Horizon OS 2.13 and Meta VR OS SDK v213, new OS features, platform capabilities, and APIs introduced in subsequent releases will only be available on Quest 3, Quest 3S, and newer devices. Meta also won't test new OS and SDK releases against Quest 2 and Quest Pro.

Meta says that existing apps and games will remain fully functional. Users on Quest 2 and Quest Pro can still find, buy, download, and play apps, as well as play multiplayer games with Quest 3 and Quest 3S users where cross-play is supported. Developers can also continue to ship app updates, but the company notes that new app submissions for Quest 2 and Quest Pro will only be accepted through December 2027.

Meta notes that developers must give users at least 180 days' notice before ending support for Quest 2 and Quest Pro if doing so would cause users to lose access to content or essential services.

Developers can use device targeting to freeze a final build for Quest 2 and Quest Pro. They can also stop offering an app for sale on those devices through the app submission flow.

Meta's Standalone VR Devices

Meta Quest 2 launched as Oculus Quest 2 just over six years ago, while Meta Quest Pro launched just over four years ago. Meta announced plans to wind down sales of both Quest 2 and Quest Pro at Meta Connect in September 2024, alongside the introduction of Quest 3S.

Meta Quest 2

Quest 2 launched in October 2020 with the notable value proposition of a much more powerful chipset and higher-resolution display than the original Oculus Quest, starting at just $300.

Quest 2 is widely considered one of the first VR devices to achieve mainstream commercial success. It outsold all its predecessors combined within six months of going on sale, and an internal presentation suggested that Meta had sold nearly 20 million Quest headsets by March 2023.

Meta Has Sold Nearly 20 Million Quest Headsets

Meta has sold almost 20 million Quest headsets so far, according to an internal presentation leaked to The Verge.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Quest 3 then launched as its direct successor in October 2023, starting at $500. Quest 3S followed in October 2024, combining Quest 3's chipset and advanced Mixed Reality features with Quest 2's optics and displays, while returning to the $300 price point.

Meta Quest Pro

Following the success of Quest 2, Meta hoped it could introduce a high-end VR device to serve enthusiasts and businesses.

Quest Pro launched in October 2022. It featured Meta's first pancake lenses, QD-LCD displays with Mini-LED local dimming, Eye Tracking, Face Tracking, and ringless self-tracking Touch Pro controllers. All of its innovations came at a launch price of $1500, significantly more than Quest 2.

Quest Pro was considered a technically impressive device, but it was effectively a commercial failure. Its value proposition was further weakened by leaks suggesting that Quest 3, set to arrive a year later, would feature a GPU twice as powerful as Quest Pro's while launching at a lower price.

Meta Quest Pro Review: For Developers & Early Adopters

We've been putting Quest Pro through its paces since the weekend & here's what we think.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Just four months after Quest Pro launched, Meta cut its price from $1500 to $1000, suggesting that the headset had missed its launch sales targets.

Multiple reports indicated that Meta originally planned to release a direct successor to Quest Pro, codenamed La Jolla, in 2027. However, the device was canceled due to cost concerns, and the company instead decided to prioritize a much smaller, lighter device as a spiritual successor.

That device has since been revealed as Meta VR Glasses, which are planned to ship in spring 2027 for $1300.

Meta VR Glasses Officially Announced, Shipping Spring 2027 For $1300

Meta VR Glasses have 2.4K micro-OLED displays, weigh 100 grams, and are powered by a tethered puck with Qualcomm's Snapdragon Reality Elite chipset.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Meta's end-of-feature timeline for Quest 2 and Quest Pro seems to follow the company's actions with the original Oculus Quest.

Launched in May 2019, the original Quest began its gradual deprecation when Meta announced the first changes in January 2023. It stopped receiving OS updates with v50 in February 2023, developers could no longer submit new apps for it starting in May 2024, and security updates and bug fixes ended in August 2024.

Finally, developers could no longer include support for Quest 1 in app updates starting in January 2025.

Four Years Ago, Oculus Quest Redefined VR

Four years ago Oculus Quest launched, redefining the VR industry forever.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

The transition of Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro to end-of-feature status largely marks the end of an era for Meta's older standalone VR devices, while paving the way for a new generation of devices with different form factors.

2026 is winding down, but the flow of new VR releases isn't slowing down as we enter the holiday season. November tends to be frontloaded in the first couple of weeks as the tail end runs into the Thanksgiving holiday in November which comes with a slew of Black Friday & Cyber Monday sales on existing games crowding the field.

The games on this list all have confirmed release dates either directly stated by the developer or from storefront pages. If you know of a game we missed or if a release date is announced mid-month, let us know down in the comments.

For now, here's our list:

Scared by Squares (PC VR) - November 3

Scared by Squares is a surreal psychological horror puzzle platformer in a world made entirely of cubes. You have been sent to The Cube, a digital prison constructed from perfect squares to investigate reports of corrupted geometry. This game launched in Early Access on Quest in late 2025 and added multiplayer earlier this year. The Steam Early Access version will launch as a hybrid title with added flatscreen support and every post-launch update from the original Quest game. A free demo is currently available.

Store Link(s): PC VR

Stuffed: Two Foot Hero (Quest, PC VR) - November 3

Stuffed: Two Foot Hero is set inside the dreams of a little girl. The family-friendly shooter puts players in the paws of a two-foot-tall teddy bear defending its owner from waves of nightmares. Players can fight solo or team up with up to three friends. The game was built from the ground up for VR, and expands on the original Stuffed with twelve weapons, six maps, new enemies, bosses, traps, turrets, and more. There is a free demo available on Steam.

Store Link(s): PC VR, Quest

Flyon (Quest) - November 5

Flyon RC is a VR/MR miniature flying game where you fly drones, helicopters, and RC planes in either a virtual environment or your own room. You can play with friends in co-op and complete skill challenges.

Store Link(s): Quest

Forefront (PS VR2) - November 5

After leaving Early Access earlier this year, Triangle Factory's Battlefield-inspired shooter Forefront arrives on PlayStation VR2 with adaptive trigger support, headset haptics, and running at a native 90Hz.

Store Link(s): PS VR2

Payday: Aces High (Quest, PC VR) - November 5

Fast Travel Games' spinoff heist shooter Payday: Aces High finally releases after two well-received playtests. You and up to three friends play as a team of thieves out for revenge on their wealthy benefactor who betrayed them. The game will launch with six heists available, with another planned for release before the end of the year.

Store Link(s): Quest, PC VR

Zero Caliber 2 (PS VR2) - November 5

PlayStation VR2 fans will have their choice of new shooters on November 5 as XReal Games' cinematic action FPS Zero Caliber 2 also launches on that day. This is the PC VR remastered version with improved graphics and lighting coupled with extra PS VR2 features like headset haptics and adaptive triggers running at a native 90fps with support for bHaptics accessories.

Store Link(s): PS VR2

The Great Flood (Quest) - November 9

The Great Flood is a fast-paced PvP real-time strategy game for up to four players. You choose from a roster of over fifty units to deploy on the battlefield and pair them with artifacts and defensive structures to win the fight. The game will have themed limited-time events and a seasonal battle pass to unlock special rewards.

Store Link(s): Quest

Hyperlane Highway (PC VR) - November 10

Hyperlane Highway is a futuristic hoverboard roguelite shooter with a unique 'lean' system where you steer your board left and right by physically leaning your body in that direction. Nine different 'sponsors' offer you a choice of over ninety enhancements to upgrade your build during each run. At the time of this article, there is a free demo available on Steam.

Store Link(s): PC VR

Sol Protocol (PC VR) - November 11

Sol Protocol is a three-player co-op space exploration roguelite. Trios of players man three different positions aboard your spaceship to explore different systems for resources to repair your ship and upgrades for more dangerous systems with higher rewards. It originally launched for Quest in Early Access in September. At the time of this article, there is a free demo available on Steam.

Store Link(s): PC VR

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2 (Quest 3) - November 12

The long-awaited sequel to a beloved VR sandbox FPS finally arrives with Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2 on Quest 3. As explained by Rust Ltd. head Anton Hand, the PC VR version will launch sometime in 2027, allowing more time for a new official framework for mod support and extensive testing with the array of PC VR-compatible headsets and PC configurations. H3VR2's primary mode, 'Facility', is an extraction-style campaign where you battle enemies and loot resources in a procedurally generated megastructure. Hand said the game will run as a "pseudo-live service" with biomes planned to be added at a rate of two new ones per year.

Store Link(s): Quest 3

Fading Light VR (Quest) - November 12

In Fading Light, you will play solo or team up with up to three additional players to explore a zombie-infested open-world city, gather resources, craft gear and build bases to survive the zombie hordes together.

Store Link(s): Quest

Sunstone of Time (PC VR, Quest) - November 25

Sunstone of Time is a historical puzzle game that puts you in the role of a scientist on an unexpected trip to the Aztec period.

Store Link(s): Quest, PC VR, PS VR2

Div Zero (PC VR) - November 27

Div Zero is a single-player environmental puzzle adventure centered on exploring a fractured world. Across ten different scenes, you discover clues in each room to discover why the dimensions are fracturing.

Store Link(s): PC VR

This news was first brought to our attention via a BlueSky post from Kyle Hilliard, the husband of one of the affected employees, Ashley Godbold.

Schell Games formally announced the layoffs with the following statement on LinkedIn:

We’re very sad to say that due to this challenging time in the game industry, Schell Games has found it necessary to lay off a significant number of employees in order to ensure a sustainable future for our studio. While this will enable us to stay stable moving forward, it is incredibly painful as we are losing some fantastic talent.

This is Schell's second round of layoffs this year. The first was in August, with an employee commenting at the time that the cuts were due to the industry 'hemorrhaging,' echoing the sentiments of Mighty Coconut founder Lucas Martell when announcing his company's second round of layoffs in 2026.

Among Us 3D Developer Schell Games Confirms Layoffs

Among Us 3D & I Expect You To Die developer Schell Games has laid off employees for the first time in its history.

UploadVRMike Johnson

2026 has seen a number of tenured VR teams either affected by layoffs or closing down entirely. Mighty Coconut, Kluge Interactive, Survios, Camouflaj, Schell, and Combat Waffle have all gone through layoffs while Sanzaru Games, Twisted Pixel, Armature, Polyarc Games, Vertigo Games Amsterdam (formerly Force Field Entertainment), and two internal studios within nDreams have all shut down.

Schell Games is currently developing Dragon Grove, a cozy 3D puzzler announced at Meta Connect expected to launch in spring 2027 for Meta VR Glasses and Quest 3. Its past projects include the I Expect You To Die series, Among Us 3D, Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire and Project Freefall.

Developer Othergate could have stopped at September's Tomb Extraction update and called that this year's spooky season content drop as the new realm type definitely fit the spirit of the season, but instead the team refused to rest on its laurels and dropped a proper Halloween update.

Here's a rundown of the highlights:

• The Stormgrave realm returns, this time for good. By popular demand, the rain and lightning-riddled realm is available permanently. With it comes a new chamber style, Deadwood Forest, filled with huge dead trees casting shadows over tombs and graveyards.
• The lobby and main menu get a Deadwood Forest-themed makeover.
• New monsters: the vampire is a miniboss in the Stormgrave realm, mummies replace the zombies in Sandstorm, and pumpkin head skeletons will run you down and explode into cluster bombs.
• The Keep chambers have several new variants added.
• A new Halloween Cosmetics Bundle DLC includes appropriately themed headpieces, accent colors, and wing cosmetics. It is priced at $6.99.

• Celebrating Dungeons of Eternity's third birthday, every player will receive a one, two, or three year trophy in their room depending on how long they have been playing.
• A new potion chest has been added to better organize your inventory between dungeon runs.
• Weapons can now be traded with other players in the vendor area of the outpost.
• If you fall into a pit, you now have to be pulled back up by a teammate. If they feel nice enough to do so.
• A teleporter has been added to the Outpost to move you from the Vendor area to the Crypt and back.

Dungeons of Eternity is available on Steam and Quest.

Triangle Factory has announced that its popular Battlefield-like 32-player FPS, Forefront, is coming to PlayStation VR2 on November 5.

The release comes with cross play between PC VR, Quest, and Sony users. The PS VR2 release naturally makes use of the great tech found in Sony's headset, including adaptive triggers and headset haptics, and Forefront runs at 90Hz on both PS5 and PS5 Pro.

The news of Forefront's PS VR2 port comes just after Triangle Factory released one of Forefront's biggest updates ever, which introduced a "Battle Pass" style progression system for unlocking weapons and cosmetics. The update, called "Operation: Sandstorm" also introduces a melee weapon, a new gun, a new game mode, and much more.

The full update details can be seen here:

Forefront Update Adds New Game Mode, Melee Weapon, "Battle Pass" & More

Forefront's latest update, called Operation: Sandstorm, adds a new game mode, melee weapon, progression-tied unlockables, and much more.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

Forefront is available today on Quest, Steam, and Pico, and it's coming to PlayStation VR2 on November 5.

The first game retails for $14.99 and the second is priced at $19.99. At the time of this article, we do not know if there is an 'upgrade' path for owners of the original games as we saw with 2024's Arizona Sunshine Remake. That said, developer Bit Planet Games has also released a bundle for $24.99, $10 cheaper than purchasing both new titles separately.

Ultrawings Remastered - Remaking A True OG

The first Ultrawings was released in 2017 for Oculus Rift, Steam, and PlayStation VR as one of the first open-world VR flight games to utilize the virtual stick, throttle, and cockpit controls as opposed to confining controls to the analog sticks and button presses. It was a launch title for the Oculus Go in 2018 and the original Oculus Quest in May 2019 with crossbuy for those who already owned the Oculus Rift version, meaning if you owned one, you got the other for free.

Remastered is, per Bit Planet, the original PC version of the game with some additional enhancements. All four planes and over two hundred missions return from the original with the Quest 3 enhancements bringing a new ocean, a wider variety of skies to fly through, better haptics, new music and upgrades to lighting and shadows.

Ultrawings 2 Gold Edition

Ultrawings 2 launched first for Quest 2 in February 2022 and jumped to PC VR on Steam eight months later in October. PlayStation VR2 followed in January 2024 with support for that system's adaptive triggers and headset haptics at a native 90Hz refresh rate. The sequel introduced new aircraft and competitive gameplay with aerial dogfights for up to eight players and ring races much to the delight of returning players looking for more action after the first game's more relaxed atmosphere.

We loved Ultrawings 2 when we reviewed it at release, calling it "the exact kind of VR sequel we’ve been hoping for, building upon the original’s modest beginnings with a massive increase in scope and variety whilst retaining its air-tight controls and level design."

The Gold Edition brings back the six aircraft from the original with a new dynamic weather system ranging from clear blue skies to lightning storms and a new full day cycle as you fly. The controller haptics have also been overhauled to take full advantage of Quest 3's TruTouch haptics system.

Both games being rebuilt for Quest 3 headsets also means a higher native render resolution and presumably better draw distance, which is important for a flying game with a visible horizon. Few things can break immersion in games like this worse than seeing islands and such pop in as you approach them.

Ultrawings Remastered and Ultrawings 2 Gold Edition are available now for Quest 3 separately or at a discount in a bundle.

Real VR Fishing Great Lakes & Oceans is the latest paid DLC for the popular VR fishing game. It introduces ten new fishing spots, including six locations on the Great Lakes of the US-Canada border, 30 new fish species including five freshwater monsters and three new sharks, new cosmetic items, and a new set of achievements and trophies.

Beyond the new locations, gear, and fish, the headline item in this DLC is the freshwater monster species. Up until this DLC release, the toughest battles in Real VR Fishing have all come when we hook a shark, and this has exclusively occurred only in saltwater (naturally). Now, freshwater monsters can bring that same battle to the game's lakes and rivers.

The way it happens is also pretty interesting. To catch a freshwater monster, you'll have to hook a regular fish and begin reeling it in. At times, randomly, and mid-fight with the smaller fish, a giant monstrous fish with shark-class power and difficulty will rise from the depths and steal your catch. From there, you've hooked a monster and the battle is on.

There are five freshwater monsters in this DLC, and each has a separate encyclopedia entry, its own trophy, and landing your first one unlocks a unique rod and reel set.

Real VR Fishing Great Lakes & Oceans DLC will be available on Meta Quest on November 10, and on SteamVR on November 11. The paid DLC costs $12.99, and the base game is priced at $19.99.

Here's the trailer:

Vaelorys features co-op multiplayer 'Diablo-style' dungeon crawling for up to eight players, an arena mode where you combat hordes of enemies, over thirty unlockable gesture-based spells, a progression system with multiple classes and builds, and owing to the Diablo roots, lots of loot to be found during runs.

Developer Spellbound Studio is still conducting playtests and seeking feedback to shape future updates with features players would like to see added. A low launch cost of $4.99 was likely priced to entice players to take a chance on the game.

Fans of the Diablo series have not had a lot of choices for VR, with the best available options being Dungeons of Eternity and Legendary Tales. A Township Tale developer Alta cancelled its co-op dungeon crawler Reave earlier this year.

Vaelorys is available now for Quest.

The Elusive Target missions are a series of free limited-time missions featuring well known actors and entertainers. Previous Elusive Targets this year featured hip hop stars Wiz Khalifa and Snoop Dogg and actress Milla Jovovich.

Here's the trailer for The Host:

Jacksepticeye, real name Seán McLoughlin, is an Irish YouTuber with over 31M subscribers and 17B total views. In The Host, he plays Finn Colton, known online as Finnvictus, a controversial, yet popular content creator and former child star suspected of murdering a fellow content creator who has gone missing. A relative of the missing person is the client who hires Agent 47.

As depicted in the trailer, you go undercover as Agent 47 portraying a reclusive millionaire named Tobias Rieper who appears on Colton's Finn and Friends podcast. To play this special mission, you need to have previously unlocked the Hawke's Bay location.

Jacksepticeye had this to say of his role:

I’ve been playing HITMAN with my community for years, so getting to actually step into the World of Assassination is unreal. Finn is loud, paranoid, and completely obsessed with content, and playing him was an absolute blast. I can’t wait to see all the creative ways you take him down, so make sure you’re recording it!

The mission kicks off a new season of content, including five challenges, the returns of previous Elusive Target missions, a Twitch Drops campaign, and a paid themed DLC for The Host with new cosmetics and permanent access to The Host among other things.

Hitman: World of Assassination is available in VR on Steam and PlayStation VR2. The Host is a free add-on to the game available from October 29 until November 25. It is also included in the free demo for the game.

Forefront has just launched a new update known as Operation: Sandstorm which adds a new game mode, a combat knife (the game's first melee weapon), a new rifle, and a new progression system called "Operations" that's essentially a "battle pass" in all but name.

Operations offers players an opportunity to unlock free rewards, through gathering points from daily and weekly challenges. Operations also offers premium rewards, such as character and vehicle skins, weapon patterns, and more, if players choose to purchase the premium version of the Operation.

In addition, the update adds a new game mode called "Breakthrough" which is a mix between Conquest and Rush. The objective is for attackers to push and capture all points in a sector until they overwhelm the enemy and conquer the map, while defenders try to maintain control of their sectors.

The full list of changes is included here, pasted from the game's Steam update page. Enjoy!

Changelog | 7.0.171

Featured

• Added **Operation: Sandstorm!** Operations allow players to unlock new weapons, vehicle and character skins, player cards, charms, emblems, weapon patterns, and more!
• Added new gun, the **FMS** (Unlockable through Operation: Sandstorm)
• Added a **Knife** melee weapon (Unlockable through Operation: Sandstorm
• Added bHaptics support | Supported devices include TactSuit vests, TactSleeve, and the TactVisor.
• Added new gamemode: Breakthrough | Available on Tunnels, Siberia, Mauritania, and Fjord.
• Added Character skins and Vehicle skins (Unlockable through Operation: Sandstorm)

General

• Added daily and weekly challenges through which players earn XP, or points to spend on free or premium operation rewards
• Added more server performance improvements
• Added more network bandwidth improvements
• Added movement speed increase when only holding knife
• Added knife kills awarding extra score and making the victim “executed” (which blocks revives)
• Added giving a player ammo when killing someone with the knife
• Improved foveated rendering on Steam Frame
• Improved voice chat systems and its error handling
• Fixed an issue that resulted in players letting go of grabbed equipment at random times or even the equipment swapping hands
• Fixed an issue where player loadout wouldn’t save between matches due to changes including a new unlock
• Fixed claymores and anti-tank mine kills counting as air kills while parachuting
• Fixed voice restricted players not being able to hear others
• Fixed respawned character keeping the previous corpse ragdoll active
• Fixed getting softlocked during onboarding when closing the game while choosing username
• Fixed the whole party getting kicked from the game when the leader is getting errors
• Fixed controller rebinding being broken
• Updated whiteboard

Weapons & Attachments

• Added separate movement slow stats while firing for each weapon category (for example, SMGs will have less of a slowing effect than LMGs)
• Added gun mastery for the FMS (won’t affect the T5 and T6 unlocks for the base game guns)
• Added remembering the laser enabled state upon respawn
• Fixed the jitter on the Qilin reload animation
• Fixed players getting teleported when colliding with friendly vehicles
• Fixed LMGs Fire Rate Discrepancy Compared to ARs

Gadgets & Perks

• Fixed spotting inconsistencies with the drone
• Fixed an issue where knobs on Spawn Beacon couldn’t be turned 360 degrees
• Fixed detonating an enemy's C4 only giving the player an assist and not a kill
• Fixed C4 on a vehicle acting as a shield against tank or RPG shots
• Fixed Stim inconsistencies while inside transport helicopter
• Fixed stim gun reload mispredictions

Vehicles

• Fixed the crash sound for fighter jets not playing sometimes
• Fixed player being able to shoot through Little Bird body to hit the pilot from below
• Fixed unoccupied vehicles stuttering while they are still moving

Maps

• Fixed characters getting stuck on top of pillars on Karst
• Fixed various gaps and holes on Fjord
• Fixed players getting stuck on the water plane under the map on Oasis
• Fixed various places where players falling through the floor on a variety of maps
• Fixed idle vehicle damage on Paradise

UI

• Added sorting by unlock requirement for the My Soldier view
• Added melee weapon slot to the loadout menu
• Added vehicle and character skin selection to the loadout menu
• Fixed name tag above ragdoll not always showing when standing nearby
• Fixed fighter jet icon flying backward on the respawn map

Forefront is available now on Quest, Steam, and Pico. It's coming to PlayStation VR2 on November 5.

Exoshock, the 1-4 player co-op sci-fi PvE shooter built for VR is out now on Meta Quest 3 and 3S and PC VR via Steam. The game is also playable on flat screen PC and cross-play is active across all platforms.

A trailer has been shared to announce the game's EA release, included here:

Developed by PolarityOne, Exoshock is a 1-4 player cooperative sci-fi PvE shooter with a gritty dystopian setting. The FPS promises intense firefights as you enter active war zones, prioritizing squad tactics as you adapt and fight using customizable loadouts.

Exoshock has been previously playable by purchasing the "Founder's Edition," a pre-Early Access build which we went hands-on with back in April. At that time, our writer wrote, "Exoshock is shaping up to be one of the most exciting shooters VR has seen in a long time."

Exoshock - Hands On With The Founders Edition

Exoshock is a visceral, first person shooter that can now be accessed via the Founders Edition before it launches in Early Access.

UploadVRPete Austin

Exoshock is out now in Early Access on PC VR and Meta Quest 3 at a price of $19.99.

Adding to the growing list of VR games with spooky season updates, both games have limited-time updates for you to dive into.

Ghosts of Tabor

The popular extraction shooter has released a Halloween-themed bunker (pictured above) and launched a Twitch drops campaign running until November 2. If you are unfamiliar with drops, it is a collaboration between developers and Twitch, a livestreaming platform, wherein you can earn exclusive in-game rewards simply by tuning in to a livestream of the game. These have been quite popular on Twitch for some time, but speaking as someone who has livestreamed VR on Twitch for over five years, it is rare to see VR developers do drops campaigns. Tabor and No Man's Sky have been the most frequent users of these campaigns that I am aware of for VR.

To qualify, you'll need to have played Tabor at least once during this current wipe period and link your account online, which can be done here.

Ghosts of Tabor is available now on Quest, Steam, PS VR2, and Pico.

Knights of Fiona

Since launch, Knights of Fiona has been steadily adding new quests with special rewards for players. October 20 kicked off a new Halloween Event Quest that ends on November 12 with two new rewards: a pumpkin shield and a Halloween body (both pictured above).

This quest is free to all players, including those who did not purchase the Story Pass to complete the full campaign. To start the quest, go to the quest board in the Eftora Station, select 'battle' and 'special' to see the quest. This quest can be completed in co-op with friends.

Additionally, the Got 'Em Mall also has several pumpkin hat sets available as in-app purchases.

Knights of Fiona is available now free to play on the Meta Horizon Store and Steam. 

This update coincides with the iOS launch of the game. Here's the trailer:

The deep-space outposts, introduced in the Cosmos update this year, now have forsaken traders, new merchants who task you with retrieving haunting mementos from hulk wrecks in space, infested outposts, derelict freighters, and paleontological digsites. The mementos can be traded for special modules for corvette ships, a new ship type introduced in the Voyagers update, including new cockpits and biomechanical components.

You can also pick up new space courier contracts from deep-space outposts, tasking you to deliver important packages for high pay.

The Forsaken update also brings significant quality of life features, some of which have been requested by the community:

• The new minimal HUD mode minimizes the compass, hazard protection bars and mission notifications while hiding non-essential markers.
• The holo-arena battles introduced in this year's Xeno Arena update have been extended to deep-space outposts.
• Stars in nearby systems will now appear as targetable destinations that can be flown to directly while flying in a ship in deep space, bypassing having to navigate to them via the galaxy map.
• Off-planet bases can now be uploaded to No Man's Sky, allowing other players to visit bases that are not their own.
• The multi-tool now has a weapon select wheel for quick switching between modules instead of cycling through with a button press.

No Man's Sky is available on Steam and PS VR2. The Forsaken update is free to all players.

Sega Amusements has unveiled a new video, screenshots, brochure, and sales page for their upcoming VR arcade game House of the Dead Reawakened, giving us our first clear look at the game cabinet, VR headset, and (at least a glimpse of) gameplay.

House of the Dead Reawakened is a two-player arcade horror experience with a "terrifying gothic cabinet." The cabinet is themed like a decrepit manor, with two 43" vertical displays forming the manor's side windows, and a massive 85" display serving as the front door. While players play in their VR headset, the displays show the action happening on screen to arcade-goers and passersby.

The game has been developed in Unreal Engine 5 and uses DPVR E4C commercial-grade VR headsets. The guns feature haptic feedback and recoil.

Much of this information is included in the game's sales brochure:

House of the Dead Reawakened follows in the footsteps of the original The House of the Dead, which was first released in arcades in 1997 and then ported to Sega's then-current home console, Sega Saturn, in 1998.

Numerous mainline releases have followed in arcades, with standalone games and ports appearing on a wide range of home game consoles since. The series has also enjoyed several spin-offs, and at least one (fairly terrible) movie. A new film is currently being developed.

The most recent all-new release in the series was 2018's arcade shooter The House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn, which was a more traditional arcade shooter that did not feature VR tech.

House of the Dead Reawakened makes its global debut at the arcade and amusement park trade show IAAPA Orlando in mid-November. A release date has not been confirmed yet, but it seems likely that these zombies will be haunting arcades in 2027.

As a fan of VR, I've often struggled with the state of the retail experience as it relates to VR. Last year I visited a large Best Buy store and was so disgusted by the Meta Quest display I found there that I was motivated to write an editorial about the experience.

Since then, Meta has upped their retail strategy significantly, opening several first-party Meta Lab locations around the United States. Additionally, it has aggressively pursued an expansion of the Meta Lab in-store retail experience at select Best Buy locations, called Meta Lab @ Best Buy, with over 50 locations planned by the end of 2026.

Both retail experiences feature the Meta and Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, as well as the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, and Meta Quest VR headsets and related accessories.

After realizing my business travels would take me through New York City, I decided to visit both the Meta Lab flagship store in Manhattan, as well as a Meta Lab @ Best Buy location, and see how the experiences compare, and what they deliver to the general shopping public.

I made appointments for a Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses demo at a Best Buy in Westbury, NY and the Meta Lab in New York City. I received email confirmations and reminders for each appointment.

Meta Lab @ Best Buy

My first appointment was at the Best Buy in Westbury, NY. Walking in, the Meta Lab is off to the right, which is prime territory in retail space. The display was bright and modern, with Meta's signature blue branding contrasting with light wood tones.

I was greeted quickly by an employee who later told me that he's employed by Meta under a special arrangement with Best Buy. We confirmed that I was there for my demo and quickly walked to the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses area, where they had demo units charged and waiting. They had both sizes and colors available for the demo, and we determined that the standard size would fit me best. I chose to try the Sand colorway.

I was then fitted with the Neural Band that accompanies the Display glasses. Once we settled on size 3, it was time to start the demo.

And that's where things went sideways.

It turns out that Meta was rolling out a "software update" that rendered the Neural Band useless and limited functionality of the glasses themselves. The employee was apologetic and still delivered a high-quality demo using the right stem touchpad controls to navigate the UI, to the best of his ability given the circumstances.

Despite my disappointment at being unable to fully demo the glasses and Neural Band, I was impressed by the employee's knowledge, directing the demo from memory, unable to see what I was seeing in the monocular display.

He asked me questions to help guide his presentation. How would I envision using this function? Would I see myself doing this or that? His enthusiasm for the product came through. I asked him how long he's been working there and he told me only two months - pretty impressive training, I thought to myself.

The challenge and friction I encountered was technological, frustrating yes, but I came away from the demo feeling positive about the experience, mostly due to the employee who did such a nice job in non-optimal circumstances. If I were actually going to purchase these glasses, I would not hesitate to go back for a full demo once Meta's "software update" was completed.

While there, I also decided to demo a Meta Quest VR headset to see how they were being presented and sold.

My original employee had to go attend a training session, so I was handed off to a second employee. He quickly brought me to the Quest display. I asked about the differences between the Quest 3 and 3S, and he explained them competently. Again, I was impressed by the enthusiasm of the employee. He also asked me questions about my experience with VR and how I would be using the headset.

The Quest 3 I tried was pre-loaded with several games that demonstrate some of the most accessible standalone VR and MR experiences. Beat Saber, Golf+, First Encounters (mixed reality experience), and Cubism are the games I can recall, among others. Also notable is the "Streaming" experience which loads up a large virtual screen and displays TV and movie content.

The employee gave me the option to sit if I was uncomfortable. When I told him I was going to remain standing, he made sure I was positioned in a safe space, and I could hear him tell other customers to steer clear of my flailing hands.

After playing a bit of Beat Saber and trying the Streaming experience, I thanked the employee for the demo and took some time to look around the space at how these devices were being merchandised.

Compared to the horror show I encountered last year, this was VR retail nirvana. The shelves were stocked with headsets, accessories, and gift cards. There was digital signage highlighting some standout experiences and comparing headset models. The display table had both Quest 3 and Quest 3S mounted face-down, to better enable customers to compare the pancake and Fresnel lenses.

It's impossible to miss the space given to the AI glasses, with large rows of models available to try on, and digital signage that includes a camera for virtual try-ons as well.

Overall I came away from the Meta Lab @ Best Buy experience feeling like I was treated with care by the employees, and served with respect by the merchandising and space design. Unfortunate as it was to have my demo affected by a software issue, I felt that it was time well spent, and as a customer I would be very comfortable buying in this environment.

Meta Lab Flagship Store - New York City

Walking down 5th Avenue, it's hard to miss the Meta Lab, with its deep cobalt blue painted frontage, extending three stories up.

Upon entering the Meta Lab store, you enter a curated space that is trendy yet warm. AI glasses dominate the displays on the walls, with some Quest headsets on display as well in the main floor showroom. I was directed to take the elevator to the second floor and check in at the demo desk for my appointment.

I was asked to sit at a nearby table. Within what felt like 20 seconds, an employee approached with Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses and Neural Bands. After introducing himself, he fit me for the frames and Neural Band, and we commenced the demo.

This time I got to fully experience the Display glasses as intended, using the Neural Band to navigate the UI on the monocular display. I used maps to navigate to a nearby location, scrolled an Instagram feed, and took photos and videos. During the demo the Meta employee could follow along on a phone app, seeing what I was seeing to help guide the experience.

Throughout the demo we chatted about how interesting AR technology is. He was very clearly a tech enthusiast and transmitted his excitement openly. He delivered the demo professionally, asking me questions about my anticipated use cases, and also allowed me time to freely navigate around the UI without narration.

At the conclusion of the demo I was offered snacks and refreshments. A Meta manager approached to ask how I enjoyed my demo. I gave my feedback and also complimented the employee for doing a great job. There was zero sales pressure.

I asked about doing a demo of a Quest, and was directed back to the first floor. At this point the Meta Lab experience started to show cracks. The first employee I spoke to wasn't trained on Quest demos, so they summoned a second employee who could set me up with a Quest. The second employee was barely trained on Quest, but was able to take me to a room in the back where there was room for a VR demo. I requested a Quest 3S this time.

A third employee, who was apparently more trained than the first two, now came to take over the demo. She struggled to put the Quest into a demo experience, and instead loaded me into a VR 360 Space video touring a space station and floating on a spacewalk.

This content was completely inappropriate for a demo where the employee never bothered to ask my experience level with VR or my comfort level with potential motion sickness triggers. Though seats were available in the room, it was not suggested that I sit for this experience.

I asked the employee if this was the usual demo, and they said yes. I asked about Beat Saber or First Encounters, and was told that those are available, but was not offered a way to launch those experiences.

Upon finishing my demo, I asked the employee if they enjoyed using VR, and they told me they don't use it. They were pleasant enough, but you could tell they had no passion for the product. They were much more enthusiastic about the AI glasses, which we talked about as we walked together toward the front showroom.

They did take time to point out that the Meta VR Glasses are coming in the spring, and that they hope to have a unit on hand for training early in the year. They seemed much more excited about the VR Glasses as a product, so perhaps that's a good sign for the future.

I had another look around at the myriad AI glasses available, and also noted the steady foot traffic in the store. There seemed to be a mix of locals and tourists visiting the store.

Overall my experience at the Meta Lab Flagship Store was a study in contradictions. The Display glasses demo was outstanding, with a knowledgeable and enthusiastic employee as my guide. The Quest demo found me passed around before a disinterested employee drew the short straw and threw me into a vomit-inducing 360 spacewalk video.

Conclusion and surprise

I was skeptical that the Meta Lab @ Best Buy could deliver an experience equal to the first-party Meta Lab experience.

On the Display glasses demo, I believe that if the Best Buy units were fully functional, I would have experienced an equally impressive demo experience as I did at the genuine Meta Lab in New York City. Both employees were enthusiastic and knowledgeable.

For the Quest demo, Best Buy wins hands down. The headset was in demo mode, with the menu of experiences ready to try. The employee was interested in my needs and had at least a passing interest in VR.

The Meta Lab Quest demo experience fell woefully short of what I expected to find, especially at their "flagship" store. Perhaps it's a training issue, or a matter of hiring people with interest in VR. It will be very interesting to see how Meta Lab employees are trained to present the VR Glasses.

My hope is that I caught the Meta Lab on a bad day for Quest demos.

So for now, it seems there's some genuine improvement to the state of VR retail, and the heavy lifting is being done by the Best Buy version of the Meta Lab experience.

Post-Visit Survey

For both demos I was sent a thank you email with a link to a survey to give feedback on my experiences. I was eager to provide both positive and negative feedback. In both cases, clicking the link opened a web page with this message:

"This survey has reached its quota and responses are no longer being solicited."

I might have to write another editorial.

Before game's end, you're not just puzzling out how to balance planetary ecosystems, grooving to a phenomenal soundtrack by Swedish electronic duo Carbon Based Lifeforms, and interacting with a lovely cast of wonderfully voiced robots and aliens, you're also considering what it means to be homeless and grappling with who gets to decide if people have a healthy place to live.

And while the developers never beat you over the head with the game's deeper message, its last hour does hint at harder conversations about ecology, greed, and the potential destructiveness of progress, all while thankfully maintaining a wry sense of humor and an engaging gameplay loop.

Terry's What?

In Terry's Terraforming, you play as a new hire at the titular company and spend your working days turning dead or dying planets into habitable worlds for alien clients. You'll warm atmospheres, lift mountains from the sea, dig life-giving rivers, prod volcanoes into bursting, and grow lush forests, all to shape the ecosystems of the planets to best suit the aliens who wish to live there.

Each alien species wants something different: this one may need tropical beaches to live, while another may need a frozen tundra or a dry desert. Crafting the perfect world isn't easy. You'll need a veritable tool chest of gizmos to make each world just right, and each tool may be used only at a cost (literally - Terry's Terraforming is a for-profit venture, after all). The goal for much of the game's five-or-so hour playthrough is to achieve the ideal planetary conditions as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.

Before long you learn that you're not actually terraforming worlds, but rather creating expensive simulations for the alien clients. And a meeting with your company's mysterious CEO (sitting in his perch at the highest point of our orbiting space station) confirms the true ambition of Terry's Terraforming; to make money.

By the end, your interactions with the bereft aliens and rapidly diminishing coworkers (budget cuts) put you in a bit of a pickle. Do you follow the CEO's commands to the detriment of your coworkers and clients, or do you take the honest route? I know which one I picked, and earned a pretty satisfying ending for my trouble. Which path you'll walk is up to you.

Playing God

Of course, Terry's Terraforming is a video game, and to be successful, it must be fun to play. Thankfully, it is.

The gameplay loop is essentially this: you'll hit Terry's reception desk, chat with the friendly robots there, collect your assignment, and then head up to the lab to terraform a world into shape alongside your friendly floating computer, Sprout.

In the lab you'll find the terraforming station. Sprout gives you a briefing on the world to be terraformed, and the aliens who hope to live there while a display shows you the "sweet spot," a zone somewhere within two axes that the alien clients will feel is "just right" for them. You'll then try to make the planet hotter or colder, wetter or drier, covered in oceans or dense with forests, depending on the aliens' needs, by using a selection of tools.

These tools are all effective showcases for VR tech. For example, a cheap way to flatten mountains or destroy islands is to grab an asteroid from orbit and slingshot it into the planet's surface, and a quick way to heat up a planet is to use the blowtorch to start a forest fire. Each of these interactions feels distinctive and immediate, and as is the case in all the best VR puzzle games, Terry's capitalizes well on the tactile nature of the medium.

There are fifteen tools in total, and each is unique and interesting in its own way. Furthermore, some tools are non-usable at various points in the adventure (budget cuts, again?), which adds a little wrinkle to the otherwise fairly straightforward gameplay.

In addition to the terraforming, which makes up the vast majority of the gameplay, there's also a tool called "Sweet View," a play on Google Street View. Using this tool teleports you down to the surface of whatever planet you're currently creating. Here you can freely teleport in any direction, exploring on foot and snapping photos and videos with a special camera. These you can save for your own use, or to be shared with your alien clients (indeed this changes some of the interactions in interesting, if minor, ways). It's neat, but somewhat underdeveloped. After a few moments on the surface of the planet there is a distinct feeling of, "Okay, now what?" At the same time, it's interesting to see just how greatly your terraforming actions impact things on the ground level, and the photo geek in me does love making virtual photos, too.

Between terraforming sessions you'll chat with your robot colleagues and with the visiting alien clients. There's an observation deck with a translation machine that lets you chat with the aliens, and while some of these interactions are fairly innocuous and shallow, others are surprisingly affecting. It is this emotional content that spurs you on to the game's surprising conclusion, one which will almost certainly have you reflecting on conditions found in our own real world.

Terry's Terraforming Review - Final Verdict

Terry's Terraforming surprised me. It's a tactile and funny job simulator with great VR bones and some interesting mechanics. It also tells a surprisingly earnest story about who gets a home, and who gets to decide who gets a home. It never lectures, but it certainly has something to say. The fact that it can speak this way while also remaining fun and funny is a real testament to the creativity and heart of the people who made it.

Terry's Terraforming is available now on Meta Quest 3. It's coming to Steam at a later date.

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.

I do not talk about this often, but I do 'maintenance checks' on VR platforms on a regular basis. I'm a bit of a nerd for data like this, so I read the PlayStation blog every month to see if there is any new blood in the PS VR2 top monthly downloads. Same with Valve's hardware survey, where I check for any changes in VR headset usage for PC VR. Every Friday and Monday, I check the weekly 'Top Selling' category on the Meta Horizon store. As you can imagine, this due diligence is often fruitless as these lists rarely show anything significant unless there's a sale with a game riding a huge discount to the top of the charts, like the infamous Max Mustard 90% off sale in summer 2024 and Alien: Rogue Incursion on PS VR2 earlier this year.

Which brings me to Fishy, Enver's massively multiplayer online fishing game that launched officially on October 15. At the time of this article, Fishy sits at number ten, pushing Wooster Games' popular Animal Company out of the top ten into the eleventh slot. With its success, Enver currently occupies three of the top ten slots for Quest along with its own hit Scary Baboon and ContinuumXR's caveman sandbox UG, a title Enver helped to fund and market alongside fellow top ten title Yeeps developer Trass Games. Building off the success of UG, Enver and Trass announced a joint initiative earlier this year to fund more social VR projects.

To my knowledge, the only other teams to have two or more games in the top selling list simultaneously were New Folder Games with I Am Cat and I Am Security soon after the latter released and Owlchemy Labs' Vacation Simulator and Job Simulator in years past. I Am Cat, by the way, was also the number one downloaded game for PS VR2 in September.

Amidst the constant barrage of free-to-play so-called "slop" that hits the Quest store on a weekly basis, the top ten remains remarkably consistent. Besides Fishy, SigmonVR's Hero x Hero, a free-to-play action-shooter is the only other 2026 title on the list, currently at number one at the time of this article.

With free to play games dominating the charts, another 'check' I do is filtering out the free to play games and looking over the paid charts. This top ten also rarely changes, but chaotic prison sandbox Bad Inmate, released earlier this month, cracked the 'paid' top ten at number five.

The physics-driven sandbox Voxel Playground is now available on Steam for the first time. The new release includes all the content that was recently added to the Quest version of the game, including an all-new Bank Heist Map, community mod support, overhauled gore and destruction, seven sandbox maps, and survival mode.

The new Bank map features a full heist sandbox; a bank, a vault, and plenty of ways to pull off the perfect heist. The Bank map joins previously released maps like Prison, Night Club, Construction Site, and Bloodmoon.

Voxel Playground is a physics sandbox playable in VR (it's also playable on flatscreen) in which every in-game object is built from tiny, destroyable voxels. Players build, fight, play, and experiment with chaotic weapons and mods across an ever-expanding collection of sandbox maps.

Voxel Playground is in Early Access, and according to the game's developer, a multiplayer update is planned for the game's "Christmas update" this year.

Voxel Playground released in Early Access on Quest at the very end of 2025, and holds a 4.8 out of 5 stars rating based on nearly 5,000 user ratings. The game is now available on PC VR via Steam.

I've played several of these Dead Space-like VR adventures in the past like Memoreum and By Grit Alone, both of which were ambitious efforts that came up short in one way or another. Rustmourne, due out in early 2027, nails one crucial element of Visceral Games' classic formula: a single enemy is enough to unnerve you.

VR games can oftentimes get caught up in ensuring you feel empowered and with survival shooters, that often amounts to throwing scores of easily defeated enemies at you. That very premise flies in the face of the Dead Space formula, where for all but the most elite of players, combat feels like a struggle. The first two enemy types you meet in Rustmourne have no legs and crawl towards you with long robotic arms. Despite that, even with one of them literally being blind and tracking you by sound, they are more intimidating than anything else I've faced in VR recently.

You wake up in some sort of chamber in a futuristic warehouse of sorts, impaled with a piece of metal piping that you have to remove. You quickly learn to use your gravity gloves to grab objects from afar or move them out of your way and proceed deeper into the facility until you meet your first blind one, the aforementioned crawling automaton that introduces itself by dropping a body right in front of you. Message received. This thing is no joke. With no way to defend yourself, you're forced to employ the classic stealth game trope of 'distract the enemy with a noise opposite the direction you want to go.'

Over the next hour or so of the demo, you are led through the facility by a disembodied voice, gain the ability to flick objects at great force to attack enemies and break through barriers, and acquire your first weapon: a gun that is a dead ringer for Dead Space's plasma cutter. As soon as you acquire these new defenses, the game ramps up by dispensing with feeding you one enemy at a time. Stand your ground with three crawlers bearing down on you if you dare. Simply backing up won't work because the crawlers are faster than you.

It's all wonderfully realized and presented in a dirty, grimy, visually stunning industrial environment. Sound design, a crucial element of games like this, is on point, giving you reason to pause every few steps and go "what was that I just heard?" In terms of story, precious little is offered up here and that's fine. Your unknown guide hints at enough to keep you intrigued.

I can't really say much more because there is not a lot of game here. It is very much an extended tutorial. I died often enough to get the very clear message that this game will challenge me and refuse to let me feel at ease at any point. Rustmourne is expected in early 2027 and after playing this demo, it comfortably sits atop my list of most anticipated VR games for next year.

OpenXR is the open standard API for AR/VR/MR app development and runtimes. It's managed by Khronos, the same non-profit industry consortium that manages OpenGL, Vulkan, and WebGL.

The ideal of OpenXR is that developers can build apps that run on any headset, without needing to use vendor-specific core APIs for different hardware. Almost every headset, engine, and runtime supports OpenXR today, except for Apple Vision Pro and PlayStation VR2 on PS5.

Spatial Containers

Spatial Containers extend OpenXR beyond fully immersive apps and allow developers to build apps that can move between multitasking and full-space experiences. Apps can have multiple Spatial Containers, each capable of switching between:

• A bounded display mode, suitable for simultaneous multitasking across multiple apps.
• A full-screen immersive display mode.

A Spatial Container's position is controlled by the system. This allows you to choose its preferred location or enables the system to have a Spatial Container that follows you during movement.

The initial Spatial Container extensions that have been ratified and published in the OpenXR Registry are as follows:

• XR_EXT_spatial_container: Core functionality that allows apps to create and manage Spatial Containers.
• XR_EXT_spatial_container_self_rendering: Enables apps to render into Spatial Containers using OpenXR composition layers.

The Khronos OpenXR Working Group says that it is also actively building extensions to enable apps to leverage a system-provided renderer that is optimized for the particular hardware that an app is running on, from high-performance headsets to lower-power devices.

In essence, Spatial Containers allow for apps broadly similar to those enabled by the core concepts of visionOS on Apple Vision Pro, where the "Shared Space" architecture and RealityKit framework allow for both windowed and volumetric 3D apps to run alongside each other in a system-managed environment and transition into "Full Space" immersive experiences.

Notably, Pico OS 6 on the upcoming Pico Space Pro is also built around this concept, using a new system-level compositor with a unified rendering architecture called the Pico Spatial Engine to allow both 2D and 3D apps to run alongside each other, with either a virtual environment or passthrough as the background.

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ByteDance's Pico announced the key display and compute specs of its next headset, coming later this year, and detailed the revamped XR operating system it will run.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

This is in stark contrast to the current state of Google's Android XR and Meta's Horizon OS, which allow for 2D app multitasking but only support running a single 3D app at a time.

That could change soon, however, as Google XR platform and SDK lead Jared Finder stated in Khronos's official announcement for the extensions that the company is "excited to bring Spatial Container support to Android XR."

While Meta did not explicitly commit to supporting the extensions in its statement, they interestingly present an opportunity for the company to ship a revised version of the effectively cancelled "Augments" app category announced for Quest 3 at Meta Connect 2023.

Quest 3 Augments Are Persistent Digital Objects In Your Space

Meta will introduce a series of spatially-aware digital objects to your living space next year on Quest 3.

UploadVRHenry Stockdale

Augments would have been system-managed 3D apps created in Meta Spark Studio, a now-defunct Windows and macOS app for making smartphone AR filters and experiences for the camera in Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. Spark Studio supported importing and animating 3D assets, and implementing advanced functionality with JavaScript.

In June 2024, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth revealed that the Augments feature was being rebuilt from scratch as the original approach "wasn't good enough," and then in August 2025 he reiterated similar points, adding that the company was in the process of rebuilding the system from the ground up.

Given that recent updates to Horizon OS and developer tooling have centered on overhauling spatial window management and improving spatial apps, it's possible the company will leverage the Spatial Container extensions to deliver on the original vision of Augments, but that remains to be seen.

Meta Expands SDKs To Boost Spatial Apps On Quest & VR Glasses, Including NBA, Disney+

Meta announced several new SDKs and features to enhance spatial apps on Quest and Meta VR Glasses, alongside major spatial updates for the NBA and Disney+ apps.

UploadVRLuna

The extension specs and sample code for OpenXR Spatial Containers are out now, and the Khronos OpenXR Working Group says it expects implementations to start rolling out across the OpenXR ecosystem this year.

Developer DreamVR, whose previous VR projects were in location-based entertainment (LBE) venues, had one goal with The Rifted Skies, its first consumer VR offering: get people moving their arms again. While playing the demo in my barely five-meter-by-five-meter space, I immediately felt the desire for more space or a VR treadmill. It felt both like a throwback to older, more roomscale-friendly VR titles and a rarity for a platform that has increasingly been turning to more stationary controller-focused experiences.

I am not knocking games that lean in that direction, but nowadays when a game dares to demand more physicality out of you, it stands out. The physical, rhythmic combat in Batman: Arkham Shadow was arguably its best feature. Arm-based locomotion popularized by games like Gorilla Tag has become a VR subgenre unto itself and games that adapted that system for more narrative-centered projects like No More Rainbows and Outta Hand stood out in a very crowded field of single-player VR adventures. Games you can comfortably play while only needing to move your arms to point at an object.

The Rifted Skies demo introduces you to Derwish, a young man greeted by a yellow wisp who speaks of his nebulous lineage and the need to outpace the titular rift swallowing his world whole. It's the fastest bit of world building I've ever seen done in a fantasy game before you're off and running. The responsiveness of the arm swinging here should be commended. I have played other games where you can swing your arms to run and thrust them in the air to jump like Joyway's Stride, none of which felt this fluid. The tradeoff here is the margin of recognition for "the player swung their arms" is so wide that it occasionally triggers when I didn't want it to. At one point I lifted my right arm to adjust the volume in my headset and the game thought I was trying to run. I didn't lift it quickly either. If you are doing anything other than actively playing the game, like reaching for a drink or adjusting your headset, I would suggest pausing the game.

Besides running, you also squat to slide under low hanging obstacles and thrust your arms in the air to jump. I should note here that these actions in the game have controller equivalents in the settings, so though DreamVR built The Rifted Skies to be played with your body, you can press A to jump and pull back on the right analog to squat down. Those of us with bad knees champion this bit of accessibility, but like the run motion, the squat recognition is generous enough that I opted for that over the controller-mapped option anyway.

The combat is pretty perfunctory. Your sword, the first weapon available to you, can be used for standard hack and slash melee, to deflect projectiles back at enemies, or be charged and flung at the ghostly creatures that periodically portal in to attack you. That said, it needed to be simple because, again, you're on the run from the Rift, so you need to be able to dispatch enemies quickly. I fell into a pattern of throwing my blades at enemies that were charging up a projectile to stun them, then sprinting to their location and slashing them.

The magic in The Rifted Skies is when you get into a flow state: sprinting, jumping, gliding on air currents, and cutting enemies all in what feels like one continuous motion. Once you get moving, it is hard to stop even when you go down thanks to the generous checkpoints. You only stop when you reach the end of an area to select the bog-standard roguelite power ups. DreamVR nails its mission statement, creating an entertaining romp that remained compelling to play well beyond when my arms started to fatigue. The demo does an excellent job of presenting its core gameplay, even if I was left with questions by the end.

Visually, the world of The Rifted Skies is bright and colorful, but quickly started to feel repetitive as I recognized specific chunks of landscape several times already in my couple of runs. I'm curious if the full game will bring new biomes and environments to keep things fresh. In terms of fidelity, the environments are nothing to write home about and definitely feel more optimized for standalone headsets, but there is hardly any time to stop and stare at the details to begin with. I'm curious if it has more variety to offer deeper into the game.

Another question is, narratively speaking, what type of roguelite is this? Many roguelites have hinted at deeper lore at the onset of the action, only to quickly ignore any semblance of a narrative once you are settled into the action. Personally, without leaderboards, collectibles, or persistent rewards, those tend to run thin for me. Then there are games like Underdogs with a full story to tell and enough replayability to run it back repeatedly. The gameplay loop is rock-solid with no major complaints. The longevity is the question and a demo cannot truly answer that.

For now, The Rifted Skies is absolutely worth a wishlist and continued monitoring for more details.

Version 1.0 adds multiple new features and content, including one that Flat2VR Studios' Elliott Tate teased to me in our interview earlier this year: first-person vehicle ejections. Anyone willing to test their VR sea legs in Stunt mode or crashes in races (like me) is free to do so with a first-person camera instead of the Early Access method that shifted to third person view in such cases.

Here's a list of the new additions:

• An overhaul to the multiplayer system redesigns the lobbies to be faster to get into a race. You can also now join active sessions, fill out your lobbies with AI racers and spectator functions including passenger ride-alongs.
• AI settings to tweak the behavior of non-human opponents. The opponent AI has also been improved overall.
• Support for bHaptics, motion rigs, and additional steering wheels.
• New options for FlatOut 2 physics.
• New vehicles, including multiple cars and a motorcycle.
• Updated UI and menu interactions, bug fixes, and performance optimizations.

The new price now matches the original FlatOut 4's cost. The VR port was originally $19.99 in Early Access. Price increases out of Early Access are not uncommon in gaming. Just to name a few examples, Forefront VR did the same earlier this year and Beat Saber went from $19.99 to $29.99 in 2019 when it went to full release. Pavlov Shack was a free-to-play beta for over two years on App Lab before its official release on the Meta Horizon Store when it shifted to a $19.99 cost.

FlatOut is the first release under Flat2VR's Spark program, an initiative pairing experienced VR modders with game developers. The second Spark release was I Am Your Beast VR last month. I shared my impressions of FlatOut 4 at release and said it was "a joy to play." Since release, it has received multiple updates to add support for 'hundreds' of wheel-and-pedal accessories before its Early Access exit.

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Flatout 4: Total Insanity VR brings chaotic, destructive, demolition derby style racing to VR in Early Access.

UploadVRMike Johnson

FlatOut 4: Total Insanity VR is out now on Steam for $29.99.

Joy Way, who previously developed Red Flowers (later, Catana: Red Flowers), Stride and Stride: Fates, have announced their VR zombie survival shooter Fading Light is coming to Quest on November 12. A price has not yet been announced, but the game can be wishlisted now.

A trailer has been released, showing off the game's blend of parkour movement, survival shooter sensibilities, and base-building and crafting mechanics.

In Fading Light, you will play solo or team up with up to three additional players to explore a zombie-infested open-world city, gather resources, craft gear and build bases to survive the zombie hordes together.

Movement is described as "fast, physical VR parkour" that will have you running, jumping, climbing, and navigating the city to escape zombie masses. There are also Time-Run challenges in which you can compete to set the fastest time.

Fading Light is coming to Quest on November 12, and you can wishlist the game now.

VRChat has technically supported Eye and Face Tracking for years over OSC (Open Sound Control) and the community-made VRCFaceTracking (VRCFT) app. However, avatars did not natively support full facial tracking, and instead needed to be configured with add-ons. Without them, avatars could only natively use Eye Tracking data for basic gaze and eyelid movement.

Now, VRChat's latest Open Beta client on Steam and Avatars SDK Version 3.10.6-beta.1 and higher bring support for SDK-level authoring of Face Tracking. Initially described as "High Fidelity Face Tracking," the feature allows creators to set up facial expressions for an avatar via a new dedicated section in the Avatar Descriptor component.

The new system maps facial expressions to blendshapes and animator parameters, supports the Unified Expressions standard from VRCFT, and integrates with VRChat's audio-driven visemes, eye look, and eyelids. It does not currently support Blended Shapes or Simplified Parameters.

Even further, the system allows for network-synced Face Tracking without contributing to the avatar's synced parameter budget. On paper, this should mean a reduced synced parameter load for the avatar, more visually consistent facial expressions for other users, and better performance.

VRChat's native Face Tracking supports OSC methods like VRCFT (in its latest beta release on Steam) as well as VRChat's Selfie Expression feature, which allows you to mirror facial expressions to an avatar on desktop PC and Android via a webcam or front-facing camera.

VRChat says that the functionality has been in closed beta testing for a while, and that the company has been gathering feedback from prominent community members and creators such as Hash, the VRCFT team, and many others.

Creator and developer Hash has updated several of their popular Booth avatar packages with beta variants that take advantage of the new SDK functionality, and you can make the switch if you own them.

Few headsets currently have both the hardware support and third-party APIs for Eye Tracking and camera-based Face Tracking. The most popular options are the Pico 4 Pro and Enterprise, Meta Quest Pro, and Samsung Galaxy XR, though there are also open-source and community-built solutions for other headsets such as the Meta Quest 3 and 3S. VRCFT is also able to pass data from headsets and add-ons that only support Eye Tracking, such as the Bigscreen Beyond 2e.

Bigscreen Beyond 2 Has Clearer, Wider, Adjustable Lenses And Optional Eye Tracking

Bigscreen Beyond 2 starts shipping next month with significantly upgraded & adjustable lenses, and Beyond 2e is coming in May with eye tracking too.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Notably, the upcoming Meta VR Glasses feature hardware support for both Eye and camera-based Face Tracking, using dedicated sensors for the eyes and capturing facial signals through the same downward-facing cameras used for Hand Tracking.

However, as spotted by dataminer and programmer Nori, Meta will not give third parties API access to the visual Face Tracking data source at launch as it did with the Meta Quest Pro, where apps including Steam Link and Virtual Desktop are already able to forward abstracted tracking data to OSC apps such as VRCFT. Instead, developers will only have access to Eye Tracking and must rely on the audio-driven data source, known as Audio to Expressions. Camera-based Face Tracking will be limited to first-party usage, such as the new realistic Hologram avatars.

This restriction has been met with some frustration from developers, and Meta Developer Advocate Dilmer Valecillos stated the feedback would be passed along to the appropriate teams.

A feedback post on the Meta VR Developer website requesting a camera-based Face Tracking API for Meta VR Glasses is currently the fourth most-voted investigation, and is marked as "Backlogged - A team has this on their backlog to address in the future."

Imagine if the charming Border Bots met an extraction shooter like Ghosts of Tabor somewhere in outer space and had a baby. That's RAID VR in a nutshell. You take on the role of a pseudo-intergalactic customs agent, scanning ships at a checkpoint for potential contraband. If a scan reveals a ship carrying illegal goods, you board the ship and remove the offensive cargo by force.

The Next Fest demo starts you at rank 4 and ends when you reach rank 6, which took me a hair over thirty minutes to do. Also, note that the demo only supports two-player co-op whereas the final game will support four players.

At the start of your shift, spaceships line up in multiple lanes that you can switch between with your control panel. You have a list of icons representing illegal goods to check for, varying by type and color. After the scan completes, you have a limited amount of time to decide to let the ship pass or intercept it. Choose to intercept and the ship is tractor-beamed to you to board and engage in combat with the smugglers. All of this works very well, with an intuitive control panel that all makes sense on first sight. The colorful cel-shaded art style, as it usually does, looks fine in the headset and the sound design complements the gameplay well. There is a concerted effort to make everything in the game, including the options menu, a physically immersive action, so points for that.

The issue for me starts when you intercept a ship. Rather than a dynamic roomscale shootout, you are limited to moving around a rectangular border at the front of the room, dispatching robotic foes from a distance and fending off any sword-wielding bots. This immediately felt far too restrictive. After defeating the smugglers in less than a minute, you use a telekinetic grab system to pull contraband to you and drop into a vortex just below your original standing position. It's fine, but could be so much more if you had full freedom of movement around the room. I also could not help but think about this part of the game with four players. That rectangle felt small for one, so I hope it scales up for four.

That said, the action is designed this way for a reason. All of your shifts are time limited and you have to process as many ships as possible. Every second counts, even when you watch them tick away while the ship is pulled to your station and docked. To help with this, some intercepted ships don't have combat. You enter to some collectible loot, seize any contraband, and you're out in maybe half a minute. It was admittedly deflating to get hyped for a shootout and not get the payoff, though it does save on time. It would've been nice to have the option to walk around and maybe nab hidden bonus loot, even if I was choosing to sacrifice time to do so.

The weapons mostly feel fine to use and have some fun designs, like a rocket launcher that fires off tiny aliens. I laughed every time I used it, though two-handing it came with a fair amount of jank. Some weapons and your shield have a timed reload, so you can't go dual-wielding guns blazing all the time, lest you get stuck doing a Matrix-style dodge to avoid return fire. This will be hit-or-miss for most. I did not mind at all, but run-and-gun shooter fans that prefer manual reloading may yearn for more, particularly considering your loadout is chosen for you shift by shift.

Besides the scanned intercepts, you will also see a smuggler ship warp in that needs immediate attention. These are full ship raids with multiple rooms, some of which are locked and require you to acquire key cards to access. The raids make the checkpoint interceptions even more confusing. It is clearly possible to move around a full room in the game, so after completing a raid, going back to the scanned interceptions felt even more restrictive.

Lastly, the walking speed feels slow and doesn't have a sprint option. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, the smugglers are also slow as are their bullets, making them easy to dodge. I play a fair amount of VR shooters, so this may be experience talking, but I never felt threatened playing RAID VR, even with upwards of four bots shooting at me at once.

RAID VR feels like a game trying to be as accessible as possible, but in the process stripping some of the excitement out. You want to move faster and be more dynamic than the game allows you to be. The gameplay loop itself is easy to learn and mostly fun, but the action can use some tweaking. It feels a bit too safe and easy for its own good, though I did enjoy my time in the demo. The question is whether that fun will be fleeting across longer sessions. At the very least, RAID stays on my wishlist and I look forward to the full release, which is all a good demo needs to accomplish.

I was playing as Lila and my UploadVR colleague, Mike, was playing as Ghost, and together we'd spent the previous hour working our way through the cooperative puzzle game's unwieldy two-player puzzles. We'd manipulated odd dials to free a caged prisoner, dunked a strange seed into a bucket of water to destroy a punitive pyre and postpone the church's ability to burn a man at the stake. Now, I was staring at a caterpillar.

This fragmented and seemingly dissonant range of activities speaks to the bigger problems in Daumier. The entire game is confused, lacking logic and cohesion, and at times, it feels like it was designed by five or six people who never once talked to each other.

But let's get back to the caterpillar puzzle.

We were standing in a garden where three painters were painting a woman under the tutelage of their master, "Vinci." I don't really know why, nor how this was connected to the first chapter's plague-ridden medieval city and its bloody, torturous ending, but swathes of NPC-delivered exposition between chapters did hint at... some connection, possibly involving vampires.

But anyway, there we were in the garden, where we soon learned that Mike (Ghost) had the power to advance and rewind the seasons so that a tree in the center of the garden would pass through its cycles; green vines in spring, fruits in summer, golden leaves in fall, and barren boughs in winter.

Running through the cycle caused a leaf to fall (this leaf was oddly enormous), which I was able to successfully feed to the caterpillar. Once full of leaf, the caterpillar could be made to form a chrysalis through Mike's advancement of the seasons once more. Back to spring, and the caterpillar emerged from its silken bed a beautiful butterfly. That makes sense.

What doesn't make sense is that at some point during all of this "gameplay," two shimmering orbs of liquid light had materialized at the edge of the garden. I couldn't approach them, (because the game doesn't allow you to move freely in its world, rather only to teleport points), and I couldn't interact with them in any way. I didn't know then, nor now, what these two shimmering balls of light were, where they came from, or what their significance was, if any. But once hatched, the butterfly flew over and hovered around them.

Okay. Now what?

I fumble-bumbled around a bit, teleporting back and forth between the few teleport points available to me, while Mike "Hmm-ed and Umm-ed" over a solution. After a few minutes, the only real action that was available to me or him was that I could pick up the leaf, which the caterpillar had earlier chewed a hole through. Okay, what's the point of that. I fumbled a bit longer, until for no memorable reason, I held the leaf up to my face and realized, "I can look through this hole."

But why would I ever do that? For what reason on earth or in heaven would I ever look through a hole in a leaf, and what would ever make me consider that doing so would generate any sort of response from anyone or anything in this or any other universe? Nevertheless, for lack of anything else to do, I peered through the leaf hole and said, "Uh, Mike, I can look at stuff through this le-," and stopped dead.

I'd pointed my leaf mask at the orbs of shimmering light (remember those?), and immediately the puzzle was solved. The scene changed, and we moved on to the next riveting puzzle.

Mike was confused. "Wait, what happened? How did you do it?"

I replied with confidence. "Well, obviously, Mike, I looked at those balls of light through the leaf hole the caterpillar had chewed."

"Ah," he said. "I see."

But he didn't see! And neither did I.

After our two hour play session, Mike and I agreed that the puzzles (and overall gameplay and presentation, too) in Daumier: Lila & Ghost are undercooked and unintuitive. While the game has a good central premise, that being "Solve co-operative puzzles with your friend by using communication and your brains," the execution falls far short. The narrative and story didn't sufficiently motivate me to keep going, either. It was convoluted, presented in a disengaged way, and felt dark and unappealing.

Too many of the game's puzzles involve one partner finding a solution while the other stands there waiting. And while some puzzles do indeed require actual communication and teamwork, none of the ones we encountered ever felt truly wondrous, like we'd done something cool, or interesting, or smart, or fun.

The physical puzzles are finicky and rough. Manipulating objects in the game spaces often works, but just as often it feels tricky and annoying. Animations are subpar, subtitles have typos, and the voice acting bounces between stilted and grandiose caricature which the House of the Dead 2 fan in me appreciates in a way. Gameplay mechanics are never explained (indeed, the game's hint system and an ephemeral paintbrush that can be used to communicate were only discovered via random button-pressing), and movement and exploration are virtually nonexistent due to the game's forced teleportation system.

It never feels good to be harshly critical of a game. I like the idea of Daumier: Lila & Ghost, and some of the puzzles Mike and I encountered were interesting to experience. But I can't say they were interesting in the way that puzzles in Zelda or MYST are interesting. In games like those and other great puzzle games, the puzzles make you feel clever and reward you for working through them. Daumier's puzzles just make me feel confused and slightly bored. For a puzzle game, that's not good.

Daumier: Lila & Ghost is available now on Quest, and those who buy it in the first month of release will get a free copy for a friend after joining the developer’s Discord server.

Finnish indie VR publisher VRKiwi (Pirates VR: Jolly Roger, Cave Digger 2: Dig Harder) has already put out a short demo on Steam, even though the full release date has yet to be announced.

You take on the role of Helen, an archaeologist who is suddenly transported to an ancient Aztec chamber during a dig project she doesn’t remember signing up for. The voice of the Aztec Sun God Tonatiuh calls to her from a gemstone on her gauntlet, urging her to explore the land around her to find more jewels and to save the world from a mysterious threat.

The Sunstone of Time demo is comprised entirely of the first room you encounter after being sent to the past, and tasks you with mixing different colored powders in a bowl, placing objects on matching pedestals, moving a green stone along a maze using arrow panels, and unlocking a treasure chest by dialing in symbols on a padlock after translating them with a decoder wheel.

You’re largely left to solve these puzzles on your own using the visual clues around you, and you should expect to be stumped until that eureka moment hits. Honestly, I was genuinely stuck on a few of these, but the solutions are all in your environment – even if a few of them are things you normally wouldn’t think to check until you’ve used up virtually all other options.

Interacting with your environment is as easy as moving around with the right joystick and grabbing items with the controller triggers. You can also crouch with the B button. The controls are all pretty responsive, even though I did find myself bumping a larger object against a wall or getting a hand stuck in a box on occasion.

Sunstone of Time’s visuals are bright and colorful, with vibrant chambers that bring The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to mind. There are also plenty of interesting tidbits about ancient Aztec mythology and its deities, with most of the demo's puzzles being centered around Tezcatlipoca, the god of destruction and the night sky. The audio is mostly quiet, allowing you to think about the puzzles around you, and lending the game a somewhat creepy atmosphere.

Once you’ve solved the last puzzle and unlocked the door to escape, the demo ends on a cliffhanger, teasing the greater adventure ahead. So far, Sunstone of Time looks very promising, offering up fun brain teasers and a fascinating look at Aztec mythology. With some more polish, it could end up a compelling archeological VR romp.

Zenith: The Last City was actually the original version of the game when it launched. Citing a declining player count amidst the server costs, the game pivoted to a free-to-play model in early 2024 with a new free co-op game mode called Infinite Realms. The Last City became a paid DLC, staying at its original price of $29.99. Developer Ramen VR announced the end of active development in summer 2024, but vowed to keep the servers online as long as possible. The Last City DLC would get a permanent price cut to $9.99 and the final update for the game shipped in August 2024.

VRMMO Zenith Receives Last Update And Permanent Discount

VRMMO Zenith: The Last City and the Infinite Realms mode received its last update and a permanent discount.

UploadVRCallum Self

Zenith had a lot of excitement when it was first revealed. Its initial Kickstarter raised over $200,000 and Ramen raised another $10M in funding to grow its team in preparation for launch. Zenith officially launched in Early Access in January 2022 and after notable early success, Ramen raised another $35M in funding and planned to double the size of its team to maintain and grow the game.

Zenith Review: VR's Best MMO Is A Rough But Real Achievement

Zenith is an inarguably rough but undeniably massive achievement for the VR industry, and already the best VR MMO.

UploadVRJamie Feltham

That said, Zenith's biggest criticism, as we noted in our launch review, was a general lack of content with repetitive dungeons and quests, a low number of classes, and missing features players craved like crafting. MMORPGs in general are very difficult to pull off, requiring a lot of ongoing content to maintain one of the most dedicated and ravenous fanbases in gaming. This is a genre where people will merrily grind and go on raids with their friends for hundreds if not thousands of hours, but the content needs to be there to support that amount of playtime. Comparatively, the core campaign of the game at launch was up to forty hours, a pittance by comparison.

The Celestial Throne update in summer 2022 was the first major post-launch update, adding a slew of new quests, dungeons, armor sets, weapons and a new matchmaking system to pair players coming without a group to play with. Pets were added in late 2022, PvP gameplay was introduced in 2023, and ongoing 'named' updates with new content like Skyward Summit, Legends Untold, Rings of Ruin, Might and Mastery, and Ascension continued to ship.

Zenith: Celestial Throne Update Available Now, New Details Revealed

The Celestial Throne update is available now for VR MMO Zenith: The Lost City, adding a wealth of new content and minor changes.

UploadVRHarry Baker

Despite all this, the aforementioned declining player count and revenue forced Ramen into the pivot to free-to-play with Infinite Realms a season-based procedural action-adventure built around co-op gameplay and social aspects. This is also when the in-game currency, Zennies, was introduced in the hopes of bringing the game back to profitability after running at a loss for some time. Infinite Realms got four seasons ending with Golden Isles, the final content update for the game.

Zenith: Nexus Rebrand Gives VRMMO A Free-To-Play Mode

Zenith: Nexus splits the game into two modes, adding a new free-to-play co-op RPG alongside the existing paid The Last City VRMMO.

UploadVRHenry Stockdale

That brings us to this week's announcement of the servers shutting down. Per Ramen, sales of The Last City and Zennies ceased on October 21. The free version of Zenith will remain available to download on its available platforms until November 18. After that date, existing players will still be able to download and play the game until the servers close for good on December 18 at 10:00am PST. Ramen has said there are no plans for an offline version or community-hosted servers.

As someone who has tried a VR horror game and quit at the first jump scare (looking at you Exorcism of the Legion!), I was apprehensive about experiencing the Fear Arena. Horror and terror are really not my preference in VR.

Fear Arena introduces what Liminal calls "recreational fear" - that is, fear that provides a level of enjoyment or thrill, like watching a horror movie or riding a roller coaster.

The introductory video explains how fear can create different emotional and psychological reactions, from anxiety to excitement, and finally relief.

"The aim of the Liminal Fear Arena is not maximum fear. It's finding that sweet spot where fear and fun come together," the company explains in the video.

I explored Liminal's initial offering in the Fear Arena, titled Wander. Liminal says Wander places the user amongst "the eerie sights, sounds, and scares in a dark and mysterious forest".

Without giving too much away, I found the experience to be just the right mix of spooky environment and elements. I did have a few moments of unease and a jump scare, but I encourage even those like me, with a low tolerance for scary material, to explore it. It really strikes the right balance and the ending provides a satisfying conclusion.

When I relayed my experience to Liminal co-founder Nick Busietta, he told me that was the balance they were seeking for Fear Arena. “We don’t want to terrorize people at the end of the day,” Busietta explained.

He also told me that their design philosophy places user safety and well-being at the center of what they do. Busietta recalled a prototype experience for Fear Arena that they ultimately decided not to release because it didn’t cross the threshold of what they consider to be a beneficial user experience.

It’s easy to scare, but much more difficult to balance the appropriate level of thrill and fear with a satisfying resolution that leaves the user feeling better than they did coming in.

Busietta said they are working on additional content for Fear Arena, with more expected to be released this fall.

He says he also sees the Liminal platform as capable of hosting a broader range of entertainment experiences, expanding beyond its psychological and neuroscience-based roots.

Liminal is available to download on Meta Quest. An annual subscription is $34.99 for full, unlimited access to their content, with a selection of experiences across their Arenas unlocked for free-tier users.

Per developer Singular Perception (Epyka), the Steam demo was designed specifically to onboard new users with a tutorial and three sectors to explore. The Steam launch will include every post-release update from the Quest version including a unique in-game roadmap where players can vote on updates and features they would like to see next. The first new fan-voted feature is a crafting system to transform undesirable loot into ship upgrades that will launch either with the Steam version or shortly thereafter.

At the time of this article, we did not see a new trailer for the Steam launch. Here is the Quest launch trailer:

The game is built around an interactive spaceship designed for three players working three different positions: pilot, gunner and engineer, with communication and coordination required to explore, fight other ships, and salvage structures and planets to repair and upgrade the ship. Singular Perception is still developing a bot system called Automa that will automate some ship functions to support solo and two-player crews, but as we noted in our Early Access impressions, right now this is a game meant for a full trio of players.

Sol Protocol Early Access Impressions: A Sol-id Foundation

Sol Protocol in Early Access on Quest has a good foundation of co-op teamwork and exploration, but the limited scope has a lot of room for growth.

UploadVRJames Galizio

Sectors in the game are procedurally generated and can be chosen for travel via an interactive 3D map that gives information on the sector's potential hostility and potential rewards. PC VR players who want to see more of the game after playing the demo can sign up for a playtest planned for the end of this month via Discord.

Sol Protocol is available now in Early Access on Quest and comes to PC VR on November 11.

The team of 15 people behind the re-launch of Supernatural includes all of the fitness coaches who were with the prior iteration, as well as some of the design and support staff.

As recently reported by UploadVR, the app is launching with "thousands of workouts". Users of the previous, Meta-owned "legacy edition" can "transfer their points, start date, streaks, favorites and badges from the original app through Dec. 3", according to Supernatural.

In an email to users who registered for the new version, Supernatural provided details on how to transfer history by visiting a dedicated page on their website.

“It’s not every day you get to make a comeback, but thanks to the Supernatural community, that’s exactly what we’re doing,” said Supernatural CEO James Senior in a press statement. “Early Access gets Supernatural back into members’ hands now, so we can build what comes next with them. We’ll be adding new workouts every week, bringing back more music and building features like Supernatural Together and a new mobile app. This is just the start.”

Supernatural says its future roadmap includes adding more workouts and music, reintroducing multiplayer workouts, new enhanced environments, and a new mobile companion app to track workout progress and heart rate.

I was able to download the new app today and confirm that there are many workouts already available from the previous app's catalog. The UI is slightly updated and a bit more colorful in places. Gameplay appears identical. I will do a deeper dive as new features launch and bring you those impressions here.

The new Supernatural is available to download today on the Meta Quest store. A subscription to the service is $19.99 monthly or $199.99 annually.

I love puzzle games, especially in VR, where the ability to reach out and physically touch the mechanisms and toy-like worlds of the best puzzlers becomes even more effective and rewarding.

Traffix XR: Cities of Tomorrow is the latest such game to take over my Quest headset, and its blend of relaxing vibes and genuine challenge makes it a truly great puzzler. However, it can also be frustratingly difficult, and this stubborn difficulty combined with occasionally finicky controls mar what would otherwise be an almost perfect experience.

What is Traffix XR?

Traffix XR was developed by Infinity Games, who (among many other projects) have previously released a flat screen traffic management puzzle game called Traffix for Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, and PC. While the earlier Traffix was presented with a simplistic and stylized aesthetic, and with gameplay in which you literally direct traffic by tapping on traffic lights, Traffix XR: Cities of Tomorrow takes a different road.

In Traffix XR: Cities of Tomorrow, you build miniature roadways to connect points of interest on a map in mixed reality or virtual reality (the latter of which places you in a generic and sparsely decorated living room). Connecting two points on the map will allow traffic and people to flow from one to the other, and back again, essentially activating these points of interest. Along the way, buildings will pop up as your city grows. New points of interest appear, and these too must be connected to the roadways, until all of the map's points of interest are connected successfully.

The challenge comes from the difficult terrain of the given maps, and the limited resources available to you. In each stage, you're provided a limited number of road tiles and a limited number of road types, and each map is typically arranged so that you must puzzle out the perfect routes that will link all points using only the number of tiles and road types available to you.

You can erase road tiles and redraw your route at any time, but obstacles, such as boulders and forests, rivers and lakes, will block your roadways. And even though you have bridges available to you, they aren't unlimited. The sum total of all of this is that you're going to have to think long and hard about how to get from Point A to Point B, and beyond, if you've any hope of success.

Those familiar with popular games like Mini Motorways will immediately understand what Traffix XR is doing. Those who have never played a traffic management game will pick it up pretty quickly, too, since its gameplay is intuitive and the built-in tutorial teaches everything you'll need to know in about ten minutes.

Get in We're Going Puzzling

There's a lot to like about Traffix XR. Its miniature worlds are charming and rich with detail. Its soundtrack is smooth, playful, and relaxing. Its gameplay is built on a central mechanic that's truly engaging. It has a vast quantity of maps, from a variety of interesting biomes to keep things interesting, and a custom map maker is also included for those who want to build and share their own creations.

But there are potholes, too.

The game can be played with hand tracking or controllers, and while each has their strengths and weaknesses, neither feels totally perfect. Grabbing roads with the controller or fingertips is sometimes equally unreliable. Erasing roads and linking roads you've already laid down with new ones can be troublesome, too. Even selecting a stage to play, which is done by rotating a mass of floating islands that surround you, is kind of annoying. Sometimes, triggers are used to grab things, while other times it's performed with the grip buttons. It just feels like there's not a lot of cohesion in the design language used for the game's controls, and in a game like this, where natural control is so important, it's a problem that slows the flow of the game considerably.

Then there's the difficulty. This game is simply hard. By the fifth or sixth level, you'll be scratching your head, struggling to find the perfect route through a cantankerous wilderness using only the tiles (and their configurations) available to you. When you manage to find the correct route, it all feels great. The citizens of your mini city get where they need to go, the city sprouts up like crabgrass in summer, and you clear the level (usually a three-stage affair).

But I'd be lying if I said this game didn't frustrate me with its rigid demand that each stage be solved in exactly the way the developer intended. I could be wrong, but it seemed to me like many of the game's puzzles could only be solved one way. For a traffic management game in which you spend the entirety of your playtime building creative roadways, this seems incredibly limiting.

Traffix XR: Cities of Tomorrow Review - Final Verdict

Traffix XR's pieces come together into something charming, fun, and engaging (if flawed). It's the sort of game that works perfectly in a mixed reality headset, with its cozy little worlds coming to life in your living room, and in VR, it works nearly as well. What holds it back from greatness, however, is the rigidity of its solutions. Too many stages feel overly difficult or solvable by only a single route, and its controls are a bit finicky. All that said, Traffix XR is a good game, and puzzle fans looking for a new puzzler on Quest will find much to like on its miniature motorways.

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.

As we previously reported, Zero Caliber 2 will come to PS VR2 with the 'Remastered' edition that launched on Steam in October 2025 instead of the original Quest version.

XReal Games previously clarified that the port will run at a native 90 frames per second instead of 60 frames reprojected to 120. It will also utilize the headset's haptics, adaptive triggers on the controllers, and launch with native support for bHaptics products. We have reached out to ask if the co-op will be cross-platform with Quest and Steam. In the time since we last covered the game, the co-op campaign remains, as far as we're aware, restricted to same-platform players.

The first Zero Caliber launched for PS VR2 in December 2025 and currently has a 4.1 rating from 630 ratings. We reviewed the original Quest launch for the sequel, giving it a 4 out of 5 star rating.

Zero Caliber 2 can be wishlisted now for PS VR2 ahead of the November 5 launch.

Titan Isles launched in September 2025 with four suit types and developer Psytec Games (Windlands) has not expanded that number since then. In the game, you select one of these suits for your gameplay session, with each suit having its own specialized weapon loadout and traversal method. The fifth suit, Cage, flies through the large scale environments with anti-gravity rotors and engages in combat with laser-guided homing rockets and charged power shots. Cage is available as part of a free update that also adds a new encounter, Scrapspine Ridge, in the seventh campaign and a new look for the breakable loot boxes spread through the game's environments.

Titan Isles Review: Colossal Co-Op Fun, And Solo Too

Titan Isles is an absolute blast in both co-op and solo play, offering a strong VR action adventure worth exploring.

UploadVRHenry Stockdale

Here are the other suits you can choose from:

• Storm is similar to Marvel's Iron Man with a jetpack, wrist-mounted thrusters, and twin plasma pistols that combine into a long range rail gun.
• Hunter moves more like Spider-Man with a grappling-and-swinging movement system and a laser arrow bow.
• Goliath is a tank of a suit with an explosive cannon, a defensive shield (the only exo suit with a shield) and burst jets for enhanced mobility.
• Blink has a phase dash ability (hence the name), can air jump, and fights with homing bolts.

We reviewed Titan Isles at launch, saying it "delivers a compelling action adventure that's equally enjoyable in co-op and single-player."

Titan Isles is available now on Quest, PC VR, and PS VR2.

Meta VR Layout SDK & Gaze SDK

Historically, 2D apps on Horizon OS were largely restricted to tablet-style interfaces. Although multiple windows were supported, developers could not integrate floating or spatial elements into their UI without turning their apps into immersive experiences using the Spatial SDK.

The Meta VR Layout SDK changes that.

The Meta VR Layout SDK allows developers to add spatial components and windows around the main window of a standard Jetpack Compose or React Native Android app. The app remains non-immersive, can coexist with other open apps, and retains its existing activity and UI architecture. Developers do not need to switch to the Meta Spatial SDK.

The NBA app is one of the first apps to take advantage of this SDK, using it to improve the UI and support multiple views.

In essence, the Layout SDK enables window layouts similar to those in visionOS. However, it does not allow developers to spawn 3D objects or control the environment. Those capabilities still require the Spatial SDK.

The Meta VR Layout SDK is fully supported only on Horizon OS 2.7 and later. Meta says that on releases earlier than 2.7, the SDK falls back to its non-spatial behavior instead of placing spatial windows. The main window remains available while each spatial window component uses its developer-configured fallback.

Meta VR Gaze SDK

Alongside the Layout SDK, Meta will also be shipping a new Gaze SDK for Jetpack Compose, React Native, and Android Views.

Meta VR Glasses use a "Look and Pinch" input scheme by default, leveraging the device's Eye and Hand Tracking. This works well for most layouts, but highly customized components can have elements that the system misclassifies. Developers can use the Gaze SDK to provide the hints the system needs to understand their layout, as well as customize hover behavior.

The Gaze SDK is in early access and is compatible with Horizon OS 2.7 and later. However, it cannot be used in a shipping app until it leaves early access. Developers can request access through the developer support portal.

Meta VR UI Set SDK

In October 2024, Meta released the Horizon OS UI Set, a UI kit for Unity, Figma, and later the Spatial SDK.

Meta Finally Released A Quest UI Kit For Unity

Meta finally released a Quest UI kit for Unity, meaning developers can easily build interfaces that feel cohesive with Horizon OS.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

When developing for other operating systems such as iOS and Android, developers have access to high-level UI frameworks that help their apps feel cohesive with the operating system.

Before Meta introduced the Spatial SDK and the Horizon OS UI Set, developers building apps for Meta's VR devices often relied on game engines, such as Unity or Unreal without a first-party UI framework specifically tailored to Horizon OS. As a result, most apps used entirely different UI solutions, many of which were custom-made or repurposed from asset stores.

The Horizon OS UI Set was Meta's solution to this problem, providing developers with the components needed to build interfaces that feel cohesive with Horizon OS.

However, the Horizon OS UI Set was not a standalone SDK. This meant that its assets and frameworks were largely impractical to adapt for standard 2D Android apps, which is a major reason why most 2D apps on the platform still use their own implementations.

The Meta VR UI Set SDK aims to address this problem.

The Meta VR UI Set SDK is a Jetpack Compose design system for apps on Meta VR devices. It provides dark and light color schemes, semantic colors, typography, icons, component dimensions, and interaction feedback. It works with Jetpack Compose apps.

This makes the SDK relatively easy for 2D Android app developers to adopt, and Meta notes that it is optimized to be implemented by an AI coding agent. The company says that it is the successor to the Meta Horizon OS UI Set in Spatial SDK.

In practice, this could mean that many more 2D apps on the platform will adopt a consistent visual style and interaction patterns that match the rest of the system.

Disney+ Overhaul

The Disney+ app on Apple Vision Pro was custom-built with a unique spatial UI and launched with several immersive environments, with more released in the months that followed.

The app then launched on Quest in December 2025, with support for up to 4K resolution with Dolby Vision HDR. Disney+ Premium subscribers also had access to Dolby Atmos immersive audio in supported titles, a feature added to Horizon OS in v71, and could download content for offline viewing.

Quest Now Has A Disney+ App With Downloads & Dolby Atmos

Quest headsets now have an official Disney+ app, with support for downloads and Dolby Atmos immersive audio — but not for 3D.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

However, unlike the visionOS version, the Quest Disney+ app did not support 3D content and was limited to 2D media. It also lacked the custom 3D environments that could be used as virtual cinema spaces.

Now, Disney plans to take advantage of updates to Horizon OS and Meta's developer tools to bring many features of the visionOS version of the app to the platform. These include recent improvements to the Spatial SDK that enable enhanced audio, interactions, and more.

In November, Disney+ will receive a major update that overhauls its UI and makes the experience more spatial. The update will also add support for 3D media and introduce several of the 3D environments available in the visionOS app.

This update is expected to arrive around the same time that Meta adds the ability to rent or buy "hundreds" of movies on Quest in the US later this year. The company says that this catalog will eventually expand to "thousands" of titles available internationally by the time Meta VR Glasses launch in 2027.

Meta VR Glasses Officially Announced, Shipping Spring 2027 For $1300

Meta VR Glasses have 2.4K micro-OLED displays, weigh 100 grams, and are powered by a tethered puck with Qualcomm's Snapdragon Reality Elite chipset.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

This is another in our series of spooky season articles this month. If you are seeking more content, check out our list of horror game recommendations and upcoming horror games.

Our Favorite VR Games For Spooky Season 2026

Halloween is just around the corner. We've picked ten of our favorite scary VR games for spooky season 2026.

UploadVRMike Johnson

Updates are listed in alphabetical order by game title and we will update this article as new updates are released. The developers of Convrgence, Hard Bullet, & Ghosts of Tabor are teasing updates on social media we are keeping an eye out for and some of these updates tend to drop late in the month, so check back closer to Halloween for new entries.

If you know of any others, drop them in the comments below and we will add them in a future update to spread the word.

Here's our current rundown:

Ghosts of Tabor

The popular extraction shooter has released a Halloween-themed bunker (pictured above) and launched a Twitch drops campaign running until November 2. If you are unfamiliar with drops, it is a collaboration between developers and Twitch, a livestreaming platform, wherein you can earn exclusive in-game rewards simply by tuning in to a livestream of the game. These have been quite popular on Twitch for some time, but speaking as someone who has livestreamed VR on Twitch for over five years, it is rare to see VR developers do drops campaigns. Tabor and No Man's Sky have been the most frequent users of these campaigns that I am aware of for VR.

To qualify, you'll need to have played Tabor at least once during this current wipe period and link your account online, which can be done here.

Ghosts of Tabor is available now on Quest, Steam, PS VR2, and Pico.

Knights of Fiona

Since launch, Knights of Fiona has been steadily adding new quests with special rewards for players. October 20 kicked off a new Halloween Event Quest that ends on November 12 with two new rewards: a pumpkin shield and a Halloween body (both pictured above).

This quest is free to all players, including those who did not purchase the Story Pass to complete the full campaign. To start the quest, go to the quest board in the Eftora Station, select 'battle' and 'special' to see the quest. This quest can be completed in co-op with friends.

Additionally, the Got 'Em Mall also has several pumpkin hat sets available as in-app purchases.

Knights of Fiona is available now free to play on the Meta Horizon Store and Steam. 

Breachers

Tactical 5v5 FPS Breachers gets into the spirit with a limited-time game mode: Infected. Teams break up into Enforcers tasked with killing any infected in sight or the Infected whose goal is to either take down Enforcers or choke them out with toxic gas grenades. The Infected mode is only available until November 9.

Alongside the temporary game mode, developer Triangle Factory has released Breachers' first character skin DLC pack, the Enforcer's hazmat suit Quarantine skin, for $9.99.

Additionally, the Hideout map, a fan-favorite, gets a Halloween makeover with a nighttime setting and spooky-themed decorations like pumpkins, coffins, and cauldrons.

Medieval Dynasty: New Settlement

Medieval life sim Medieval Dynasty: New Settlement kicked off its annual Halloween Event on October 14. If you haven't done it before, head to the swamps area to find a mysterious grave that starts a hunt for the gravesites of the Spectral Games team. Find them all to unlock a special skull-themed xylophone and new musical track to play as you explore the map. The event also reskins the main menu and several of the settlements in the game, and replaces the birds in the air with bats.

Spectral has also teased additional Halloween surprises before the event ends on November 14.

Phasmophobia Crimson Eye

Phasmophobia's Crimson Eye event is back for a third year. The limited-time special runs through November 1 marked by a red sky lit by a blood moon, cultish markings, and candlelight on the map of investigations. During Crimson Eye, the game ramps in difficulty with faster, more aggressive ghosts, but those brave enough to take on hunts get a bonus percentage of cash and XP.

The event kicked off on October 8 with a Twitch drop campaign to earn an exclusive T-shirt. From October 15 to October 22, you get double experience points and extra rewards. Finally, from October 26 to November 1, Phasmophobia hosts Ghost Hunts 4 Hearts, a crossover event with the American Heart Association with special rewards for participants.

Puzzling Places - Halloween Event

The 48th monthly pack for 3D puzzler Puzzling Places is available now with six new puzzles to dig into, all pictured below:

• Lonely Forest Cabin (up to 400 pieces)
• Farmer’s Market Stall (up to 400 pieces)
• Finnish Farm (up to 1,000 pieces)
• Povrly Blacksmith (up to 1,000 pieces)
• Family Dinner (up to 400 pieces)
• Halloween Mansion (up to 400 pieces)

Monthly Pack #48 is available on Quest and Steam for $5.99.

Real VR Fishing

The free Halloween-themed update for Real VR Fishing adds five maps, including three brand new locations and two returning favorites from previous Halloween events. Each map features a new fish species (some of them quite spooky), while virtual anglers can also catch returning Halloween fish like the Zombie Shark and the Haunted Goblin Shark. Last year's Halloween fish and all 12 fish from the game's sixth-anniversary event will also return.

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A new update for Real VR Fishing arrives next week, bringing spooky maps, haunted fish, mixed reality features, hand tracking, and more.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

Table Troopers

Table Troopers is a mixed reality turn-based combat strategy game for up to four players. The $4.99 Halloween Pack includes three new maps, two new trooper types, and four new weapons. The maps are permanently added to your catalog and when you get together with friends, only one person needs to have the new maps for everyone to play.

Virtual Skate

Virtual Skate, a realistic skateboarding sim, has added a special Halloween-themed scavenger hunt. If you are able to locate all six pumpkins in SoCal Night, you will unlock a special 'hellish' portion of the map.

Developer Fast Travel Games confirmed the date and launch price of $24.99 in a press release and new trailer you can see here:

Aces High is a spinoff of the popular series of heist shooters from developer Starbreeze. James Tocchio and I played in the August closed playtest of Aces High with some of the Fast Travel team and came away eagerly awaiting more. That build only had one heist available while this new offering comes with two. All participants will receive a special kitty mask at launch for helping Fast Travel collect data and feedback in the final days before release.

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We went hands-on with Fast Travel Games' Payday: Aces High, and we think it could be the next go-to VR shooter to play with friends.

UploadVRMike Johnson

The demos can be acquired from the Steam and Quest store listings. Payday: Aces High releases on both platforms on November 5 for $24.99.

Next Fest is a chance for players to go hands-on with anticipated upcoming games while developers get a boost in visibility, potential wishlists, and invaluable feedback to help shape their projects as they approach a release date.

Some of the participating games released demos prior to the start of Next Fest, like Rustmourne, The Rifted Skies, Drifters: Blackout Crew, and RAID VR. Co-op heist shooter Payday: Aces High will have a demo available with two playable heists after its closed playtest in August.

Please note that this list was provided two weeks ago by Valve and is subject to change. Developers can drop out of Next Fest if their demo is not ready or release a demo on short notice.

For now, here are the demos we are aware of.

Ancient Duel - Note: This is a flatscreen game with VR support. At press time, we do not know if the demo will support VR.

Arcane Architect

Archery Pro VR

ASMBL

Atlas Proxima Tether - Note: This is a flatscreen game with VR support. At press time, we do not know if the demo will support VR.

Bad Grip Club

Be A Chameleon

Board of the Future

City of Hunger

Cloud JourneyVR

Cute & Dead

Dance of Drauganna

Dark Trip

Drifters: Blackout Crew

Ghostly Late Night Show - Note: This is a flatscreen game with VR support. At press time, we do not know if the demo will support VR.

Halls of the Deep

Hyperlane Highway

I Am Octopus

It's All Ogre

Liminal

Long Trip

Low Level Hunters - Note: This is a flatscreen game with VR support. At press time, we do not know if the demo will support VR.

Magic Color Merge Puzzle VR

Moly

My Nuclear Octopus 2

Off The Top Rope!

Orb Rush VR

Outlander VR

Paranatural - Note: This is a flatscreen game with VR support. At press time, we do not know if the demo will support VR.

Parcel Panic

PatchWorld

Payday: Aces High

Plonk! A 4D Puzzle

Project Sever

Rec Room: A New Semester

Rustmourne

Saddlebow

Sapphobos

Sol Protocol

Stuffed: Two Foot Hero

Sunstone of Time

System Critical 3

The Evidence Cleaner

The Last Frame

The Rifted Skies

Undead Development 2 - Note: This is a flatscreen game with VR support. At press time, we do not know if the demo will support VR.

Voxel Playground

VR Cop Simulator

Wake

Wurst and Glory

Created by solo developer Paulo Cunha, Loony Laps is an upcoming toy car racing game that brings the magic of die-cast racing and elaborate toy tracks into mixed reality and VR. It's coming to Quest on December 15 and will cost $12.99. The game can be pre-ordered now.

The game's developer was originally targeting release on only Quest 3 and 3S, but they have now made the game available on Quest 2 and Quest Pro, as well as 3 and 3S.

We've embedded a trailer below which shows off the game's many wacky races.

Loony Laps features 29 handcrafted tracks designed to bring out maximum chaos and laughs. The tracks feature loops, jumps, magnetic hazards, branching paths, mobile obstacles and ridiculous gags. The cars are made to look like little die-cast toys and can be customized with paint, wheels, materials and other cosmetics.

The game is playable in VR, where players race within a dedicated miniature environment, and in mixed reality, where the wacky racetracks appear inside your physical space.

The game will launch with three play modes including Championship, in which progression unlocks cars and tracks, Quick Race, which lets you jump right into a chosen event, and Time Trial, which has you focusing on beating your best times. The game is built around short, replayable arcade sessions.

Loony Laps is coming to Quest on December 15 and it's available for pre-order now.

Shababeek Labs, a small game studio based in Abu Dhabi, recently announced their upcoming VR game Good Morning [Employee Name] VR. The announcement comes alongside a trailer, which scratches the Severance itch that we've all been unable to scratch since season 2 of Apple's breakout series wrapped.

We've embedded the trailer below.

Ahmad Abdallah, Shababeek Labs' founder, explained the game's premise in a bit more detail.

"Good Morning [Employee Name] VR is a seated VR narrative game [in which] you play as a new hire at Consolidated Dynamics, a 1960s company in a world where technology developed differently," they explain. "Over your working days you rotate through desk stations guided by handlers on the phone and a PA system that has a training film for everything. It's a slow-burn psychological mystery, rather than horror."

The entire game can be played seated, no locomotion is required, and it has a runtime of four to six hours. The story takes place over the first twelve days of your employment at Consolidated Dynamics, where everything seems nominally fine, if not a little strange and somehow unsettling.

The developers of Good Morning [Employee Name] VR are targeting release toward the end of 2026 on Quest and PC VR via Steam, where it can be wishlisted now.

The collaboration between Virtuix and Meta expands on the successful launch this past June of Omni One for Quest, an omni-directional treadmill made to work with Meta's Quest 3 and 3S headsets. The Omni One treadmill is currently compatible with more than 75 available and upcoming Meta Quest games, and over 100 PC VR games.

Virtuix has also announced that Omni One sales have increased "approximately 3X" compared to the same period last year following the release of Omni One for Quest.

Omni One for Quest is a full-body VR treadmill that allows players to physically walk, run, crouch, and move backward in 360 degrees inside compatible VR games. In addition to immersing players in virtual worlds, it's also often positioned by Virtuix as a great tool for fitness (they call it "Peloton for gamers").

The Omni One for Quest treadmill costs $2,595 without a headset. Bundling the kit with a Quest 3 or 3S adds $599 or $349, respectively. A PC VR Bluetooth adapter opens up PC VR connectivity, and adds $49 to the final price. Omni One Core is also available for PC VR players who already own a headset and controllers, and this costs $2,495.

You can browse the full line of Virtuix gear at their online shop.

Blackout Crew is the latest project from Salmi Games (Sweet Surrender), a co-op PvE FPS where you and your friend have to venture into a foreign world to get resources for your dying mothership and unlock or upgrade your weapons and tools.

Salmi has been conducting regular playtests for months, improving performance, adding new features and overhauling the weapon system as detailed in a recent developer blog on its YouTube channel. Personally, I'm looking forward to trying the flamethrower.

Blackout Crew was first revealed at the VR Games Showcase in June, showcasing Salmi's signature cel shaded art style and sci-fi aesthetic that carries over from Sweet Surrender. We had a chance to speak with Salmi Games founder Yacine Salmi in an episode of the UploadVR Gamescast.

Drifters: Blackout Crew's demo is available now on Steam.

The new levels are played from the viewpoint of the COI (Covert Operations Initiative), the antagonist organization of the game. Support Group features COI agents who managed to survive encounters with the game's protagonist, retired agent Alphonse Harding. The agents recount their overexaggerated stories of Harding's seemingly unreal abilities as you play the scenarios out in real time. This same story expansion was added to the original game in 2024.

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I Am Your Beast VR is a fast-paced cinematic action thriller that willingly sacrifices VR-specific elements for speed and efficiency.

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After playing I Am Your Beast VR, I called it "gleefully entertaining with a specific action thriller vibe that everything in terms of visuals, music, level design and interactions plays into" in my current in-progress review and heartily recommended it for action-lovers. The Support Group update is available now.

Other Updates

In addition to Support Group, another patch posted on October 12 added a few new features and adjustments:

• Official support for bHaptics products, specifically the TactSuit Pro & Air, TactVisor, and TactSleeve.
• An online leaderboard showing your global rank after completing each level. Note: the leaderboards are not retroactive, so your times and scores previous to this update will not post
• Four new in-game achievements
• All level ranks have had two additional seconds of time added, making the time-limited levels more equitable for VR gameplay without ruining the game's core challenge

I Am Your Beast VR is available now on Steam.

What Convrgence actually is in practice is a roguelike shooter with extraction elements. Pick a location, build your loadout, then embark on an excursion through your zone in question - following your wristwatch's directional navigation to the exit, while keeping an eye out for enemies and gear along the way. Each run is randomly generated, offering a different layout; in order to take on a run in each map, you'll need to complete a raid in the previous map either during the day or night.

Raids during the day are easier, not least of all due to not having to worry about your flashlight. Raids at night, conversely, require you to make wider use of your kit. Your weapons, flashlight and backpack all are strapped to different parts of your body. Ammo can be stored in pouches at your waist, offering easier access for reloads instead of having to constantly grab your backpack. While it's not particularly noteworthy on its own, there are a few wrinkles such as how you'll have to count your bullets manually - with many magazines being somewhat transparent, allowing you to verify whether it's worth stashing from an enemy or not.

For the most part controls work well, but I would say at least while using a PlayStation VR2 on Steam, I did notice some trouble accessing my inventory, with many cases where the game would go for one of my equipped guns. During the tutorial, I also ran into a bug that necessitated me skipping a step, which certainly leads me to a few questions regarding the existence of a button to skip tutorial steps built into the menu. While the game is ostensibly released out of Early Access, this along with a lack of distinct graphical settings makes me wonder if the game was fully ready for that 1.0 version number.

At least in terms of gameplay, the game's a bit mixed. The team nails the VR interactions for reloading and tinkering with your weapons; crafting in between missions is satisfying enough, too. But levels being mostly linear and procedural means it's lacking a lot of what makes proper extraction shooters interesting - doubly so when you always know exactly the direction to go. Enemy AI feels pretty lacking at this point, too; as interesting and well constructed as the weapons are, I can't help but feel a bit disappointed when it takes so long for them to feel meaningful.

Levels do get more complicated the further along you go, but they remain linear regardless, and it's hard to care too much about alternate paths when you'll find plenty of loot whichever way you go. The base level gameplay feels a bit too basic to start and your German Shepherd companion doesn't get enough utility; you can whistle to give him short orders, but with enemy AI being as basic as they are, it's trivial to pick them off one by one, even without your pup. To that end, it's hard to say you'll ever need to bring more than one gun in when you'll inevitably loot another off an enemy's corpse before long.

I suppose there's a chance that things will click for me eventually, but for now I'm feeling thoroughly whelmed by Convrgence. It's not a complete skip, but I can't exactly share a glowing recommendation for it, either. Maybe I'll feel better about the game with a few more updates under its belt, but that's the last thing you want to say about any game right out of Early Access. We'll see if Monkey-With-a-Bomb can win me over in the long run.

In addition to the new song, the spooky update also brings limited time changes to the Spin City home stage and play stage. Bats flap their shadowy wings against the spooky night sky, while neon bloom and flash effects hit standalone headsets.

The update is out now on Quest, PlayStation VR2, and Steam.

Watch the trailer here:

This latest update follows recent news of Synth Riders adding hand-tracking support to Quest 3 and 3S. With hand tracking, Synth Riders is positioned to support Meta's recently announced VR Glasses from day one, a trend we expect to see other developers experiment with to keep in line with support on the latest XR hardware.

Synth Riders is available on Quest, PlayStation VR2, Apple Vision Pro, and Steam.

According to Supernatural, Early Access users can expect to find "thousands of workouts from day one, including your favorites, remastered, with brand-new workouts dropping every week." Also they say there will be new environments included, with new "higher-definition" environments expected in the future.

In a move sure to please their existing users, Supernatural says users will be able to "bring your Supernatural history with you, including points, streaks, favorites, and badges." This is a major win for the Supernatural user community, and has been a concern of users who have amassed streaks and points totals that they use as a measure of their personal progress.

In a new development, Supernatural will offer in-game collectibles. They say Founding Members will receive "...your Founding Member custom bat from day one, with more Founding Member rewards dropping regularly over the coming weeks." This is a new level of customization for Supernatural, which previously had a single type of bat and boxing glove for all users.

Supernatural says that they are working on many future enhancements, including music licensing deals, a new multi-player workout mode, and a new mobile app to "track your progress and heart rate, and stay connected on the go".

Early Access will be launching "soon" according to Supernatural, and will be open to everyone, regardless of Founding Member status. However, those users who register as a Founding Member prior to the Early Access launch will secure their discounted first-year rate, plus the new digital collectibles. Once Early Access launches, Founding memberships will no longer be available.

As reported by UploadVR, Supernatural was put into maintenance mode by Meta in January 2026, after being acquired in 2023. Coaches and staff were laid off, and no new content was to be produced, though users could use the existing workout library.

In June 2026 it was announced that Supernatural would re-launch as part of a new, independent company called Supernatural Health, with all of the existing coaches and some of the previous design talent joining the new venture.

The app is available on the Meta Quest store, with the subscription for content available for $20 per month or $200 per year ($180 for Founding members' first year).

We played Spymaster in Early Access, finding that Innerspace's signature charm from their previous titles carried over to this new spy-themed adventure. You control multiple spies in sandbox-like missions with a goal of getting each agent to the mission's end.

Here is a clip from my Early Access play:

If you screw up, as in the above clip where I get shot multiple times, this is where the quirkiness comes in. A device on your wrist called the C.A.S.S.E.T.T.E. allows you to rewind time and replay snippets of the mission from either agent's viewpoint, allowing you to fix mistakes in a run, complete secondary objectives, or simply fine-tune the run.

It's a novel concept that encourages replayability to perfect a run without any anxiety-inducing tension. Basically, having a veritable reset button means you can find your own path at your own pace. I will be revisiting Spymaster to complete the campaign and will have a final review in a future article.

Spymaster is available now on Quest and Steam.