Real VR Fishing's latest DLC, Picnic Festa, launches on May 28. The new update brings a whole tackle box of weird and fun updates to the game.

The Picnic Festa update adds seven new picnic-themed fishing locations to the United States, Spain, and Japan in-game ecosystems. It also adds 14 new standard fish species, interactive picnic props and foods, and exclusive rewards and trophies.

The update also adds a couple of unique and interesting game systems. These include the "Chubby Fish System" and "Starving Shark System."

The Chubby Fish System adds special fish, who have become stuffed by leftover picnic foods. Catching these and putting them in your aquarium at home will help them recover to their normal size. The Starving Shark System adds rare sharks searching for new food sources in unusual places. Catching these will similarly allow you to rescue them and help them recover in your lodge aquarium.

Real VR Fishing's Picnic Festa DLC launches on May 28 for $8.99. Real VR Fishing is available on Meta Quest, Pico, and SteamVR.

We reviewed Larcenauts when it released in June 2021 and noted some decidedly non-VR interactions that held it back from feeling truly immersive:

Impulse Gear, for example, seems strangely fond of taking control of a player’s hands as a means of imposing restrictions. So when you run with the default option, you see two hands dangling either side, stopping you from firing. When you reload, it’s a canned animation and not something you have any say in.

Additionally, a high number of the interactions were assigned to button presses. The general sentiment around the game was it had a high level of polish, but did not feel like a VR game.

Larcenauts launched in the wake of popular hero shooters like Overwatch, Apex Legends, and Valorant seeing sky-high player counts during the COVID-19 pandemic, but ultimately failed to capture a large player base. While we do not have the presumably higher Quest statistics, the game reached a peak concurrent player count (an important metric for online shooters) of just forty-two players on Steam, according to Steam Charts.

At the time of this article, Larcenauts is still available for purchase on Steam and Meta Quest, but it should be removed from both platforms soon.

In response to feedback, this recap article will be separated into three categories: new game announcements, game content updates, and new gameplay trailers.

The entire show is available on YouTube now.

New Game Announcements

These are brand new games revealed during the showcase. These all have separate articles with more details available. Click each game title to jump to dedicated articles with more information.

Survive The Night

Coming to Meta Quest

Survive the Night is a free-to-play co-op action roguelite from The Binary Mill (Into Black, Resist). Players work together to complete mini-game challenges and defeat enemies in a surreal game show setting.

OogaBonk

Coming to Meta Quest & Steam (no store listing available yet).

OogaBonk is a chaotic prehistoric VR sandbox that combines Gorilla Tag-style movement with multiplayer exploration, collectibles, and customizable player bases. OogaBonk is from Flat Hill Games (The Mixologist, Clash of Chefs VR).

Just Hoops Nano

Coming to Meta Quest.

Just Hoops Nano is a mixed reality mini basketball game designed around hand tracking coming to Meta Quest this summer. Nano is a miniaturized offshoot of Just Hoops from developer Realcast.

Cozy Worlds Together

Coming to Meta Quest.

Cozy Worlds Together, a free companion app that allows up to 12 players to explore Cozy Worlds creations together, is coming to Quest headsets in June. Developed by original Cozy Worlds developer VRTogether, players who own Cozy Worlds can export and share their custom creations, while friends can join and play for free.

Order 13 VR

Coming to SteamVR, PlayStation VR2, and Meta Quest.

Order 13 VR is a VR adaptation of Order 13, a creepy warehouse simulator in which players must package and manage shipments while a mysterious and menacing presence lurks in the shadows. The VR version comes from Bowl of Tentacles, who just recently released Evil Inside VR.

New Content or DLC

These games are out now and have new content, free or paid, coming soon. Click on the titles for more information.

Scared By Squares

Available now on Steam and Meta Quest.

Scared by Squares first announced a multiplayer addition at last year's UploadVR Winter Showcase. The co-op mode for the spooky cube-based platformer is still expected sometime this year after missing the originally stated December 2025 release date.

The Obsessive Shadow

Available now on Meta Quest and Steam.

The Obsessive Shadow is a horror survival game where players have to use a flashlight and their wits to fend off a stalker attempting to infiltrate their home. A new mixed reality mode brings the gameplay into your actual play space.

Clonk

Available free-to-play now on Meta Quest.

Clonk is a free-to-play party game adding a new game mode, Clonkball. Best described as 'Rocket League with guns', players use weapons to manipulate a giant ball into the opponents' goal. Clonk also has a non-VR PC mode on the way.

Neolithic Dawn

Available now on Meta Quest and Steam.

Neolithic LLC, which makes the physics-based VR survival game Neolithic Dawn, has announced an upcoming base-building update will launch in June. The free update introduces player-built shelters, new environmental systems, and expanded survival mechanics across every open-world map in the game.

Dark Trip

Available now on Meta Quest. Coming soon to Steam.

Dark Trip is a Lovecraftian escape room horror game where you have to pop pills to induce hallucinations in order to proceed from room to room. Developer iWorlds is taking its mind-bending title to Steam with both VR and flatscreen support.

New Gameplay Trailers

These are all already released or previously-known upcoming VR games with new gameplay footage or developer diaries featured in the showcase. All of the trailers are viewable in this article.

Knights of Fiona

Coming to Meta Quest 3/3S and Steam.

Knights of Fiona is a co-op JRPG from Character Bank (Ruins Magus). It completed a 1.5 million yen Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, roughly $9,426, and more than doubled that goal.

How To God

Available now on Meta Quest. Coming soon to Steam.

How To God is a god simulation and world builder that just got an art style and visual upgrade by fan request.

Fixer Undercover

Available now on Meta Quest. Coming soon to Steam.

Fixer Undercover is a spy-themed escape room narrative adventure. We previously reviewed it on Meta Quest, rating it 4 out of 5 stars.

Disembodied

Coming to Meta Quest.

Disembodied was first announced at the 2024 UploadVR Summer Showcase. It is a hand tracked reality platformer that transforms the player's real hand movements into physics-based gameplay.

Loop One Done

Available now on Meta Quest. Coming soon to Steam.

Loop One Done originated as a mixed reality automation experience on Quest. A Steam port has been announced with an immersive VR world that will also be brought to the Quest version of the game.

Warchasm

Available now on Meta Quest & Steam.

Warchasm is an on-rails, fast-paced arcade shoot 'em up that pits players against hordes of mechs across an alien world.

System Critical 3

Coming soon to PlayStation VR2.

The third entry in the Mega Man-inspired action platformer series adds dynamic lighting and shadows in its upcoming PS VR2 launch.

Pedal Rebel

Coming soon to Steam and Meta Quest.

Pedal Rebel transforms any exercise bike into a cyberpunk themed motorbike racing game. Players can keep track of their fitness, gaming performance, stats and high scores while engaging in an immersive story.

Hyperlane Highway

Coming to Steam in Early Access in Q4 2026.

Hyperlane Highway is a roguelite shooter that utilizes a unique 'head-leaning' locomotion system designed to mitigate VR motion sickness. Players steer their way through futuristic environments by leaning their head and body in different directions with the hoverboard matching the movements.

Adrian's Quest

Coming to Steam. Meta Quest and PS VR2 versions are planned for after the PC VR release.

Adrian's Quest is a sci-fi action-adventure set on an alien world. Players embody an android caught between rival factions vying for control of the largely abandoned planet.

Exoshock

We've gone hands-on with the 'Founder's Edition' of this first person shooter.

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

Viper Vice

Available now on Meta Quest.

This Saints Row and Grand Theft Auto-inspired open world crime adventure has an ambitious roadmap ahead of it. Its latest update adds new optional side jobs like Police Enforcer and activities for players to play in their downtime like basketball.

Project Nova

Available on Meta Quest and Steam.

Project: Nova is a space-based puzzler that tasks players with repairing broken systems on an interplanetary vessel. The game adapts to choices made by the player with multiple endings depending on how repairs are completed.

During the Ruff Talk VR Showcase, iWorlds announced it will be conducting a playtest on Steam on June 2. No specific details about how to join the playtest were given during the feature, so for anyone interested, we would advise monitoring Dark Trip's website and Steam store listing.

In Dark Trip, you play as an investigator hired by a retired businessman to locate his missing daughter. This brings you to an abandoned laboratory whose mysteries have to be solved, occasionally by taking pills to force a hallucinatory state that transforms the environment. Watch the video above to see.

The game first launched in Early Access on Meta Quest in February 2025.

Neolithic LLC, which makes the physics-based VR survival game Neolithic Dawn, has announced an upcoming base-building update will launch in June. The free update introduces player-built shelters, new environmental systems, and expanded survival mechanics across every open-world map in the game.

The update marks a major shift for the game's Survival Mode, where players previously relied on temporary shelter and natural cover to survive the harsh realities of life at 10,000 BC. With the Hearthfire Update, players can now establish permanent camps anywhere in the game world.

A new trailer shows the updated systems in action.

The update also introduces new building materials, the ability to place campfires and beds inside completed shelters, and new weather systems. Still water will freeze in colder climates, and dry grass can now be burned.

I went hands-on with Neolithic Dawn when it launched in Early Access last year, and found the core gameplay mechanics, immersive survival loop, intriguing story, and novel respawn mechanic, are solid and engaging. You can read my full impressions here.

Neolithic Dawn's Hearthfire Update will be free for all existing owners when it launches in June. Neolithic Dawn is available now on Quest and SteamVR. Versions for PlayStation VR2 and Pico are currently in development.

There was not a video trailer in the showcase, but a fact sheet provided to UploadVR has the official description from The Binary Mill:

Survive the Night is a free-to-play co-op action roguelite set within the galaxy's most popular gameshow. Players work together to survive a series of challenges featuring physics-based melee combat, dynamic mini-games, and roguelite progression systems.

Additionally, the Meta Horizon store listing has several screenshots and brief clips of the upcoming title.

Players will be stranded on an island and forced to participate in minigames and craft supplies to defend themselves against creatures of the night, all for the amusement of a viewing audience. Winnings from successful runs can be used to unlock new cosmetics. It comes off like an unhinged version of the popular reality series, Survivor.

Players can follow the development and offer feedback via The Binary Mill's Discord. Survive The Night can be wishlisted now on Meta Quest.

VRTogether has just announced Cozy Worlds Together, a new social VR experience coming to Quest headsets in June. Designed as a free companion app to Cozy Worlds, Cozy Worlds Together will allow players and friends to explore and interact inside user-created worlds. Players who own Cozy Worlds can export and share their custom creations, while friends can join and play for free.

The app focuses on relaxed creativity and cooperative interaction. Players can reshape terrain together, build pathways between floating islands, carve tunnels, and experiment with playful environmental mechanics. The experience also introduces “Pudu mode,” allowing players to transform into a tiny South American deer that serves as the unofficial mascot of the Cozy Worlds universe.

According to VRTogether founder Richard Hoagland, Cozy Worlds Together is intended to expand the calm and creative atmosphere of Cozy Worlds into a social experience that can be enjoyed together. “We wanted to take that chill, creative feeling and make it something you can do with your friends," he says. "Making it free, standalone, and full of [...] shenanigans felt like the right way to do it.”

Cozy Worlds Together can be wishlisted today via the Meta Horizon store.

The new feature was first announced at the 2025 UploadVR Winter Showcase with a launch date of December 15. Obviously that date has come and gone without the new mode.

A new teaser, shown below, was featured in the Ruff Talk VR Showcase, confirming the mode is still in development. Siege Industries explained the thought process behind this new addition in a press release:

The goal with multiplayer is to make Scared by Squares feel less like a solo horror experience and more like a strange shared experience where players are reacting, panicking, laughing, and trying to figure out what is happening together.

The entire world of Scared by Squares is made of cubes, playing out as a series of rooms players have to navigate from one side to the other. The rooms can shift and transform while moving through them, presenting unpredictable challenges in an eerie, unnerving atmosphere.

VR horror games are not for everyone, with the added immersion and sense of presence VR brings being a bridge too far for some, yours truly included. Tackling these experiences with a friend available can make them more accessible, opening Scared by Squares up to new potential players who may otherwise shy away from a solo player horror experience. See Deadly Delivery as a recent example of VR horror that can deliver frights and laughs in equal volume.

Scared by Squares is available now on Steam and Meta Quest. A free demo is available on Steam.

Developer Pablo Heckman revealed the first teaser for the new gameplay mode at the Ruff Talk VR Showcase. Watch the teaser here:

The base game takes place in a 1980s suburban home. Armed only with a flashlight and a voice on the other end of a phone call, players must use all of their senses to fend off a mysterious intruder peeping in through the windows.

The premise is reminiscent of some gameplay loops in the older Five Nights at Freddy's games, with the threats intensifying as the hours pass throughout the night. The Obsessive Shadow already has multiple available endings depending on the player's actions. There's currently no indication if the mixed reality mode will change that.

The Obsessive Shadow is available now on Meta Quest and Steam, the latter with both VR and flatscreen support.

Realcast has announced Just Hoops Nano, a new mixed reality basketball game, ahead of its planned release this summer.

Designed around hand tracking, Just Hoops Nano transforms your personal space into an arcade-style mini game where natural hand gestures create a direct and intuitive connection to the game. You'll pinch, flick, and shoot mini basketballs into mini hoops from the comfort of your desk, bed, or couch.

A new trailer has been revealed, and you can see that below.

Just Hoops Nano emphasizes short, engaging play sessions, while providing an easy-to-play yet hard-to-master experience. Satisfying physics and gameplay built around timing and precision are central to the game's design philosophy.

Just Hoops Nano is something of a miniaturized offshoot of Just Hoops, a larger-scale mixed reality basketball arcade experience currently listed on SteamVR and Meta's Horizon store.

Just Hoops Nano is coming soon to Meta Quest, and will cost $6.99. You can wishlist it via the Meta Horizon store now.

Indie VR studio Flat Hill Games has announced OogaBonk, a prehistoric social sandbox that blends chaotic multiplayer social play with physics-based arm locomotion. Designed for "standalone VR platforms," the game drops up to eight players into a caveman-themed playground of jungles, volcanoes, wildlife, and customizable cosmetics.

The announcement comes with a reveal trailer, embedded below.

OogaBonk will most certainly draw comparisons to one of the biggest VR games for younger gamers, Gorilla Tag, which uses similar arm-based locomotion and prioritizes chaotic social play. Gorilla Tag has become one of VR’s biggest breakout hits, surpassing 10 million players and generating more than $100 million in revenue since launch. Other recent hits in the genre, such as Animal Company and Yeeps, have found similarly massive audiences by combining social interaction, user creativity, and chaotic physics-based movement.

What may help OogaBonk stand out is its emphasis on personal progression and persistent bases. Instead of focusing purely on gameplay, the title leans into exploration, collectibles, and social creativity.

A release date has not yet been revealed. We'll be sure to cover OogaBonk in the runup to release, and beyond.

Bowl of Tentacles, developer of Evil Inside VR, has revealed their next new game in a brief trailer.

Order 13 VR is a VR adaptation of Order 13, a creepy warehouse simulator in which players must package and manage shipments while a mysterious and menacing presence lurks in the shadows. On Steam, the flatscreen original holds a Very Positive rating based on over 1,000 reviews.

The trailer announcing the new title can be seen below.

The core focus of the VR adaptation is allowing you to perform every action with your own hands, making you feel fully immersed in the setting. Picking up packages, scanning, sending orders, and carrying boxes through the warehouse will feel unlike anything before.

The new game announcement comes just weeks after the launch of Bowl of Tentacles' Evil Inside VR, an extremely immersive VR horror experience that many commentators have likened to P.T., the terrifying flatscreen experience famously directed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro in 2014.

Order 13 VR is coming to Meta Quest, PC VR, and PlayStation VR2 sometime this year, though no specific release date has yet been announced.

The new mode was featured in the Ruff Talk VR showcase with a new trailer you can see here:

As seen in the trailer, players shoot a giant ball around an arena, adding power and spin to the ball based on the angle and timing of the shot. Coins earned during each round of play can be cashed in for different weapons, changing the match round by round.

Developer Bearhammer Games also said future updates will include the addition of vehicles and a non-VR PC mode enabling users without headsets to play with their VR friends. Presumably, the latter indicates a move to Steam, but the press release did not specify this.

Clonk is available free-to-play now on Meta Quest.

It was Halo game designer Jamie Griesemer who once said, “If you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game.” This principle is particularly true for certain virtual reality games. For a medium where breaks need to be taken often, sprawling 30-hour RPGs are rare. In their absence, match-based VR games have proliferated.

Shooters like Ghosts of Tabor, Breachers, and more recently Forefront succeed thanks to their nimble play sessions that don’t require much prep before jumping in. Looking at it from that perspective, A Long Survive should be a surefire hit for developer Friendly Fire Studios. The truth is that its repetitive design ensures it is exclusively enjoyable with friends, and no more.

Granted, A Long Survive is described as a “cooperative virtual reality horde survival and base-defense game.” This means that it is made from the ground up with online multiplayer in mind, but even then, it falls flat because of the lack of customization. Working towards any kind of goal takes so much longer than any game of its kind should. Many of my issues can be derived from its cookie-cutter missions, snail-paced progression, and uninspired sci-fi setting. So let's start there.

As one of four possible characters, you are a soldier aboard the SCL Caronte spaceship. Working for the dully named Space Corp, your job is to eliminate wave after wave of alien bugs. Stop me if you've heard this one before. It is not that the paper-thin lore isn't justified enough to be an excuse to shoot some deadly critters. It could have at least invented some spicy, world-ending catastrophe to make players feel like they are working towards something tangible. The hostile insects themselves getting stuck on the level is not a good look either.

From your ship working as a lobby, you can access a shooting gallery, invite or join other players, and launch missions. What is baffling from the get-go is that once the tutorial is done, the missions on offer are all too massive to commit to. While the tutorial has ten waves of bugs to blast through, the main modes to choose from are either a 20-wave match, a 50-wave match—which the game estimates takes about two hours—or a team deathmatch mode. There is no in-between. A way to tweak the number of waves, limit the number of bots and players in a match, or change to special rules a la 007: GoldenEye’s Golden Gun mode would spruce things up.

A Long Survive's saving grace is its moment-to-moment gameplay. Once on the field of its four available areas (and a fifth one for PvP), the goal is simple: survive. As expected, each round increases the number of bugs that need to be put down. A base of operations called the Nexus, a movable supercomputer, allows players to buy a series of useful items in combat. If it is destroyed, it is game over. From barricades to energy field barriers and mines, it is important to secure the base defenses at every corner.

With every enemy killed, players gain points to spend on this portable store. Managing resources is critical because the currency is divided between personal and team points. Team points can be used to buy a general good that benefits all, like the weapon maker. To buy a weapon from said machine, personal credits will be spent. The weapon designs themselves are slick, the manual reloading is logical for VR, and the realism of holding down bigger weapons with both hands due to the recoil is commendable. If only the sound effects felt impactful.

Because the waves are as predictable as they sound—more and bigger bugs, the occasional sub-boss—it helps that little details go a long way to add variety. For example, three different weapon types are sold: ballistic, energy, and explosives. Shotguns, SMGs, and revolvers are at a moment’s notice. Energy weapons, like the railgun, can only be used after activating “crystal collectors” spawning on random rounds. These pylons need to be filled up by standing close to them when they appear. Modifiers before embarking on each expedition can make the mission more difficult, such as making your character move slower. There is no benefit to toggling these on.

While I only played with one friend and bots in my experience, I must imagine that recruiting four other friends for a full-blown two-hour session is a fun time. Strategizing on the go and adapting to the near-impossible odds as the waves overwhelm the crew is enjoyable. Each of the four characters has certain skills, like the engineer using energy weapons whenever they want or the healer curing others. What did puzzle me is the glacial pace of the progression system to unlock abilities. After 5 hours, I was just level 3. The game expects you to grind up to level 55. You do the math.

The developers at Friendly Fire Studios have reiterated that this is an Early Access release. New game modes, characters, and maps are planned. Most of all, they fundamentally express that community suggestions are at the pillar of their future content. I would not exactly call the game’s foundation strong, but to have a small studio willing to adapt is worth mentioning.

A Long Survive - Early Access Verdict

In a sea of exciting VR shooters, I am not sure where A Long Survive lands. Playing with friends is always a good time, but what game isn’t? The later bug waves do lend themselves to hectic moments of chaos, so a dedicated group of players might be willing to look for that thrill time and time again. Others may just look elsewhere.

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 an early access release, this review is unscored.

The Homestar Runner Distraction Pack, due out June 25, is termed by developer Mighty Coconut to be more of a Walkabout "takeover" by the Homestar crew with in-game character appearances and voice acting built in collaboration with Homestar creators The Brothers Chaps.

Watch the reveal trailer here:

Instead of a traditional course that WMG players are accustomed to, the Distraction Pack will feature new mini-games, cosmetics, and locations from the Homestar world. Golf will still be the focus with 18 lost balls to collect, custom putters, unlockable hole celebrations, and a new ball trail.

If you are not familiar with Homestar Runner, it is an animated comedy web series adapted from a book originally created to be a parody of children's literature. The web series ran from 2000 to 2009 before going on hiatus until 2014. It started as an Adobe Flash website before transitioning to YouTube when Flash was discontinued. The trailer above is a good introduction, but we suggest checking out Homestar Runner's website and this YouTube playlist to get a better sense of the style of humor to expect.

We previously reported that, after Mighty Coconut's twenty-five percent staff reduction earlier this year, the number of DLC courses would be reduced to six per year moving forward. Mighty Coconut specified that the Homestar DLC does not count towards that total. This is considered "bonus" content for Walkabout and Homestar fans alike that has been in development for a year now. The next official DLC course is due out in August.

The Homestar Runner Distraction Pack will be available on June 25. Walkabout Mini Golf is available on Steam, PSVR2, Quest, Pico, Samsung Galaxy XR, and Apple App Store. The game is also available as part of Meta's Horizon+ subscription service.

Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness was filmed during the 2025 Champions League and paired with virtually impossible-to-access behind-the-scenes and out-of-stadium moments with over 30 Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive cameras. The nearly 21-minute Apple Immersive documentary is now available free on the Apple TV app, with or without a subscription.

The launch of Real Madrid content for Apple Vision Pro builds on Apple’s growing investment in MLS and sports storytelling on Apple TV, with its first substantial immersive experience for fans of the club, the sport, or simply those interested in compelling immersive content. Real Madrid is the highest-earning and most decorated football club in the world. It makes sense to start with them. The experience hosts its visitors with the best of what immersive video can offer: memorable moments, not just memorable views.

The Best Moments Feel Lived In

Moments in Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness are best when its visitors have enough time to take in the excitement, pride, perseverance and love surrounding the club, as well as the beauty and scale of The Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. To date, most Apple Immersive experiences seem to have followed traditional filmmaking techniques which detract from the feeling of presence that spatial storytelling can create - from quick edits that feel jarring and disorienting, to camera angles and movements that make visitors feel more present as the camera used than as themselves or characters in the story worlds. While Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness still includes some of these techniques, its strongest sequences show how much more compelling immersive storytelling becomes when it considers the unique visitor experience of being inside moments instead of just watching them flash by. Most moments feel less rushed, even as the narrative carries forward alternating between shots captured from over 30 cameras. Movement between moments feels well timed with just enough breathing room to feel present and take in the details in each scene before possibly being inspired to turn past the 180-degree capture and notice the blank space. And, during the second half especially, the shots seem to rotate with more intention as they switch between pitch-level gameplay and fans inside and outside of their stadium to showcase how much the club and the game matter, while still giving visitors enough time to stay present in each moment.

The most memorable moments for me simultaneously offer experiences that are difficult to nearly impossible to access, spark emotion, have camera placement that feels true to where I may be sitting if I was there, and sounds aligned with that reality with the absence of any unnatural voiceovers or text or color filter choices interrupting the illusion of being present. I won’t forget moments like being pitch-side seeing the gameplay in detail and hearing the bounce of the ball through spatial audio, sitting with fans in the stadium as a large banner is passed above us while chants and drums echo around the stadium, seeing the pure joy in the eyes of the crowd around me or admiring the technology behind the club’s new retractable pitch system connected to its underground greenhouse.

Curated Wish Fulfillment

With any format of immersive video, the moments that visitors can experience matter as much as, if not more than, the narrative itself. The visitor’s memories are a critical part of the experience - not what they remember seeing, but what they remember being a part of. Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness does an excellent job at taking its visitors to as many curated wish-fulfilling moments as they can during that live-captured moment in time filmed over five days. And the moments selected combine beautifully to offer a range of different human perspectives centered around the same game. This adds to the quality of its storytelling.

Real Madrid brought in €1.185 billion based on their 2024-2025 financial statements. The club generates more than €50 million annually just from tours and experiences around Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. There is extremely high interest in the matches, stories and experiences tied to the club. Having visited during the renovations a few years ago, there is still nothing like physically being there among the trophies and inside the iconic stadium itself and of course nothing like being at a live match. But there is also nothing quite like the proximity this Immersive Video documentary offers to gameplay, different views from around the stadium and the ability to get up-close with star players like Kylian Mbappé, Jude Bellingham, Vinícius Júnior, and Thibaut Courtois.

The Details Change The Game

Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness showcases what Apple Vision Pro and Blackmagic’s URSA Cine Immersive cameras are capable of for non-interactive 180-degree immersive video. The premium quality of the audio and visual details is what adds to the feeling of realism.

At times though, some creative choices disrupt that sense of realism. The biggest distraction for me is when subtitles appear as football stars stare at you not speaking while their voice-over plays. Currently, subtitles are available in English or Spanish and they appear as needed as subjects speak either Spanish or English throughout the documentary. I appreciate that regardless of language, visitors can hear the subjects speak authentically. But, the static subtitle text is small and changes quickly, requiring attention to be pulled away from the moments to the words themselves. This is especially noticeable during times with the players where the static subtitle blocks nearly get lost layered over them. Still, most creative choices take advantage of the technology available to offer a genuinely memorable experience. From wanting to reach out and feel the raindrops during practice to seeing the emotion in fans’ faces and hearing chants echo through Spatial Audio around the stadium, the smaller details consistently strengthen the illusion of presence.

The narrative and creative choices of the Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness Apple Immersive documentary focus on making visitors feel emotionally connected to unforgettable moments. This experience creates real memories with the Real Madrid club and its fans and I look forward to more immersive documentaries like this.

The company behind Snapchat officially announced that it would release standalone true AR glasses, called Specs, just under one year ago.

Snap Spectacles Are $100/Month AR Glasses For Developers

The company behind Snapchat just unveiled upgraded AR Spectacles, available to developers for $99/month.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Compared to the bulky and heavy Spectacles standalone AR development kit glasses, which the company rents to developers for $99/month or students for $49/month, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel claimed the consumer Specs will have "a much smaller form factor, at a fraction of the weight, with a ton more capability", while running the same Snap OS operating system and supporting all the same apps developed so far.

Snap OS is relatively unique. While on an underlying level it's Android-based, you can't install APKs on it, and thus developers can't run native code or use third-party engines like Unity. Instead, they build sandboxed "Lenses", the company's name for apps, using the Lens Studio software for Windows and macOS. In Lens Studio, developers use JavaScript or TypeScript to interact with high-level APIs, while the operating system itself handles the low-level core tech like rendering and core interactions. This has many of the same advantages as the Shared Space of Apple's visionOS: near-instant app launches, interaction consistency, and easy implementation of shared multi-user experiences without friction. It even allows the Spectacles mobile app to be used as a spectator view for almost any Lens. Snap OS doesn't support multitasking, but this is more likely a limitation of the current hardware than the operating system itself.

Since releasing Snap OS in the latest Spectacles kit in late 2024, Snap has repeatedly added new capabilities for developers building Lenses, and late last year launched Snap OS 2.0, adding and improving first-party apps like Browser, Gallery, and Spotlight to bring the AR platform closer to being ready for consumers.

Snap OS 2.0 Brings The AR Glasses Closer To Consumer-Ready

Snap OS 2.0 is out now, adding and improving first-party apps like Browser, Gallery, and Spotlight to bring the AR platform closer to being ready for consumers.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

In April, Alex Heath released a report via his Sources newsletter wherein he claimed that Snap will preview its new Specs glasses in the next couple of months, followed by a consumer release in the fall.

In an October edition of Sources, Heath said that Snap was targeting a price of around $2500 for Specs, and a production run of around 100,000.

That price puts it squarely in the realm of relatively wealthy early adopters, like Apple Vision Pro. But, assuming it isn't beaten to market by something we're not aware of, Specs will be the first standalone true AR glasses (meaning relatively normal-looking glasses that can place interfaces and virtual objects into your physical space, without significantly dimming or distorting your view of the real world) from a major tech company.

Meta's $800 glasses are considerably more affordable yes, but also vastly less capable, showing only a small fixed heads-up display (HUD) in one eye, while Snap is targeting a relatively wide field of view binocular display system with head tracking, hand tracking, and realtime environment meshing.

Multiple reports suggest Meta plans to ship its own true AR glasses in late 2027, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has reported that Apple won't launch AR glasses until 2028 at the earliest. Meanwhile, there are some obscure Chinese products that technically qualify as true AR glasses, but they're bulky, their onboard compute is significantly limited, and their software is not particularly fleshed out.

Snap Spins Out AR Specs Into Its Own Subsidiary

Snap spun its Specs AR glasses into its own subsidiary, and reconfirmed that it plans to launch the consumer product this year.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

The news of Snap's plan to launch this fall comes a few months after it spun its AR hardware ambitions into a dedicated subsidiary, Specs Inc.

We'll keep a close eye on Snap in the coming months for any sign of a proper reveal of the design and specifications of Specs, a product that could be a milestone moment for consumer AR.

I'm actively writing on UploadVR again, and this article is one in a series of "catch up" pieces where I report on some of the interesting things that have been happening in the industry in recent months. And yes, VR Download is coming back very soon!

The first major update for Google's XR operating system started rolling out to Samsung's standalone headset in April, bringing three massive features and other notable changes.

And given that Xreal's Project Aura headset will run the same Android XR operating system via a compute puck with the same Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chipset, these features should also be available on Aura when it launches later this year.

Here's a rundown of what exactly arrived in the update, with details on what each feature actually does.

Auto-Spatialization For 2D Windows

Google actually pre-announced the biggest feature of Android XR's major update back in December: Auto-spatialization.

Android XR Getting AI System Feature To Turn Any 2D Window 3D

Google’s Android XR is getting an AI feature that can turn any 2D content, including games streamed from your PC, into 3D.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

When enabled in the "Labs" section of the Android XR system settings, Auto-spatialization makes the operating system constantly run a machine learning model on whatever 2D window is currently in focus that synthesizes stereoscopic 3D depth at 1080p 30FPS.

That means that images, videos, games, websites and whatever other visual content you're looking at automatically becomes 3D, with a sense of depth, without any implementation from the developer or creator of said content.

It's a remarkable feature that no other standalone VR/MR headset has, though Xreal and Viture have a similar feature for their virtual monitor glasses, with Xreal's handled by its X1 chip and Viture's through the smartphone companion app.

Google notes that enabling Auto-spatialization will use extra energy, making the headset last less long between charges, and that the operating system will sometimes disable the feature when the chipset is under heavy load or too hot. It will automatically enable again when these conditions no longer apply.

Hand Occlusion In Home

At launch, when you brought your hand up such that it should be in front of content (such as 2D apps) in the Android XR home space, you instead saw only an outline, as you would in a Quest 3 or Pico 4 Ultra. Among standalone headsets, Apple's Vision Pro headsets were unique in cutting out your hands to display them in front of virtual content.

With the major Android XR update, Google has added a "Labs" feature to enable the same kind of hand occlusion as Apple.

Just like on Apple Vision Pro headsets, it works similarly to adding a virtual background to your PC's webcam on a platform like Zoom; the system runs a tailored 2D hand segmentation model on each passthrough camera and superimposes this on virtual content.

And also as with Apple Vision Pro, it doesn't work well in low light, and will cut back to the hand outlines.

Pin Windows To Physical Walls

You can now pin any windowed app to a wall in your physical environment, your real-life room. To do so, simply drag the window near the wall and it will snap in place.

For example, you can pin Google Calendar to your office wall, or a Netflix window bigger than your physical TV to your living room wall.

This feature has been available on Apple Vision Pro since visionOS 26, and the Horizon OS of Quest 3 headsets since February of this year.

However, while Apple's visionOS and Meta's Horizon OS support full persistence for pinned windows (and widgets), Google's Android XR currently does not. If you reboot your Samsung Galaxy XR, your pinned windows will be gone.

Session Restore

That's not to say that Android XR has no window persistence at all. With the update, Google says up to 3 previously used windowed apps will reopen in the position you last left them after rebooting.

It's unclear why this 3-window limit exists, given that neither Apple's visionOS nor Meta's Horizon OS has one.

Android Enterprise

With the update, Android XR now supports Android Enterprise. Google said it's collaborating with "leading EMM partners" including ArborXR, ManageXR, Microsoft Intune, Omnissa Workspace ONE, Samsung Knox Manage, and SOTI to make Samsung Galaxy XR and future Android XR headsets "workplace-ready".

This support includes key mass device management features such as zero-touch enrollment, allowing headsets to be "pre-configured and shipped directly to end users for immediate use", as well as Managed Google Play for centralized app distribution, letting businesses silently install and update the specific apps they require on those headsets.

I'm actively writing on UploadVR again, and this article is one in a series of "catch up" pieces where I report on some of the interesting things that have been happening in the industry in recent months. And yes, VR Download is coming back very soon!

Let's chart the path we took to get here.

Secret of the Mimic was first announced in 2024 with a listing on the PlayStation Store that included PlayStation VR2 support. We went hands on with the game on PS VR2 a few weeks later at PAX West, calling it a harrowing experience sure to scare your pants off. A few months later, in February 2025, a new gameplay trailer released with a June release date and the PS VR2 logo suspiciously removed. PS VR2 was also removed from the PS Store listing, the original trailer was updated to remove the logo at the end, and the original PlayStation blog post was edited to remove any mention of VR support.

The game released on June 13, 2025 for Steam and PlayStation 5, flatscreen only on both. Game director Evan Lampi clarified in an interview to promote that release that VR support was still planned. Fast forward to April of this year when both PS VR2 and PC VR support was expected late in the month. This finally happened on April 28, albeit only on PS VR2. We also learned that Steel Wool pivoted to a flatscreen release first due to poor sales of FNaF: Help Wanted 2. Finally, VR support was added on Steam on May 20.

Steel Wool posted on X saying the plan was to deliver a quality of life patch for PS VR2 at the same time as the SteamVR launch to achieve parity between the two versions. A lengthy developer post on Steam details the issues fixed in the latest patch, a few suggestions for getting the optimal experience, and ends with a list of currently known issues, including multiple soft locks in the game, expected to be fixed in a later patch.

We suggest reviewing this post before diving into the game on PC so you know what to expect. For any PS VR2 fans who haven't picked up the game yet, it is currently 60% off its regular $39.99 price until May 28.

Five Nights at Freddy's: Secret of the Mimic VR support is available now on Steam and PS VR2.

If you missed it, back in March Meta announced that Horizon Worlds is fully pivoting to flatscreen (smartphones and web). While existing worlds will still be playable in VR, creators will no longer be able to include VR support in new worlds, and all future updates and tools will target flatscreen. The company says it's seeing significant growth on smartphones, while Quest owners tended to resent the social VR platform being pushed on them.

Just days later, Rec Room announced that it will entirely shut down in June, stating that it never reached sustained profitability and blaming "the recent shift in the VR market, along with broader headwinds in gaming".

The demise of two of the biggest social VR platforms has, understandably, led many in the industry to wonder whether the entire concept was simply not viable in today's VR market. But VRChat, which has been around since before either Horizon Worlds or Rec Room were even concepts, is adamant that this is not the case.

VRChat Set A New Concurrent User Record On New Year’s Eve

On New Year’s Eve, VRChat set a new record for concurrent users online.

UploadVRIan Hamilton

At the end of March, in response to the announcements from Meta and Rec Room, VRChat issued the following statement:

"Horizon Worlds VR moved into maintenance mode. Rec Room announced yesterday that it's closing on June 1. Both were very well-funded platforms with real communities – and both are winding down. If you're reading this and you built worlds there, made friends there, had a place you liked to hang out there, or even worked there - we're sorry. Behind everything created, built, or experienced on these platforms is a lot of creativity, love, sweat, and tears. We are sad to see fewer compatriots in our space. Our heart goes out to you.In case you were wondering, VRChat is not going anywhere.

Last New Year's Eve, nearly 150,000 people were in VRChat at the same time – celebrating a worldwide event for yet another year. Most of those folks had visited us for New Years multiple times before, but for some, it was their first time.

It's been three months since, and we've broken that user record twice since then. Our latest record? Nearly 160,000 people in VRChat at the same time.

Not only that, but our creator economy, avatar marketplace, and first-party stores are all growing. Creators like Studio TrickForge, spookyghostboo, and nawty have made VRChat a place where they can create amazing communities, experiences, and identities, all while earning for their hard work. We onboard more creators every day.

The core reason we're still here, though, is you.

Our community is the thing that makes VRChat different from every platform that has come and gone. You create worlds that defy imagination. You build avatars that embody expression and identity in ways never seen before. You welcome strangers into your communities, make them feel at home, and often change their lives for the better.

You show up, every single day, in numbers that keep growing -- and you bring your friends. The loyalty, creativity, ingenuity, passion, and energy you bring to VRChat is the heartbeat that no amount of funding can replicate.

We don't take that for granted.

To anyone looking for a new home: we'd love to have you. VRChat has been here for over a decade, and we plan to be here for many more. Creators are building real careers on this platform - the tools are deep and will help you build the skills you need to begin your game development career. Our economy continues to grow. You can easily build a community that gets excited for every update you put out or each event that you run. If you're looking for somewhere your work can live and grow, VRChat is it.

To our existing community: the people that are showing up now are showing up because of what you built. They'll stick around because of how you'll welcome them. They'll learn, grow, create, share, and play because of the communities that you're a part of. Thank you for all of the hard work you put in along with us. We see you.

We have a lot of work ahead of us, and we're moving fast. But we wanted to take a moment to say this plainly: we see what's happening in our industry, we're grateful to be in the position we're in, and we're not slowing down."

As the statement notes, VRChat hit a concurrent online users record on New Year's Eve, with nearly 150,000 people on the platform, and the company says it has exceeded that figure multiple times since.

To be clear, despite the name, VRChat is just as popular on flatscreen as in virtual reality, and the company doesn't say how many of these concurrent users were actually in a headset. But this was the case for Horizon Worlds and Rec Room too, and this still means that at minimum tens of thousands of VR owners were online together at the same time, across hundreds of different online virtual worlds.

VRChat has a well-earned reputation as a notably less moderated platform than Horizon or Rec Room, with its far greater degree of freedom around avatar and world design enabling a much wider range of experiences - from those you'll love more than anything else you can experience in VR to those you'll absolutely hate.

If you've been put off by some of the bad vibes you might get from certain footage of VRChat, I'd encourage you to put that feeling aside, pick an avatar that expresses who you are, and try out some of the highest rated worlds on the platform. Despite all its flaws, given the size of VRChat's userbase and the possibilities its creator tools enable, there is simply no other software as deserving of the "metaverse" moniker of science fiction.

As Horizon Worlds Moves Away From VR, Its Users Decide Their Future

As Meta drops VR support for new Horizon Worlds, we take a look at the people who run virtual venues on the platform and what they intend to do after the pivot.

UploadVRK. Guillory

"To anyone looking for a new home: we'd love to have you. VRChat has been here for over a decade, and we plan to be here for many more", the company tells the many Rec Room and Horizon Worlds VR users looking for a substitute for the places where they had spent a significant chunk of their lives.

I'm actively writing on UploadVR again, and this article is one in a series of "catch up" pieces where I report on some of the interesting things that have been happening in the industry in recent months. And yes, VR Download is coming back very soon!

We spoke with Tate about the origins of Spark, how Flat2VR balances Spark projects vs its in-house games, and the unique challenges behind bringing FlatOut 4: Total Insanity to VR.

This is a transcript of the video interview, edited for clarity:

UploadVR: Okay so before we get into it, we're supposed to talk about FlatOut 4: Total Insanity VR, but before we get to that, this is the first release from the Flat2VR Spark program. So for those who don't know what Spark is, can you kind of explain what that program is?

Elliott Tate: If you know how we began with Flat2VR, it was just passion projects on the side, and it's really incredible how when you are just passionate about wanting to see your favorite games in VR and you connect with the right people, just what you can do. So when Beat Saber first came out, I started the Beat Saber modding group [with] a similar goal of "let's get talented people to build something cool here" and it really just exploded and helped pave the way for that. Flat2VR was something I always wanted: to see more of some of my favorite games in VR.

So [we] built a whole big community around it and it's grown in a really cool way and just so many incredible talented other developers have joined in and shared talents. A lot of them have full-time jobs and aren't ready to quit like we did and go all in on just game dev, but love pouring their talents out to make VR happen and so Spark was kind of built around this mix between Flat2VR Studios, where we do super polished, bigger-team [projects] making VR ports of some of our favorite games to in between like a mod and done kind of part-time with lots and lots of love without as set deadlines and still officially licensed.

We have the source code, but working with modders in the community and putting a lot of off hour love into making it happen. So it's a really cool way to get games that probably wouldn't happen otherwise and get other really talented people involved that wouldn't necessarily have the time to [fully] commit, but can work [in] a Spark capacity we call it, which is just an on-the-side the way we build mods and build that out into VR experiences. It doesn't mean it's any less or worse. It just means probably longer timelines and sometimes that means it's a better product because you really spend the time to get in every night and play it all the time and really see how it's going and build it out that way.

UploadVR: What goes into the decision process behind something being a Flat2VR project versus something that you say "this I think would be a good candidate for Spark and let a modder get some experience." How do you balance that decision?

Elliott Tate: Yeah, well I guess it started because we had our plates so full we were like "we're going to have to turn down games unless we figure out another way to make this happen" and that's what grew out of Spark. Some of our games Meta has funded and that can mean our budgets get even bigger. Some games like Postal 2, we did the Kickstarter for it, which really opened the door for a bigger budget on that. I don't know if there's an exact system. It's if it doesn't fit in the studio. With our team size, we do have a limit of how many projects we can take on at a time and then Spark allows us to continue other projects.

UploadVR: So Mutar worked on this one and I think you say he's been a friend of yours for quite some time. Walk us through the process of pairing a specific game like FlatOut with this specific modder. What does that look like?

Elliott Tate: That's where the magic of these smaller teams that take longer, when you find someone who has passion for a certain genre, they'll often act like a game designer or a game producer. As you're playing and as you love this game, you start coming up with ideas in your head in a way that a typical dev team, you'll have some of that, but not to the same extent. So it really works to find someone that just loves the game, number one. Somebody that has talent [because] FlatOut is not Unreal and not Unity, so it requires a special dev skill.

He's a senior developer who's got lots of experience working on custom code and so that put him in one bracket to be the right fit to work on like a very custom engine that has a lot of custom physics and all kinds of custom systems. So his talent level fit that where we have some equally talented people just in Unreal Engine and that would put them in a different category. I guess it's more do you love this game [and] do you have a lot of kind of design ideas yourself because we try to empower a lot of that to come as they're building. It's kind of how you build a mod. It's like "wouldn't it be cool if I did this? Oh man that would feel so cool" and then you try it yourself and you just fall in love with it and you expand it and keep working on it.

UploadVR: Was the design team planned to be involved from the very beginning? In the last Dev video you put out, you talked about bringing in an artist to do all the interiors for each car.

Was that always planned from the beginning or did you discover that when you were scoping the project and said okay we might need to get someone involved here to finish the game out?

Elliott Tate: A lot of times, it does come later. At the start, whoever's starting to work on it is really scoping out "okay, what could I possibly do? What talents do I have?" Mutar is not a 3D modeler or an artist, so for this game, once we looked at "can we reuse the interiors?" and we were like "Nope, there's no interiors in here! You probably need to probably need to recreate this from scratch."

I oversee a lot of the projects too. I just love to share ideas, so that's a big part too. Just coming in and brainstorming with them and what would work. So just supporting them and then where they get stuck or if there's more that's missing, even pre-early access, if we launch it in this state, let's at least try to get it to an early access state by adding this and this. Kind of getting it to at least that level that it should take off and yeah it's a case by case basis.

UploadVR: You're the CCO, and now CTO I just learned a few minutes ago, of basically two companies. Which means you have oversight into a lot of projects you're involved with a lot of things. How often do you get to get your hands dirty now? I know when you're trying to have that 50,000 foot view, sometimes you don't really get to like dig in deep on a project. Do you get to do that anymore just get to get in there and play around?

Elliott Tate: I've really fought to keep that and so I try to have about half the time in the trenches developing myself and being very in touch with the projects and then the other half trying to run a company or two companies or no, three now. It's a little crazy. We don't get a lot of sleep, but I think it's really important just because we're trying to do things so differently and yeah, there's business books, but there's no exact rule book for how this works. I think it's really important to still stay very in touch with development. I think one thing I'm always looking at is the experimentation we did as modders.

When I worked with Praydog on UEVR, it was this wild idea of what if we could inject some level of VR in every Unreal Engine game and a lot of people from a traditional sense would say no, that's not a good idea, no, that can't be done, but if you really kind of come with that hacker mentality of "well, why not like? Let's figure out a way! "Let's build something. Let's think outside the box." That's been really fun to continue to do, but it's not easy to juggle at all.

UploadVR: Is it hard to switch your analytical brain off when you play a game that's not your company's? You look at it and you go "well that texture and this menu, why'd they set it up?" Is it hard to switch that part of your brain off?

Elliott Tate: Curse your brain! Even in high school, I did landscaping and I couldn't walk across a yard without looking at edges and that shrub needs to be cut. You have to fight it and I think one of the beauties of VR is it helps to be so immersed that you are just in it and you feel it and that's more than those technical details, which I always have to switch to and I can be very detail oriented when it comes to those things. It's more the feeling of how does something feel like the dance in VR.

In Beat Saber notes come at you and when we map, it wasn't just where do you place a block, where do you place a block, but it's how do you set up the next block, so your player moves swings back and then the force like swings this way, but does it jerk you if you have to then hit another block. I think of all VR development like that dance where if you're just doing one action like shooting, well that's just using your finger and you're no longer completely engaged in all your senses, so what are some things that you can do that switch it up? That makes the experience feel more complete.

Trombone Champ, at first, we had just flat notes coming at you and redesigning that so it really moves your hand out as you're playing and then you have to move from left to right and interact a complete body experience with different things happening like a different visual experience, fireworks exploding above you. There has to be, in that dance, the right amount of components and then suddenly you forget everything. You're connected, you're teleported, and you're there and I think, by default, a flat screen game, if you just put in VR can do that with amazing visuals, but for most people you'll hit spots where okay the visuals aren't enough anymore. I want other stuff. I love that process of bringing that dance into game design. How do you reimagine this so it feels like it was built from the ground up for VR.

UploadVR: Let's go into FlatOut specifically. You might have already answered this, but I'll ask it anyway. Do you have a preferred mode that you play in the game? Or have you been in debug so long that you really haven't had time?

Elliott Tate: I did get pretty sick with this. But some of the knockout modes [stunt modes] and flying as first person when you're flying, it's actually not enabled in the game right now, but I probably will enable it at some point. You are the person. You get this thrill being launched out of your car and you're just flying. I think we'll probably add it at some point to allow for first person on that. It's just wild and fun and especially when you don't expect it, even just racing, you hit something and the player goes flying. In VR, it's almost like unexpected but you're just like whoa okay I'm really in this car. I really can fly out at any moment.

So you asked favorite mode. I just still love a classic race. I don't think anything beats the thrill of the FlatOut races with all of the debris and all the physics that the game has. I think that physics and VR go hand in hand so well together. In FlatOut, hitting something to try to get ahead and you try to take a shortcut, but now you have a big log in on your windshield, so it's like "oh, is that actually worth it?" Then you have to stick your head actually out the window to see a little bit until you steer and shake the log off.

UploadVR: What went into the decision making process of something like this and Out of Sight VR being an Early Access game versus full release like Wrath, Trombone Champ, and Roboquest?

Elliott Tate: When I was coming up with the idea of Spark, one of the rules was "no timelines" because that kills so many projects and kills creativity and also gets games to ship on time. I know you have to have it within budget and within time and you need it for a lot of things, but part of the magic of what we did with modding was just this looser timeline and so Early Access really plays well into that concept. If it's a smaller team working on it or just one person you might not have the community helping to give feedback at some point to build the game with them. We kind of do with all our games, but I think for FlatOut specifically, one nightmare that I've been talking about being in the trenches is just getting all the wheels supported and um turns out that's a nightmare like hell on earth don't wish it upon anyone.

UploadVR: Just thinking about all the different combinations for PC, there's so many different GPU/CPU/RAM combinations. Now you got VR headsets on top of that and now you're putting wheels on top of that, so there's an infinite number of different combinations you've got to account for.

Elliott Tate: The situations I've been working through it's like this wheel doesn't work, so look into the report and it's like Fanatec wheel mixed with Logitech pedals mixed with a Thrustmaster. The different parts of it are all different and then they all use the same axis and they're conflicting, so you have to basically make them all know how to talk to each other. We finally built a tool that really has kind of solved that, so we've gotten a little over like 200 unique combos working now for people, but that is the pain of PC.

Not just having one thing to build for, but you've got sometimes hundreds of different setups and you're like "why is this not working?" and it's of course some combo that you know you had never seen before, but worth it I think. I love to see that there's still a core PC VR community. It's kind of part of my heart. I love the graphics that PC VR can produce, so it's been really cool to see them show up for FlatOut and really support it. It's been pretty awesome.

UploadVR: Was there any feedback so far that has surprised you?

Elliott Tate: Some people were saying it was too easy some people were saying it was too hard so it's kind of weird when you get sentences away they're like this is too easy and then...

UploadVR: Two reviews back to back...

Elliott Tate: Or one person was like "I paid this money and now I have to grind for this stuff. I paid for it, so I should get it all unlocked" and I was like here, let me give you a special save that has it all unlocked, but it was almost like "how dare you make me work for it."

UploadVR: That's interesting, because a lot of games have that progression system and that grind in there.

Elliott Tate: We can fix that super easy. Here's a save that has it all unlocked. I think I'll probably add that as like a Konami code somewhere we hide in there that unlocks. One cool thing about a game like this and what we do is even stuff that seems kind of obscure, like a feature request that isn't real big, we're happy to add it. A lot of times, it doesn't take long just to add some option out there for something, so sometimes it surprised me how many people have enjoyed like whether it's a difficulty, some insane mode that I would never play myself.

UploadVR: I'm looking forward to getting chucked out of a car whenever you decide to put that in there. That's gonna be fun.

Elliott Tate: I'll let you be the first tester.

UploadVR: You've got my email. What were some of the unique challenges of FlatOut aside from the wheel configurations versus those other projects? And were there some things that you learned from those earlier projects that you were able to pull forward into this to make this a little bit smoother?

Elliott Tate: Yeah, that's a good question too. The custom engine has a learning curve. There's a lot of proven processes especially for VR if you're using Unreal Engine or Unity. There's um kind of methods to doing stuff and you're kind of inventing the wheel a little bit when you're doing a custom engine

UploadVR: Was this the first custom engine project you've taken on? Or the first one to release?

Elliott Tate: The first one to release, yeah. I did the motion control implementation and with VRIK, there's no package out there. You have to write it by yourself, so there's those extra um bits there, but I think learning, every time we release a game, that design language of how do you convert flat elements? What makes them feel even a little bit better if you don't have time to redesign something completely? One thing I did was in FlatOut adding feathering to the loading screens. In a flat game, you're drawing on the actual monitor size and you have a nice rectangle, but a floating rectangle doesn't feel exactly great in VR, especially one that's shaped to the size of a screen. Ideally you break that apart and redesign it completely, but it also can work pretty well if you just add some kind of feathering, how you handle the world around it blacking out and fading in at the right areas.

A racing game is quite different, so I wouldn't say there's a huge amount of design overlap, but we've built a lot of tools that help porting flat screen games to VR and that certainly gets used across projects. Adding DLSS was a big thing for this game. It's an older engine that looked quite blurry in VR and so one real big thing I wanted to do was make it look as sharp as we could. If you've played on default settings, it might still be a little blurry. You can turn up the super sampling, but if you have the computer to put DLAA on, that looks really nice. It's a modern Nvidia antialiasing technique and it looks super super sharp.

To me, those kind of details are important. Then optimization, things you don't even think about. The game has a physics tick that runs at 30 and 60 Hertz, so that's how it calculates physics, so if you're running a headset at 90Hz, you'll see objects move almost like they're stuttering across, so suddenly you're like oh I don't just need to work on the rendering now. I need to unlock the physics engine and make that talk to the rendering part and make those all match up, so that it looks smooth. Those are all examples of things that the more projects you do, the more you have pretty clear ideas of how to solve different tech challenges.

UploadVR: We talked about all the challenges that you've had through the development process. What's something in the game that you want to tell people to look out for that you're really proud of?

Elliott Tate: I think I'm pretty proud of the haptics. Do you have a wheel?

UploadVR: I do not, not yet. This game is going to make me buy one.

Elliott Tate: You need to. We really went all out with how the car handles when you're crashing, so it's the full force feedback that connects to the whole suspension system and everything, so you feel just every bump or if you're turning it, it really force feedback swerves around. We've added telemetry that will come soon in a release, so people that have full motion rigs will be able to experience that too.

I love being immersed in VR, so when I sit there with the wheel and feel all that, it almost doubles the experience for me. I can't wait for you to get a wheel because it really takes it to the next level where literally somebody smashes you and you feel it and getting knocked around. That really turned out well I think.

UploadVR: Alright, well congratulations again on the release. Elliott Tate, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. I appreciate it.

Elliott Tate: Yeah, thanks Mike.

FlatOut 4: Total Insanity VR is available now on Steam in Early Access.

Hand-gesture movement is nice, but my favorite new feature is the custom app arrangement in the Library that finally lets me put apps where I want.

These new features are easy to miss if you don’t know where to look or how to switch them on. It only takes a few minutes to get familiar with the controls, but a little preview always helps.

Hand-Gesture Movement Controls

Hand-gesture movement might not sound like a big deal, but it’s actually quite a convenience upgrade. I often pop on my Quest 3 without picking up the controllers to check what's new, browse the web, or watch a video. Now, I can move around Horizon Home with just my hands.

After checking out my Instagram wall in 3D, I can teleport to the balcony with a thumb tap to admire the waterfalls in my environment, or swipe my thumb to turn and walk back to the browser wall to check the latest news. I found it to be very reliable, and the visuals make sense, showing directional indicators on my avatar's hand when the hand-movement controls are active. The controls disappear when not in use.

You can check if you have the new hand-tracking controls in the Settings app. If you see a menu at the top right of the Movement tab, you can select Hands to see the hand-movement layout. Below that, Meta added an option to watch a video guide.

It’s fairly intuitive. Make a fist with either hand, then tap with your thumb to activate the control overlay. You’ll see left and right arrows, suggesting you can swipe left and right to turn. You can also swipe forward and back to walk or aim with a ray and tap to teleport to the highlighted spot.

The gestures quickly become familiar, and you’ll soon be zipping around without needing controllers, a nice addition to hand-tracking.

Your Library Your Way

Meta finally lets me set up my app library however I want! That’s a long-overdue feature. It’s frustrating to dig through a long list of apps to find old AAA games I haven’t finished, like Asgard’s Wrath 2 or Vampire: The Masquerade - Justice.

I keep pretty busy, so games that offer several hours of gameplay might sit in my library for a month or more, getting pushed down the recents list by other apps. Old favorites that are worthy of replaying also tend to get buried. So this is a huge convenience feature.

Meta defaults to sorting by the most recently used games and apps, so I couldn’t rearrange anything until I changed that. The same is true if you sort by A-Z, Z-A, or Installed. The last option is Clear sort, and that’s where the magic happens. By removing the automated sorting, I could drag and drop apps anywhere in my library, or drag over another app to create a folder.

I put frequently used system apps at the top, followed by the games I’m actively playing and a few utilities. It’s great to arrange games and apps my way, instead of having to search or scroll through the entire library.

App Crash Recovery

There’s one more practical improvement in Horizon OS 2.4. Meta says apps can now restore a previous session after closing unexpectedly, so Browser panels should reappear where they were if the app crashes. I haven’t had the misfortune of testing that yet, but it sounds like the kind of small reliability upgrade that matters more if you use your Quest as a spatial computer.

As usual, keep in mind that the timing of Horizon OS rollouts can be unpredictable, and PTC features are still undergoing testing, so a wider release isn’t guaranteed. However, these are useful upgrades that seem likely to appear in future Quest updates.

The release date announcement follows a series of open playtests in April, the data from which resulted in refinement of gameplay, performance, and co-op features based on player feedback. The team has now entered the final pre-release stage and the game is coming very soon.

JOLLYCO describes the game as "a fast-paced, arcade-style VR shooter with a mix of mechanics and mini-games. It rewards accuracy, movement, and quick decision-making, while remaining easy to pick up and play."

Sugar Madness can be played solo, or in co-op mode, where teamwork and coordination are essential to overcome more challenging encounters.

Sugar Madness is a first-person shooter set in a candy-themed world. Dr. Sour, a mad genius, has experimented one too many times, turning the once-sweet confections of the world into rabid "candymorphs." You'll battle through an absurd candy-coated landscape, shooting a vast arsenal of wild weapons at a bizarre gauntlet of enemies. There are on-rails sections, boss fights, mini games, multiplayer, and more.

We'll have a review posted when the game launches. From the videos we've seen, it looks to be a fun and twisted take on the rail shooter, a Disneyland dark ride for people who like House of the Dead.

Sugar Madness is launching on June 4 on Meta Quest.

Gracia first launched in 2024 as a Quest app for viewing static photorealistic objects, and, far more notably, a PC VR app for moving photorealistic scenes, otherwise describable as volumetric video.

And to be clear, this is not just simple parallax like you'd get from stereoscopic 3D video, nor limited-perspective synthetic depth like the spatial scenes of Apple's visionOS 26. Gracia goes much further, offering fully volumetric content that you can physically walk around in VR or in your room via mixed reality.

Gracia Moving Volumetric Scenes Now On Quest 3 & Pico 4

Gracia’s moving volumetric scenes, dynamic gaussian splats, are now available on Quest 3 and Pico 4 headsets standalone.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

As with almost all of the remarkable advancements in 3D reconstruction over the past few years, the technology behind Gracia is Gaussian splatting - fitting millions of semitransparent colored blobs (Gaussians) in 3D space so that arbitrary viewpoints can be rendered realistically in real-time. Moving splats are often called 4DGS, four-dimensional Gaussian splats, the fourth dimension being time.

By the end of 2024, Gracia had already launched standalone apps for Quest 3 and Pico 4, removing the requirement for a PC, with the tradeoff of some quality. But the biggest problem with this standalone flow was the need to download each scene, requiring you to stand there with the headset on watching a progress bar chart the multi-gigabyte file arriving on your device. With the company's technology at the time, streaming would have required a 2.4 gigabit internet connection, something only a tiny fraction of people have and that most standalone headsets can't even reliably hit wirelessly anyway.

This crippled Gracia's founding ambitions of being the "YouTube of truly volumetric content", because if YouTube required a multi-gigabyte download before each video played, it just wouldn't be a viable service. And so the standalone headset app focused on short 10-second clips, rather than longer content that would support more use cases.

At the time of the standalone app launch, Gracia told UploadVR that it was working on improving its compression by at least an order of magnitude. Now, a year and a half later, the startup has achieved that lofty goal.

In March of this year, Gracia launched a world-first: the ability to stream select 4DGS scenes, with no app install or full download required. And you don't even need to download an app; Gracia's new tech stack works entirely in WebXR, meaning you can just navigate to gracia.ai/store in your Quest 3's web browser and have a performer volumetrically streamed into your living room in seconds.

On Apple Vision Pro, since Apple still doesn't let WebXR apps use camera passthrough as a background, you'll instead see the captures in a featureless black void. To get around this and let Vision Pro owners display the captures in their living room, Gracia is working on an Apple Vision Pro app, currently in testing, which should be launching relatively soon.

China’s 4DV AI Releases 6DoF Volumetric Video WebXR Demo

China’s 4DV AI released a WebXR demo of volumetric 6DoF videos created from 20 camera views, and you can try it on your VR headset right now.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

China's 4DV showed moving scenes in WebXR last year, but those were only 10 seconds long and predownloaded. Gracia is once again leading the pack when it comes to rendering moving volumetric captures in VR.

The startup says it achieved this by developing a technique for sending keyframes and motion change deltas, encoding only what parts of the capture change over time rather than sending the entire scene for each frame. Essentially, Gracia is applying a video codec style approach to Gaussian splatting. It also uses the new WebGPU graphics API in your browser to achieve the maximum possible performance, rivaling native apps, to eliminate the most frictionful step of all for any consumer app, that initial download requirement in the first place. The compression makes the stream feasible; WebGPU makes rendering the streamed splats fast enough in the browser.

As well as allowing for near-instant streaming of volumetric captures, this means captures have no hard file-size cap, in theory supporting use cases like entire concerts.

To stream Gracia's moving volumetric scenes at relatively high quality, 120K splats per frame, you'll need a constant 75 Mbps connection. A decade ago that would be a non-starter, but as of 2026 over 90% of homes in developed countries now have sufficiently fast internet for this.

Still, some don't, and sometimes the headset will be too far away from the router or on a network where other devices are hogging the bandwidth. For that, Gracia has demonstrated a 17 Mbps mode, offering 15K splats per frame, though in this mode the quality takes a significant hit.

Three scenes are currently available to stream from Gracia's website: a 36-second clip of a person working on a bicycle wheel, a 39-second clip of a doctor examining a patient's shoulder, and most impressive of all, a 4-minute performance by a musician singing with a guitar, complete with spatial audio.

Gracia is also keen to point out that while its captures are well-suited to be placed in your living room via mixed reality, they can also be placed into existing virtual Unity or Unreal environments, including for VR games and experiences, if a developer wanted to do this.

To be clear, by the way, by "stream" in this article I'm referring to watching content without having to fully download it. Gracia's technology does not support livestreaming. And the capture and processing requirements are the elephant in the room here.

Capturing these scenes requires around 60 shutter-synced and genlocked cameras arranged in a sphere, which studios typically charge at least $15K for a recording session with, and Gracia charges $800 per minute for processing plus a "minimum charge per segment". iPhone 17 Pro's genlock support may allow for a lower marginal capture cost, though for best results creators will want to use professional cameras like those from Blackmagic and Sony.

Still, the capture and processing requirements aside, what Gracia has pulled off here is remarkable. I would much rather watch a musician or comedian perform as a 6DoF volume in my living room, or preferred VR environment, than a 3DoF 180° 3D video, and I suspect if you're reading this, you agree.

If you own a VR headset, head over to gracia.ai/store in your headset's web browser, or your desktop browser for PC VR, and try it out for yourself. And even if you don't, you can try a flatscreen render in your browser to get the basic idea, though without the sense of depth and scale.

The next frontier for the volumetric media space will be developing the technology to allow anyone to capture scenes with a couple of iPhones, and to significantly reduce the processing time. As impossible as this might sound today, so did the idea of even streaming this type of content a few years ago, and the pace of progress in the 3D reconstruction scene, leveraging the rapid advancements in AI, remains staggering. The "YouTube of truly volumetric content" is not possible today, but I suspect it very much so will be by the end of this decade – and it could become a core use case of XR technology, propelling its mainstream use by the compounding advantages of a future social content platform that truly takes advantage of it.

I'm actively writing on UploadVR again, and this article is one in a series of "catch up" pieces where I report on some of the interesting things that have been happening in the industry in recent months. And yes, VR Download is coming back very soon!

The originally planned May 21 date was revealed at the VR Games Showcase in March following the November launches on PlayStation VR2 and PC VR. Flat2VR technical designer Tsvetan explained why in this update video, along with some Quest gameplay footage:

Reading between the lines, it appears the Quest version is not quite ready and the co-op would be limited to specific platforms, something Flat2VR did not care to do.

We reviewed Roboquest VR on Steam, saying "Roboquest VR takes what was already a great flatscreen roguelite experience and transforms it into a new VR classic. Moment-to-moment gameplay feels fantastic, and the game is right at home on the platform."

Roboquest VR Review: An Instant Classic

Roboquest VR takes an already exhilarating FPS roguelite and delivers a near-flawless VR adaptation.

UploadVRJames Galizio

We have seen other titles launch on multiple VR platforms without cross platform co-op like Into Black and the community response tends to lean negative as players prefer to play with their friends without limitations. The video states that Flat2VR will provide progress updates between now and the new July date. We'll monitor these for any additional news to pass along.

Roboquest VR will be available on Meta Quest on July 23. It's available now on SteamVR and PlayStation VR2.

Rhino Rock Studios has announced that its sci-fi arcade shmup Outblast is set to release on June 4, 2026. The game promises a high-speed, neon-soaked fight for survival that can be experienced either in full VR via Meta's Quest headsets and SteamVR, or in flat-screen mode, giving players the choice between full immersion and traditional play.

The game places you in the cockpit of C11-28, humanity's last line of defense against a rogue viral intelligence known as Typhon. Corruption is spreading across Perseon-6, and your job is to shoot enemies and save the planet from collapse.

While shmups haven't enjoyed mainstream popularity since the days of 16-bit consoles, recent games like Sektori have begun to break out of their niche and reach new audiences. We'll have a full review of Outblast closer to release, and see if it captures the magic of the greatest shmups.

Outblast will launch into action on June 4, 2026 on Meta Quest and Steam VR.

We'll have full coverage of the new game announcement and any other news from the showcase after it airs this Friday.

For those unfamiliar with The Binary Mill, the independent Australian studio has been working in VR for a decade.

One of its earlier VR titles was Rush, a high-speed flightsuit racing game in 2017. Gun Club VR, a weapons firing range simulator, followed later that year. Miniature arcade racer Mini Motor Racing X dropped in 2019, followed by high flying dystopian shooter Resist in 2021 and finally, Into Black in 2024. It also released Oculus Go and Gear VR games like 2016's Gun Club 3 VR.

Into Black Review: A Sci-Fi FPS That Hits The Mark

Co-op action adventure Into Black returns this week on PlayStation VR2 and PC VR, offering an enhanced port worth considering.

UploadVRLuis Aviles

All of The Binary Mill's games are available on Meta Quest, SteamVR, and Pico. PlayStation VR2 has Into Black, Rush (a revised Apex Edition with better graphics than the original PS VR release), Resist, and Gun Club, only lacking Mini Motor Racing X.

In a post on X, Friendly Fire said the previous issue with crossplay support has been resolved for PC players, allowing that port to move forward. That issue halted the planned May 14 release after a previous delay in late April for additional polishing. Friendly Fire promises a similar short turnaround time between announcement and release for the PS VR2 port as soon as crossplay is resolved for that platform.

Check out an updated gameplay teaser for yourself:

The PC VR and PS VR2 versions of the game promise to come with 'major visual & gameplay improvements' along with a new horde system and a new map titled Atlas.

We will have a review of A Long Survive available soon. A Long Survive can be wishlisted on PS VR2 and Steam. It is available now on Quest.

The legendary adventure game Myst and its sequel Riven arrive on PlayStation VR2 today. The Myst and Riven remakes first debuted in 2020 and 2024 respectively and have previously been released on PC VR via Steam and on Meta's headsets.

This marks the first time the Myst and Riven remakes have appeared on the PlayStation ecosystem. They'll be fully playable on both flat screens, and via PlayStation VR2.

We reviewed both games when they previously debuted on Meta Quest and PC VR, and you can read those reviews here: Myst and Riven.

The original games that the remakes are based upon first released in 1993 and 1997, respectively. Myst was the best-selling PC game overall for almost a full decade, and defined PC gaming in the '90s. Its sequel, Riven, expanded the series' lore and pushed the boundaries of what PC point and click adventure games could achieve. For many PC gamers of a certain age, Myst and Riven were landmark titles and pioneers of immersion, and with the remakes playable in VR, that has never been more true.

We'll have a unified review of both games as they exist on PlayStation VR2 coming soon.

Myst and Riven are both available now via the PlayStation Store for $34.99 each.

I played Darts VR2: Bullseye right around its April release, finding the core gameplay modes addictive while being underwhelmed by the zombie mode. The former is a good sign as the darts simulator spins up its competitive League mode this week.

Darts VR2: Bullseye Impressions: Of Course There Are Zombies

Darts VR2: Bullseye, out now in Early Access, keeps it simple, making it easy to repeatedly return for one more round.

UploadVRMike Johnson

Before starting tournaments this summer, Gamitronics is hosting two test events on Friday, 22nd May and Thursday, 28th May. Both events will take place between 7pm-9pm BST/11am-1pm PT, with four-player and eight-player tournaments consisting of one set and one leg each.

Anyone interested in participating in the tests can sign up via this form. Test participants will be added to the in-game credits as a thank-you from the Darts VR2 team. Official tournaments will be open to all players with cross-platform support across Meta Quest, PlayStation VR2, and SteamVR.

Multiple VR games have dipped into the esports realm with tournament play, including Triangle Factory's Hyper Dash, Resolution Games' Blaston, Vail VR in partnership with the Virtual Reality Master League (VRML), and most recently Polyarc Games' Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss.

Darts VR2: Bullseye is available now in Early Access on Meta Quest, Steam, and PS VR2.

Free-roaming VR and XR experiences feel like a glimpse into the potential of VR beyond gaming as a tool for education or entertainment communally, beyond the solitary experience often found when putting on a headset. VR concerts and fan content, or experiences like the recent Ghost in the Shell exhibition, showcase how you can create a social experience that enhances, rather than detaches, from the real world, bringing people together. Often the thing holding them back is not ambition but practicality. Space, language and scale are all factors that make it difficult to expand these experiences beyond one country, especially if it's a larger free-roaming experience like Monster Hunter Bridge that requires a huge space to function. This space comes at a cost, for the same reason a cinema is more expensive to operate than a cafe.

Even if the software is digital, the limitations are frustratingly physical and practical.

Excurio is one of the few VR developers creating these large-scale experiences that have found the balance necessary to grow into an international force within this niche but growing market. Based in France, sub-licensing of their ambitious, deep, educational VR experiences has brought these works to over 30 venues ranging from Europe to North America to Asia, localized as necessary. The company was founded as Emissive in 2005, before launching this immersive initiative in 2020 at a time many were pulling away from the sector.

Their selling point is their ambition: these are 45 minute interactive stories that encourage players to explore and learn about a past brought to life, occasionally working with museums and cultural initiatives in various countries to find and develop these works with a focus on history and immersion. Utilizing HTC Vive headsets, players explore these universally understood landmark moments in history that transcend language as though they were really there.

In Yokohama, a city just a short train ride from Japan’s capital, Tokyo, two of their experiences have been sub-licensed to Immersive Journey for anyone to try for themselves. In Horizon of Khufu, players are encouraged to explore the Khufu pyramid, including areas closed off to the public in real life and told from both the perspective of the present day and a journey 4500 years into the past to see them at the peak of their radiance. Tonight With the Impressionists is set in the heart of France in 1874, during the origins of the Impressionist art movement, focused on key artists that shaped the era.

At the gracious invite of the Cinema Leap team in Japan that operates these Excurio-developed VR experiences, we made the trip to Yokohama to try them for ourselves.

Horizon of Khufu

When Excurio first made the leap into creating these large-scale VR experiences, they turned to the pyramids. Horizon of Khufu is a narrative walk-through explainer of the development of the pyramids, told via an exclusive night-time VIP tour that soon descends into a journey through time and space via the gods to explore the very depths of what the pyramids and Egyptian society were at their peak. At least, based on what current Egyptologists understand of its creation, which creates for both the most fascinating and frustrating aspect of an experience that, while fun, certainly feels like a lingering first attempt by a company still finding its feet at the time of its development.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu stands as the tallest of the pyramids, honoring a pharaoh whose life is relatively unknown despite being considered one of the most beloved rulers during the golden age of Ancient Egyptian society. The construction of such a monolithic structure is a wonder of the world today for a reason: the mere concept any human civilization could build something like this at that time is still awe-inspiring to consider, only heightened by how we still are yet to uncover the truth of its construction even a millennium later. Your tour guide Mona initially takes you into the pyramid, through public tunnels and into the large open space known as the Queen’s Chamber.

This is where the so-far typical tour takes a turn. The electrical lights installed in modern decades for tourist purposes suddenly go out, with Mona asking you to wait behind while they investigate the cause further. At this moment, a cat that sneaked inside the temple with you reveals themselves to be the feline goddess Bastet, who proceeds to take you beyond the physical limits to see an internal X-ray of the pyramid before taking you and Mona through time to learn not just about these colossal structures, but the ceremonies, temples and lives that existed around them during their peak.

It’s a genuine attempt to use VR to make an educational lecture about the pyramids entertaining for all ages. We start outside the pyramid and physically walk through tunnels in VR in order to explore these tunnels. The outside of the pyramid from the ground is imposing, while an impressive attention to detail reveals individual stones close enough it feels like you could touch them. When we are transported to ancient Egypt, we journey on a replica of a solar barque, a replica of the type of boat used by Khufu during his reign. VR grants a window into his embalming and mummification after his death to give us a deeper understanding of how these ceremonies were conducted, to the point of even allowing us a glimpse inside the coffin itself.

Yet the experience, for all its interesting factual elements, is very hands-off and wordy, at times to its detriment. This is truly a lecture in VR conducting an overview of Egyptian history, and the result is an experience we less interact with and more are told about as we watch on, at times not moving for minutes at a time. Over 18 months of co-operation between Excurio and Peter Der Manuelian, an Egyptologist at Harvard University, ensures even the minutiae of how the pyramids are rendered and the ancient rituals are recreated are accurate to the best of our current understanding, acknowledging that gaps in our knowledge lost to time remain. Yet compared to the shorter, more action-driven experiences offered somewhere like Tyffonium, this can feel at times exhausting by virtue of how this history is being communicated via the narrative of the experience.

Without a broad cast of characters - at most you will be joined by only Mona and Bastet, with most of the experience featuring just one of these companions talking directly at you, rather than in conversation - there are long periods that can feel like a pretty VR backdrop to a podcast that could easily be made more involved to take advantage of the medium. When it does this, such as the moment it takes you above the pyramid at sunrise before transforming the environment into a rendition of what it looked like 4500 years ago, watching these buildings restore to their glory and the Nile River grow, it’s a joy.

These other moments leave the overall experience somewhat mixed, albeit one I certainly left feeling satisfied with when I eventually took off the headset. I find the pyramids a fascinating relic of a past civilization, with VR being effective in communicating the scale and immensity of these constructions that alone makes it worth the cost of entry, especially as its free-roam nature lets you truly feel present in this ancient world. Wordy, inconsistent pacing aside, the pyramids alone are fascinating enough to justify the journey.

Tonight With the Impressionists: Paris 1874

Tonight With the Impressionists could not be more different in both structure and approach to exploring the period in which it's set. Replacing Egypt for 19th Century Paris, this is a structurally far more engaging piece as it seeks to illuminate not just the famous artworks, but the philosophical debates that consumed the art world surrounding this new style of painting.

Originally launched in 2024, it’s clear years of experience have enhanced the work and given the team an understanding for what works, these lessons implemented into this artistic lesson. Rather than being lectured, we’re invited into a journey through time and feel a part of the intimate conversations and debates of Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and others that would go to define the era.

For all you may not be familiar with every name of the artists featured in this experience, which also includes Berthe Morisot, Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro, you likely know their work. Monet’s impressionist pieces capturing the Parisian sunrise or a water lily pond are often considered some of the best artistic works ever made. While you may not know Renoir’s La Grenouillère, if you’ve ever looked at older paintings from the late-1800s you likely have a faint familiarity with the park lake scene portrayed in the work, and this is true for every piece featured in this walkthrough exhibit.

A collaboration with France’s Musée d'Orsay does more than just provide historical accuracy in this case, as their direct involvement is key to bringing this work to life. We enter the streets of 1870s France and meet a model and writer named Rose, who takes us through the streets to introduce us to the social history of the period before we enter a quaint home repurposed as one of the earliest solo exhibitions for Impressionist art. As we jump through time and beyond the confines of the gallery into the minds of the artists to explore the driving ideals of a movement craving interpretation of the mundane over posed spectacle, each moment is illuminated not just by rote recreations but high-quality scans of the real art pieces that reveal every paint stroke and sketch.

The best part of this exhibition, however, is the method taken to relay the history of the era. We meet each of the six featured artists and are invited warmly into their social circle to hear the debates these artists would have amongst one another about what art is and could be, inspired by the writings of the period. The result is more dynamic and involved, like listening to friends debate a topic you can’t help but overhear, an approach that makes the information they tell us far easier to digest and retain once the headset is removed. Writing is improved, natural dialogue that makes these conversations feel dynamic even if you can’t shape their outcome.

There is somewhat of a bias, admittedly, in my preference for this work over the other - while I love the pyramids and their spectacle, I also already know a lot about their construction. For all I know of these artistic works and the era, I didn’t know as much on the questions and conversations surrounding them, or what it meant to be Impressionist at the time the movement was being pioneered. I felt like I was learning more. It’s also no coincidence, however that a more casual format stripped of the grandiosity of a god talking down from a place of omnipotence as you physically walk the galleries and stare at the walls and art like you would any other museum felt more natural than standing on floating boats, making the 45 minutes quite literally fly by without even noticing the time, despite being the second demo of the day.

Should You Visit Immersive Journey in Yokohama?

That being said, I certainly enjoyed my time in both Egypt and Paris during my visit. Compared to other public free-roaming VR demos, the space offered to these two VR exhibitions made the grandiosity of these longer-than-normal experiences apparent - some smaller-scale ones, for all their ambition, make the reality of circling a parking space-sized room inevitably apparent while this had the space to truly lose yourself in another world.

For the credit of the team at Immersive Journey, everything is set up to ensure an easy onboarding process for anyone who wishes to take part, regardless of their prior experience with VR. Each experience is available in both English and Japanese, but also other languages like Korean and Spanish. Dubs have also been produced for each language. While I imagine most readers will try these experiences in English, it should be noted the attention to detail and care taken in these experiences translates even to the multi-language dubbing. In Japanese, the voice cast for Horizon of Khufu includes the talented Fairouz Ai, the voice of Jolyne Cujoh in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean.

There’s even accessibility considerations for those who struggle to stand and walk for long stretches of time, as each experience has been optimized to allow the entire experience to be played from the comfort of a provided wheelchair. It’s an accessibility concern I’ve never seen considered by similar experiences that typically exclude those requiring such needs, though its inclusion does make the omission of other accessibility features like subtitles for dialogue a surprising oversight.

The main critique that can be offered is less of a problem with the experience and more of a safety inevitability that can occasionally break the immersion of the worlds crafted. Considering the large space required to operate these VR experiences, as well as the time required to clear them, it would be impossible to reserve these spaces for just one group enacting one experience at a time. To avoid wandering into other players, any person not in your group that enters your field of vision is rendered as a shadow to let you know their location and to avoid bumping into them.

When you have a lot of groups and different experiences taking place at once, however, their appearances are regular and distracting, often tonally jarring to what is taking place in the virtual world you are a part of. In one sequence during Tonight With the Impressionists, I was stood on a narrow balcony watching Monet paint his famous sunrise when, floating above the sea to my right, I saw two silhouettes appear in view and walk right through the scene, including directly through Monet’s canvas. Their appearance ensured I didn’t bump into them, though seeing two labored shadows saunter through this emotional scene did take away from the impact of this genuinely beautiful recreation.

This even occurred during a quieter period with far fewer interruptions compared to my Horizon of Khufu demo. With two large groups before and after me, and other groups already moving through the space at the time I began my journey, the room appeared at capacity, which was noticed when I had shadows wander through my feline goddess guide and float through the clouds. It’s far from a dealbreaker and can be ignored (I’d certainly not recommend removing them, considering the safety risk of doing so), but it was an occasional immersion-breaking frustration.

Even with this stumbling block, though, I found both Immersive Journey experiences to be a thrilling and entertaining breeze through history, blending education and VR in ways that felt fresh and ambitious. At just 4000 yen per experience there’s a lot on offer in these 45 minutes to justify the cost, especially with friends. Beyond Yokohama, the Horizon of Khufu experience is also available in Nagoya, and both experiences can also be found in select locations in Brazil, Canada and beyond. Yokohama is a wonderful city with plenty to see, but taking a step away from it all for an hour to travel through time is far from a bad use of your time.

The technical merits and engaging reinterpretation of the past are more than worth a break from sightseeing for this innovative method of bringing the past to life. You might even learn something along the way, and at the very least experience something at a scale beyond what similar groups are attempting in the space. Considering the expense and difficulties that come with making it to Paris or Egypt, it’s also a chance to virtually travel for a far more affordable cost than the real thing.

The first time I loaded into WorldLens VR's new AI-powered 3D Street View mode, I thought the feature was broken.

When you first drop onto a street corner, you are just looking at the standard, flat imagery wrapped around your head. But if you stand still for a second, the depth layer snaps into place. It’s a strange realization when it happens: buildings suddenly separate from the sky, foreground objects take on physical weight, and the scene stops looking like wallpaper.

The developer, Stoian Eduard Andrei, has been rolling out steady optimization updates to fix blurring and edge warping around objects, but even with those fixes, the effect is understated. It isn’t a dramatic, pop-out book 3D spectacle, and it shouldn't be oversold as one.

Instead, it relies entirely on subtle, real-time parallax. I tested it in an old European square flanked by a massive church. When you shift your physical weight or move your head, the foreground elements slide against the background just enough to trick your brain. It feels like a step in the right direction rather than a total visual overhaul.

This subtle depth is most striking when you drop into high-density urban environments like Times Square. In the headset, towering digital billboards cleanly detach from the structural steel and glass skyscrapers behind them. Even chaotic, organic shapes, like a dense patch of bushes in a sidewalk planter or a clump of trees outside a restaurant, manage to pop out with satisfying depth.

The effect carries over beautifully to complex indoor spaces as well, like the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, Germany. Standing inside the museum, the app successfully separates the reflective cars from the open, multi-level walkways behind them, turning what used to be a flat, static panorama into a believable physical hall.

Getting these flat images to warp into 3D on a mobile headset is no small feat, which is why the tech behind it is so interesting.

When I spoke with Andrei on a video call, he told me that restraint was intentional. The developer previously released an app called EarthQuest, which was a validation and test for the concepts that eventually became WorldLens VR. EarthQuest is no longer available, and the result of his research and feedback can be seen in WorldLens VR.

"The main design goal was realism," Andrei told me. "I wanted the Street View environments to feel natural and believable in 3D, corresponding to the real scene as closely as possible."

In written follow-up questions, Andrei confirmed that because Google doesn’t provide raw LiDAR data or depth maps for third-party developers, WorldLens has to infer the entire spatial structure from a single raw 2D panorama on the fly.

Pushing that much streaming data through a standalone headset can cause performance problems. During my testing, rapidly jumping from dense city centers to narrow mountain passes sometimes overwhelmed the system, occasionally throwing a "RAM usage high" error before crashing straight back to the Quest dashboard. When I reported the issue, Andrei noted that his backend analytics show a lifetime crash rate under one percent for the build, pointing to tight Meta OS memory limits mixed with heavy streaming threads. In fairness, I was pushing the app aggressively at the time, loading multiple locations in quick succession and forcing scene reloads. Fortunately, the app's state-saving is solid, since rebooting drops you right back onto the exact street corner where it failed.

To handle the blurry ground textures common in third-party Google Earth apps, Andrei also built a proprietary 4x neural network upscaler into the preferences menu. It acts as a sharp texture filter for close-up viewing without hallucinating fake objects or inventing fictional geometry.

While a PCVR port is in the works, Andrei is holding off on estimating a release date too early given the scale of the project. However, he noted that moving to PC-tethered hardware will provide significantly more performance headroom. According to Andrei, the goal for the PCVR version is to push visual detail and caching capacity further, which should mean faster loading, near-instant 3D generations, and reduced 3D tile pop-in compared to standalone hardware.

While virtual travel remains a specific niche within the broader VR ecosystem, WorldLens VR shows why these experiences continue to resonate with some headset users. There is a massive psychological difference between looking at a flat map and getting that brief, genuine sensation that you are standing on a street corner halfway across the world. It is the kind of experience where you can easily lose yourself for hours just exploring, hopping from one random corner of the globe to the next.

For an app built by a solo developer chasing a personal obsession, that alone makes it worth a look.

Affordable handheld consumer 360° cameras have improved leaps & bounds in recent years, with $500 8K HDR options available for over a year now from Chinese startup Insta360 and drone giant DJI, as well as from the American GoPro Max2. And while professionals could mount these or an array of wide-angle cameras to drones, that wasn't practical for typical consumers and amateur creators. Insta360 also previously sold an attachment for drones, called Sphere. But any attached solution, no matter how streamlined, adds weight and thus negatively affects flight time and performance. It was also incredibly hard for these attached solutions to produce an undistorted 360° output free of any visible seams.

Last year, Insta360 spun up a new subsidiary brand called Antigravity, and in December launched Antigravity A1, the first fully integrated 360° camera drone.

As well as recording 8K 360° footage at 30FPS or 5.2K at 60FPS – footage that you can share with VR headset owners however you like – remarkably, the currently $1279 Antigravity A1 package actually comes with a headset featuring the same 2560×2560 micro-OLED panels you'd find in a Bigscreen Beyond, though a narrower field of view, around 70° horizontal and vertical.

The goggles receive a live 360° video feed from the drone via their protruding antennae, and with the headset's rotational tracking you can look around from the drone's position using your head, with very low latency. It weighs around a third less than a Quest headset, has a tethered battery to keep the weight off your head, and you can use it to watch your 360° recordings at home if you don't already own a general VR headset.

Further, Antigravity A1 has a rather unique controller, also included in the box, a tracked device that leans into the VR-like experience by having you point with your arm where you want to fly. It's essentially like being in a 3DoF VR flying game, the type you could have imagined on Oculus Go, except with photorealistic graphics and the obvious glaring difference that you're actually flying around the real world.

In fact, Antigravity has leaned so much into this gamified approach that the company even has a feature to superimpose a player object onto a traditional FPV (non-360°) view of the live feed, such as a dragon or airplane. A truly unique idea, though it would be far more impressive if it could be superimposed onto the 360° feed, not just the regular FPV view.

In late March, just under two months ago, the drone market leader DJI launched a competitor to Antigravity A1, called DJI Avata 360.

DJI Avata 360 has a lower entry price for those who already own DJI controllers or goggles, at just over $400. Further, DJI's drone can record 8K 60FPS and features a larger image sensor for superior footage, omnidirectional obstacle avoidance for easier flying, and prop guards for safety, while Antigravity A1 is meant only for outdoor use in open spaces. DJI's drone also has a traditional single-lens mode, with the cameras in a mechanically rotating block.

In other words, DJI Avata 360 is essentially the better drone – though I should note that it's around double the weight, bringing it over the threshold for FAA registration.

However, it's arguable that while DJI may have the better drone, Antigravity A1 is the better VR/MR experience, thanks to a better included headset.

The two DJI goggles that Avata 360 supports have a field of view of just 39°H×23°V and 48°H×28°V, respectively - considerably narrower than Antigravity's. The chips in the DJI Goggles are also limited to 4K 60fps decoding, while Antigravity's goggles have a more powerful chip for 8K playback.

In other words, flying the Antigravity drone will feel considerably more immersive, and you don't even necessarily need a general VR headset to immersively watch the footage you record, though the even wider field of view of something like a Quest 3 would of course be preferable.

Regardless of these differences, the real story here is that any consumer or amateur creative can now record 360° drone footage with relatively little effort. We're already starting to see the results on YouTube and Vimeo, and it's a product category we'll be tracking in coming years.

I'm actively writing on UploadVR again, and this article is one in a series of "catch up" pieces where I report on some of the interesting things that have been happening in the industry in recent months. And yes, VR Download is coming back very soon!

Polyarc has announced that the previously VR-exclusive Moss and its sequel Moss: Book II are coming to flat screens in a unified package called Moss: The Forgotten Relic. The game will launch this summer for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox and Nintendo Switch.

Moss: The Forgotten Relic not only unifies both Moss games into one, but also includes Moss' DLC Twilight Garden. Polyarc's announcement also mentions that the new game will feature enhanced visuals, a reworked camera, new cutscenes, and an accessibility feature that will let players skip challenging combat sections.

This news follows recent turmoil at Polyarc. We reported in March that two-thirds of the studio's staff had been laid off after the studio's next "large project" lost its funding. Other studios have suffered similar setbacks in recent months. Survios, makers of Alien: Rogue Incursion and Creed: Rise to Glory, has all but shut down after a pivot to flat screen products failed to bolster the studio's coffers.

This year has seen more and more VR studios pivot to a hybrid model. Vertigo Games and their The 7th Guest Remake, ,Realities.io,'s Puzzling Places, and Resolution Games' Demeo x Dungeons and Dragons: Battlemarked are just a few of the many VR titles that have recently released or are currently being ported or remade for flat screen platforms.

The trend is one that we discuss on this week's UploadVR Gamescast. It speaks to challenges in the broader game industry, and in the VR market in particular. The games industry has always moved through similar peaks and valleys. If a hybrid model helps VR developers weather the storm and come out the other side producing new VR titles, that's the best possible outcome.

Nintendo has added five additional Virtual Boy games to their Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack service. The new batch of games includes Virtual Bowling and Jack Bros., two extremely rare games that for decades have held an incredibly high value on the used market.

The full list follows:

Jack Bros. - This Atlus-developed stereoscopic 3D dungeon crawler was the first Shin Megami Tensei game released outside of Japan. Its rarity has long made it an expensive buy.

Vertical Force - A technically excellent shmup developed by Hudson which uses the Virtual Boy's 3D display to great effect (the player's ship can move into the background to avoid bullets and obstacles).

Space Invaders Virtual Collection - A Japan-only release developed by Taito, this game includes direct ports of the classic arcade game Space Invaders from 1978, and its sequel Space Invaders Part II from 1979. It also features 3D remakes that take advantage of the Virtual Boy's hardware capabilities.

V-Tetris - Another Japan-only release, V-Tetris is essentially Tetris for the Virtual Boy. A second Tetris game, 3D Tetris, was released for Virtual Boy the following year.

Virtual Bowling - Another extremely rare game originally released only in Japan, Virtual Bowling was rushed to market just prior to the Virtual Boy's discontinuation. It's a 3D bowling game.

We reviewed Nintendo's official Virtual Boy accessory headset when it launched earlier this year, and everything you need to know about Nintendo's Virtual Boy support and emulation on Switch and Switch 2 can be found in that piece (we cover the subscription cost, the pros and cons of "renting" these games via a service, and the hardware itself).

Prior to that we'd covered Virtual Boy Go, a sideloaded app that's without question the best way to play Virtual Boy games on the Meta Quest ecosystem.

Wingsuit: Romsdalen first released a playable demo in February, before launching in full three months later. It can be played with a traditional controller, but the game’s VR support puts the player right into the action as a would-be glider soaring across a massive open-world landscape.

Wingsuit: Romsdalen’s campaign features multiple starting points, each with a list of achievements you need to perform in order to gain points and advance further. These challenges include flying through a course of rings, reaching a certain score, or uncovering hidden secrets like UFOs or whale balloons.

You only need to complete a few objectives to unlock the next drop point, but you can always come back later to fulfill some of the ones you skipped the first time around. Keep in mind that many of these challenges will be incredibly difficult to complete, especially when you are starting out.

Once you initiate a dive, you hold your arms up at a neutral level (which you set during the initial start-up) to glide. To steer, you need to tilt your head to position yourself, raise and lower your arms to climb or dive, and even press one of the upper triggers for a sharp turn. Getting the hang of the VR motion controls can be tricky at first, but there is a decent sense of adrenaline as you speed across the sky.

Diving can increase your speed at the risk of plummeting to the ground, while climbing is useful for stabilizing your fall. The speedometer on your arm keeps track of how fast you are going, and beeps when you are at risk of losing control. You can also perform midair tricks by tilting your arms toward your head or raising one while lowering the other. This will earn you points, and the closer you are to the ground when you perform a trick, the better your reward will be.

Once you are ready to end your run, you can pull your parachute by pressing the lower triggers. If you end up hitting the ground too fast, your character will suffer a brutal end - one you can avoid by landing on a pile of boxes or slowing your descent with the parachute. Completing runs will also grant you Experience points, which you can use to unlock new wingsuits. Each wingsuit has its own stats that influence how fast you can go and how easily the suit can handle turns.

Wingsuit: Romsdalen has a Line Creator mode, which lets you chart your own course (literally) by gliding across a map and placing rings with the press of a button. After you wipe out, you can choose to test out your newly formed path or upload it online for other players to try out for themselves.

Graphics are pretty solid for the most part, recreating the snowy peaks and lush green valleys of Romsdalen while being accompanied by the rustling sound of wind as you glide through the air above. However, it should be pointed out that flipping and barrel rolling can be pretty disorienting. There is also a small blood splatter when your character crashes into the ground, but thankfully it isn’t too graphic. Still, your character hitting the ground with a hard thud again and again can be tough to watch at times.

It can be hard to get a handle on Wingsuit: Romsdalen's gameplay mechanics at first, and you should be prepared to grind a decent amount while unlocking new drop points. That said, the game does provide a thrilling sense of gliding through the air, though you might want to avoid it if you are particularly prone to motion sickness.

The concert joins a growing collection of immersive music performances available through Meta's Horizon TV app, including Coldplay’s concert at Wembley Stadium, Sabrina Carpenter, Arcade Fire, and several others. Apple is exploring similar territory as well through Apple Immersive Video on the Vision Pro, including a Metallica concert experience that places viewers directly inside the performance.

After spending more than an hour watching the Goo Goo Dolls show on my Meta Quest 3, I came away impressed by how naturally live music fits immersive VR180 video when the production is done well.

What immediately impressed me was the image quality. The Quest 3 delivered a consistently sharp and clear presentation in VR180 3D, with enough detail and depth to create a real sense of presence inside the theater. The Beacon Theatre itself plays a major role in that feeling. Between the lighting, stage design, and the visible crowd below, the experience captures the atmosphere of a live venue in a way traditional video simply cannot.

What makes the concert especially effective is the way it was filmed.

Several immersive cameras are positioned throughout the venue, including wide shots from the back of the theater that showcase the full scale of the stage and audience. Other cameras are placed directly on stage alongside the band, including a moving immersive rig that walks around the performers during songs.

Those moments completely change the feeling of the concert.

At times, you are standing so close to the musicians that it creates a level of intimacy that would be impossible for most fans attending the show in person. During the band’s performance of “Iris,” the combination of proximity, lighting, crowd energy, and spatial depth created moments that genuinely felt emotional in a way traditional video rarely achieves.

That may ultimately be why concerts work so well in immersive video compared to some other forms of VR entertainment.

Live music already depends heavily on atmosphere, scale, lighting, and audience energy. Viewers also naturally accept fixed camera positions during concerts in a way they may not during narrative content or interactive experiences. VR180 enhances those strengths rather than fighting against them.

There is also something compelling about being placed in positions that are normally inaccessible. One moment you are sitting behind the audience taking in the entire theater. The next, you are effectively standing beside the band on stage as they perform.

That sense of access may be one of immersive entertainment’s biggest advantages.

Meta appears to understand that potential. Horizon TV has quietly become home to a growing library of immersive entertainment experiences beyond gaming, while the company’s previously announced partnership with James Cameron suggests broader ambitions around immersive 3D media and storytelling in the future.

None of this replaces attending a real concert in person. That’s not really the point.

What experiences like the Goo Goo Dolls concert demonstrate is that immersive video can deliver something traditional media cannot: the feeling of physically being somewhere you otherwise could never be.

For a VR industry still searching for mainstream entertainment use cases beyond gaming, experiences like this feel increasingly important.

Realcast Inc., developers of Le Dino Labo, has announced that the second expansion DLC for their dinosaur-building mixed-reality experience is available now on Meta Quest. "Cretaceous Predators and Prey" introduces three new dinosaurs to the casual puzzle game, including the legendary Velociraptor, Protoceratops, and Psittacosaurus.

Like the dinosaurs previously available in the base game and the first DLC "Jurassic Giants," each new dinosaur has been carefully adapted for Le Dino Labo's hands-on game mechanics, which allow players to examine individual fossil fragments and assemble dinosaur skeletons one bone at a time.

Le Dino Labo uses full hand tracking interaction, allowing fragments of iconic dinosaurs to be examined, rotated, and assembled into complete creatures all within the player's real-world environment. When a dinosaur is completed, it springs to true life size, driving home the sheer enormity of these ancient creatures. (Can you fit a Diplodocus in your bedroom?)

A previously published Le Dino Labo roadmap for future updates included new themed packs, deeper skeletal manipulation, enhanced environmental integration, and more.

Le Dino Labo's new DLC Cretaceous Predators and Prey is available now on the Meta Horizon Store for $3.99.

Barely a month after the Dua Lipa music pack, Kluge Interactive is back with another drop, featuring five tracks from Crypt of the NecroDancer composer Danny Baranowsky.

Watch the trailer here:

Here's the full list of tracks:

• Disco Descent
• Konga Conga Kappa
• Rhythmortis
• Fungal Funk
• Styx and Stones

Each track is available for $1.99 or get the full pack as a bundle for $8.95. With this release, Synth Riders' catalog now totals 188 songs (81 free, 107 DLC).

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

I reviewed Fixer Undercover when it released on Meta Quest in February, saying "The heavy emphasis on VR interactions and encouragement to think outside the box on solutions makes for a highly entertaining spy caper." My only real complaint was a heavy amount of annoying grab jank and the game updated about a month ago with a physics overhaul for smoother object interactions.

Developer Creativity AR announced it was working on a Steam port shortly after the Quest release, promising "dynamic shadows, higher resolution for textures, and post-processing to make the prison feel more grounded and immersive."

Watch the Steam trailer here:

Going the hybrid model to expand its audience is a trend we've been seeing in VR. Over a dozen developers have recently ported their VR titles to flatscreen or released a new game without VR support at all. Most recently, Moss and Glassbreakers developer Polyarc Games announced Moss: The Forgotten Relic, a combination of the two Moss games, for PC and consoles this summer.

Fixer Undercover can be wishlisted on Steam. There is a VR supported demo available to play for any interested in trying the new version first.

Beyond the visual treat, Meta moved two buried controls into quick settings, making them much more convenient: Power options and seated VR are now just a click away.

Browser Photos Pop Into 3D

The most impressive feature is browser-based 3D conversion. You can turn almost any website image into a stereoscopic 3D photo with a few clicks, or pinch when using hand tracking.

I can simply point at an image in the Quest browser, select and hold, and a new “View in 3D” option appears. After a few seconds of processing, the flat image transforms into a stereoscopic scene that floats beyond the frame with convincing depth.

Meta is playing catch-up with this capability and still lags behind in terms of video. Android XR offers a real-time 2D to 3D option for Samsung’s Galaxy XR headset, while Viture and Xreal extend real-time 3D conversion to smart glasses. XR manufacturers are increasingly leveraging the inherent 3D capability of headsets and glasses.

Upload 3D Photos From Your Phone

The Meta Horizon mobile app gained a related feature that makes it easy to upload photos from your phone and convert them into 3D images for Quest viewing.

Just open the app menu, tap Gallery, then select photos from your phone’s camera roll, and tap the upload button. Meta processes the images into stereoscopic 3D photos that can later be viewed inside your Quest headset’s gallery.

The workflow is surprisingly simple. There’s no special camera mode or export process. It feels more like uploading ordinary cloud photos, except the result has depth when viewed in VR. That matters because 3D photos simulate real depth in a VR headset, a different image to each eye. That’s not possible on phones, TVs, or movie screens.

As James Cameron has pointed out over the years, modern VR headsets solve many of the brightness and viewing-angle limitations that held back earlier waves of 3D entertainment. Meta has already been leaning into that idea through its partnership with James Cameron for Quest 3D entertainment content.

Faster Access To Useful Controls

The other additions in this PTC update are less flashy but arguably more practical. Meta added new Quick Settings toggles for both Power Options and Boost Height. When enabled, they appear on the right side of the Quick Settings panel for easy access.

Power Options opens a compact system window that shows the remaining battery level along with buttons for Sleep, Cancel, Power Off, and Restart.

Boost Height is a common need, so this addition has a bigger impact. The control acts like a switch, raising (or lowering) my virtual viewpoint by about 16 inches. One click and I feel like I’m standing even if I’m seated. I can also use it while standing to grow taller, a fun but usually impractical twist.

Some games and apps already offer accessibility height adjustments internally, but having a universal system-level shortcut is much more convenient.

While Quest headsets still receive a steady stream of new VR games each month, Meta’s recent Horizon OS updates increasingly focus on spatial media, everyday utilities, and lightweight computing features outside traditional gaming. Features like AI-generated 3D photos and quick-access system control make the Quest feel increasingly designed for everyday spatial computing instead of purely gaming.

The ports were originally scheduled to release last month on April 30 before Friendly Fire announced a two week delay to May 14.

The following is a quote from Friendly Fire's statement:

During our final testing process, we found a problem affecting the Crossplay connection between platforms. After discussing it internally, we made one thing very clear: we are not willing to launch the game without Crossplay working properly.

Crossplay is not a secondary feature for us. It is one of the main parts of the experience. A Long Survive was designed around cooperative gameplay, and releasing the game with that experience broken would simply not be right. From the beginning, our goal was always to break the barriers between platforms and let everyone play with their friends, no matter where they are playing.

The statement goes on to say that the entire team is working to resolve the issue, but there is no estimated time on when that will happen. As a result, Friendly Fire is not announcing a new release date until the problem is fixed. At that point, a new date will be announced with a short turnaround time between the announcement and actual release.

A Long Survive can be wishlisted on PS VR2 and Steam. It is available now on Quest.

As always, this is by no means a comprehensive list, and keep reading to the end for a few honorable mentions.

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades

It only feels right to start this article with one of the two games that inspired it.

Where to start with the accolades? Over nineteen thousand reviews with a rating of 'overwhelmingly positive.' Well over one hundred updates since release. It has also never been discounted in an age where PC players (in and out of VR) buy the bulk of their games on discount. Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades (H3VR for short) stands as one of VR's earliest and most enduring success stories.

The sandbox FPS has five hundred different guns with over two hundred fifty different attachments, many of which were contributed by community members who sent Rust the actual guns to model and add to the game. H3VR has been regarded as having the most realistic gun mechanics in VR, a large part of its sustained popularity.

All this while shooting animated hot dogs, known as Sosigs, much to the chagrin & complaints of a vocal minority that creator Anton Hand merrily swats away. You have to appreciate the dogged confidence of Hand to basically say you will pay full price, you will shoot hot dogs instead of people, and you will love it anyway. It's also, as of the writing of this article, the only game on this list to have stayed on PC VR and never port to any other platform.

A sequel, Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades 2, was recently announced for Steam and Meta Quest 3/3S.

H3VR is available on Steam.

Job Simulator

Now to the other game that inspired this article.

Job Simulator, like H3VR, is a game that if one were to simply watch the trailer, especially now in 2026, it would be difficult to understand why it is special. It is special though. It sits in rarefied air, along with several other entries on this list, to have sold over a million units, a major milestone for VR games. Ten years post release, it still rarely leaves the top ten best sellers/downloads on Meta Quest and PlayStation VR2 and the top seller scroll of VR titles on Steam.

Owlchemy Labs' Andrew Eiche told me in an interview at GDC that kids, in 2026, recognize the game if he is out in public with a Job Simulator t-shirt on. In his own words, it "delivers on the promise of VR" in ways that other games do not. On its face, it is a wacky slice-of-life simulator that one would expect consumers to turn their noses up, declaring "I don't want to do real life work in a game" or "this game is for kids." Yet it still works thanks to the tone, the self aware humor, the tangible interactions that set a blueprint for countless games after it, and its accessibility as a safe game for any newcomer to VR. That was true in 2016, when very few kids, presumably its target audience, were in headsets, and it remains true today.

As an aside, Owlchemy Labs in general should be celebrated as well. It is one of the only, possibly the only, VR studios to have multiple games crest one million units sold (Job Simulator and its successor, Vacation Simulator).

Job Simulator is available on Steam, Quest, PS VR2, Pico, Apple Vision Pro, and Galaxy XR

Windlands

You can't fly or swing in VR. That will make people sick!

Don't tell that to Ilja Kivikangas and Simo Sainio.

Windlands started life as a tech demo way back in 2014 before the duo joined Psytec Games and fleshed it out into a fully realized VR title. If you peruse the 2016 VR catalog, you will find a staggering number of 'kiosk' games, where the player does not move within the world, or 'on rails' games where the game moves the player through the environment. Most of this list falls into one of those two buckets.

To make a game that foregoes all the established "safety" rules of VR, at a time where most developers were building on underpowered hardware and low resolution headsets, is incredibly bold. Windlands also dared to be cozy in the burgeoning age of wave shooters and other high-octane action titles. There was nothing like it at the time and the soothing, calming atmosphere of the high flying world is still relevant today, arguably even more so than its sequel, Windlands 2, which added combat, and action-heavy spiritual evolution Titan Isles.

Get Windlands on PlayStation VR1, Steam, and Quest.

Space Pirate Trainer

Ten years after its Early Access debut, Space Pirate Trainer remains the default answer to the question what is a great roomscale VR game to play? Those of us old enough to have played retro classics like Galaga felt right at home in this sci-fi wave shooter. SPT taps into the kid in all of us, harkening back to a time where we would bounce off the walls of our home, jumping on and off furniture ignoring the protests of our parents, shooting at an endless number of imaginary enemies.

Space Pirate Trainer makes that real. It is one of the few justifiable reasons in VR to push your tables and furniture to the far recesses of your room, opening enough space to play the game properly. Just try to play Space Pirate Trainer while standing still. It's not possible. The game begs you to move and flow with it in ways countless other VR shooters can only hope to emulate.

Get Space Pirate Trainer on Steam, Quest, PlayStation VR, and Pico.

Superhot VR

Before my job here at UploadVR, I was an active VR content creator (still active on Twitch, check my writer bio for link). Two of my most popular YouTube videos are about how to deal with motion sickness in VR. To this day, and those videos are years old, I still get comments and DMs thanking me because someone tried VR for the first time and got sick in a matter of minutes. When I reply asking what game they played, it is a first person shooter nine times out of ten. Lately it has been Ghosts of Tabor, Contractors Showdown: Exfil Zone, or Forefront. No knock against any of those games. They are just not something I would recommend for a new VR player.

All that preamble is part of why time bending FPS Superhot VR remains relevant ten years on from its December 2016 release. As fast paced and intense as it is, the game is still (relatively speaking) safe, allowing experienced VR users to put their FPS-loving friends and family into it without too much concern. Superhot's innovative enemies-move-when-you-move mechanic remains unique after a decade, with countless Superhot wannabes trying to duplicate or riff off one of the most unique movement styles in gaming.

If you ever hear a diehard VR fanatic say "VR always makes games better," Superhot is a prime example of why. The flatscreen game is great. The VR is brilliant.

Superhot VR is available on Steam, Quest, PlayStation VR, and Pico.

Arizona Sunshine

It is a bit dated by today's standards, so much so that Vertigo Games saw fit to release a remake in 2024, but the original Arizona Sunshine's legacy cannot be denied. In the late 2010s, when the average VR skeptic would be more likely to visit a VR arcade and drop $20-$30 an hour to try virtual reality than invest in a VR ready PC and HMD, Arizona Sunshine was the zombie game to play. I say this as one of those converts. Spending an afternoon killing hordes of zombies in co-op eventually led me to buy my own headset. I should note that the multiplayer for the original game (not the remake) was removed last year.

It is hard to recommend playing the OG version since the remake modernizes its controls, but there is still such a charm, no matter the version you choose, to playing an irreverent, vulgar blowhard mowing down every 'Fred' in sight. I describe the protagonist that way with love. His lines are half the fun. He is, sadly, not present in Arizona Sunshine's two DLCs, but they are still worth the price just to spend another twenty minutes per add-on in this world.

Get Arizona Sunshine on Steam, Quest, PlayStation VR, and Pico.

I Expect You To Die

The opening credits alone, a clear homage to the cinematic musical introductions to James Bond films, make the initial entry to Schell Games' signature series, worth the price of admission. Seriously, go watch them (and the two sequels) on YouTube. They are, in this writer's opinion, the best VR game intros ever made.

You play as a spy, only referred to as Agent by your delightfully voiced handler until late in the game, in a series of espionage themed escape rooms. This is another safe game, with zero artificial movement to be found. Objects are grabbed and brought to you with an easy-to-use telekinetic grab that worked flawlessly years before Half-Life: Alyx and its gravity gloves popularized the mechanic. The MacGyver-like gameplay has you using whatever tools are within reach to complete each mission.

Like any good spy thriller, the threat of death is ever present, but I Expect You To Die welcomes this, as evidenced by its title. The creative methods of death, hilariously reiterated in a memo on the game over screen, are part of the fun. Even for people who do not particularly care for puzzle games, the IEYTD games are too enjoyable to deny.

I Expect You To Die is available on Quest, PlayStation VR1, and Steam.

Thumper

Before Beat Saber, there was Thumper, a psychedelic, pulse-pounding race through a stylized void. Its rhythmic gameplay is accompanied by one of the best soundtracks you'll find in VR. Imagine futuristic sci-fi racers like F-Zero or Wipeout doused in a tsunami of neon light with a soundtrack that wouldn't be out of place at a blacklight-lit underground rave.

That's Thumper in a nutshell, another simple-but-brilliantly-executed relic of 2016 that still plays like a gem today. Its spiritual successor, Thrasher, was quite good, but if I am stuck choosing between the two, Thumper wins out almost every time.

Get Thumper on Quest, PS VR2, and Steam.

Rez Infinite - October 2016

Rez Infinite, first released on PlayStation 4, was an expansion on Sega's original rhythm wave shooter Rez. Infinite introduced both VR support and the exclusive mode Area X, a free roaming alternative to the original's on-rails gameplay.

Not to get too nerdy and technical here, but the particle rendering in the Area X mode is a technical marvel. Consider that in most rhythm-based games, the player is not in control of where they move. It is either stationary, with notes coming at you a la Beat Saber, Synth Riders, Ragnarock, and so on, or on rails like the original Rez mode or something like Pistol Whip. The arrangement, creation, and dissipation of particles that comprise the arena keep the game "on beat" despite players having free range of motion. It is terrific game design that uses the immersion of VR to its advantage while still staying true to the original game.

Get Rez Infinite on Steam, PS VR2, and Quest.

Accounting

Can a VR game be funny? More to the point, can the humor entice a player in a headset to stand still long enough for the jokes to land? Accounting, the legacy version still free to play on Steam as of this article, is an unhinged, dark humor alternative to Job Simulator. It is also the reason no trailers are included in this article, as it drops enough F-bombs inside sixty seconds to make the late, great comedian George Carlin blush. Go watch the trailer on Steam (link below) and try not to react if it's your first time watching it.

You play as an accountant trying to get back to the real world, with hysterical mishaps tripping you up along the way. Like Arizona Sunshine, Accounting's more modern version, 2017's Accounting+, is the better experience, but Accounting brought brash comedy to VR ahead of Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality, Trover Saves the Universe, and most recently, Space Control.

The original, free-to-play, legacy version of Accounting is on Steam.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

These are either non-gaming applications or in one case, soon to be gone entirely.

SteamVR

SteamVR was officially announced in 2015 in collaboration with the original first-generation Vive and the software officially released in April 2016. I think it can safely be said this is the application on the list least likely to fade into obscurity anytime soon.

Despite other available platforms springing up like Meta's Oculus Rift storefront, SteamVR and PC VR are virtually synonymous with one another at this point. The platform currently has over seven thousand games available, according to SteamDB.

Rec Room

Once thought to be a social VR juggernaut, Rec Room sadly will close its doors on June 1, the date of its tenth anniversary. The wind down process has already begun, so it is hard to list it among its peers as a classic still relevant today when it is possible you are reading this article after its closure.

With that said, Rec Room was one of the first platforms in VR alongside VRChat to openly embrace user-generated content and provide proper creative tools to realize their creators' visions. It would be too easy to dismiss the social VR app as "for kids," but that does a disservice to the over one hundred fifty million users it built up to in its decade long run. To put it another way, Rec Room's user base is higher than all but eight countries on Earth.

The story of Rec Room's downfall, signposted by two sets of layoffs in 2025, is much too long to articulate here, but it really is a shame to see a legitimate titan of VR collapse under the weight of ill-fated platform expansion and a monetization model that never reportedly proved to be profitable.

Since Rec Room shuts down soon after this article will publish, we will not link where to get it. New account sign ups have already been deactivated.

Bigscreen

If nothing else, the social movie viewing application Bigscreen Beta was creator Darshan Shankar's primary impetus to create the popular small form factor Bigscreen Beyond headset. Simply put, (then) current-day headsets failed to provide the sharpness and clarity to maximize the viewing experience Shankar wanted for his virtual movie theater experience. In response, the Beyond was born and is already on its second generation.

The average cost for a movie theater ticket, at least here in America, is a hair over $16 each. That's before paying for the ludicrously overpriced popcorn, drinks, and candy. A family of four can expect to spend one hundred dollars to catch the latest release and those numbers are not far off what they were ten years ago when Bigscreen first launched. Bigscreen is an alternative option for those with headsets and was a veritable social gathering godsend during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bigscreen Beta is on Quest and Steam.

Virtual Desktop

Considered by many to be the best way to connect a non-native SteamVR headset to Valve's PC VR dedicated platform, it is easy to forget that Guy Godin's seminal app started life in 2016 as exactly what its title suggests, a virtual way to view your PC's desktop in headset.

It has become so much more than that in its decade of existence, enduring despite reports of Meta blocking it from reaching the main store fully featured and relegating it to the underground side loading doldrums of SideQuest if players wanted to actually stream their PC games using it. Even in light of free alternatives like Meta's own Horizon Link, Valve's Steam Link, and ALVR, Virtual Desktop remains the go-to connection method for a large number of PC VR users, yours truly included. It offers a wealth of options to tailor the experience to the user's liking across multiple headsets.

Get Virtual Desktop on Quest, Steam, Pico, and Google Play Store (for Galaxy XR and Play for Dream).

Tilt Brush - April 5

Another HTC Vive launch title along with several others in this article, Tilt Brush is a creative app that lets users paint whatever their minds can conjure in a free flowing 3D space. Offered for free by Google, this is one of those "the magic of VR" apps for those of us who liked to draw on the walls of our homes with crayons, markers, and paint as kids. In addition to being the reason Magic Erasers exist now, reviews like the following from user 'Ka$h' summarize why Tilt Brush still gets play a decade post release:

Tilt Brush is VR’s “fine, I guess I’m an artist now” button. You put on the headset, grab a brush made of pure imagination, and suddenly you’re painting in mid-air like you’ve been doing it your whole life.

The experience is magical in the most immediate way possible: you draw one glowing line and your brain goes, “YES. I AM CREATIVE. I AM POWERFUL.” Then you try to write your name and it looks like a doctor’s signature on a roller coaster.

It later evolved with an open source version, Open Brush, that is available on most VR platforms.

Get the original Tilt Brush on Steam.

It also understands something many modern games studiously ignore: that mystery works best when players are allowed to feel lost. Among Giants is difficult, opaque, occasionally frustrating and sometimes mechanically abrasive. It is also one of the best, most atmospheric, and most immersive VR games I’ve played in years.

Rare Atmosphere

From its opening moments, Among Giants drops you unguided into a strange and wondrous world. You awaken in a forest clearing beside the wreckage of a smoldering ship, its hollow hull split and splayed like a cracked egg. Nearby, an inscrutable alphabet flickers on derelict tech, ancient gateways hint at a lost civilization. Now, you must explore the world, discover its secrets, and survive by any means necessary.

While this premise may not be unique in the truest sense of the word (the previously mentioned Shadow of the Colossus [2005] and Another World [1991] are just two examples of games that blazed a similar trail many years ago), in the context of modern gaming, Among Giants is a rare thing indeed.

That's because there’s virtually no signposting, no overt exposition, no yellow paint or waypoints on a map. While your robot companion does guide you generally in the direction that will advance you through the game, the overall experience of Among Giants is one of self-directed discovery. The game does not care if you live or die, if you understand its world or not. Like the planet you've awoken upon, it is indifferent to you.

It’s also hostile. Your combat abilities are limited, your weaponry only just powerful enough. Hitting your target requires deft marksmanship, continuous multitasking, and a high degree of coordination and practice. What the game asks of you is daunting, and the world is unforgiving and indifferent. You will die a lot, and you’ll only have yourself to blame.

Furthermore, the game doesn't care if you learn its story or not. The mysteries of the planet are unapologetically inscrutable. As you explore on foot, on horseback, and via grapple hooks, you continually encounter unknowns: totems of a forgotten civilization, the hulking wrecks of massive robots, or ancient portals linking the fractured lands.

Many of these call up an indecipherable language which, at the start, is totally foreign. As you explore and interface with the planet’s technology through your robotic companion, individual letters slowly become decipherable. Eventually, the game’s mysterious and surprisingly dense lore is translated into something readable.

This story is drip-fed to you in minuscule doses. For some players, this will be a tantalizing experience. You’ll be driven to explore every nook and cranny of the vast landscape, brave its hazards to find just one more letter. For others, it will be frustrating and obtuse.

Built for VR

Like so many of the best VR experiences, every action in Among Giants feels intentionally physical. The world is tactile in a way that flat-screen games can’t replicate. You smash pottery searching for supplies, rip the covers from storage bins, and manipulate ancient machinery directly with your hands (using controllers).

Summoning your horse involves pulling a horn from your hip and raising it to your lips. When the faithful steed arrives, you physically pull yourself onto the saddle and take the reins in hand, yanking left and right to steer and leaning forward or pulling back to control speed.

Combat benefits enormously from VR’s physicality as well. Your main weapon is a bow and arrow, and the archery mechanic in Among Giants is among the best I’ve experienced. It feels natural and precise, requiring a steady hand and genuine skill to hit distant targets. The game’s firearms are also satisfying, and their intentional scarcity and limited ammunition make them an emergency resource to be carefully deployed.

Traversal fares slightly less well. Grappling hooks are undeniably fun, particularly when swinging across gaps or scrambling up ancient structures, but they occasionally feel clumsy and their use is tied to a stamina system, a controversial mechanic in the best of games.

Whether running from a giant on foot, or ducking under cover in a shootout with robots, or scrambling up a cliff with your grappling hooks, there’s a constant feeling of mechanical friction. From a design perspective, I understand it, and it points clearly to Among Giants’ most obvious influence, Shadow of the Colossus. But just as this friction rubbed many of that game’s players the wrong way, I suspect the same will happen in Among Giants.

A Hostile Beauty

Technically, Among Giants is not a graphical showcase in the traditional sense. The game eschews photo realism for a more artful direction, using lower poly designs, striking lighting, scale, and color to create a world that feels beautiful, desolate, and deeply lonesome. I love the "Super FX Chip" art style, but it won’t appeal to all tastes.

The dynamic weather and day-night cycle sustain the game’s visual flair and keep things interesting. A familiar valley can feel serene during one play session only to become an ominous chasm during a thunderstorm the next. Rain, darkness, flashes of lightning, or a pastel sunrise radically alter the mood of the world.

Among Giants’ audio design is similarly evocative. In the wilderness, the beautiful soundtrack often feels contemplative, while inside hostile structures, ambient mechanical noise and oppressive musical cues transform the experience into something bordering on horror. When you encounter a giant, the music swells with tension, reinforcing the grandeur of battling creatures so impossibly massive.

Core Gameplay

Among Giants’ gameplay loop is deceptively simple: explore the world, decipher its mysteries, locate a giant, and bring it down.

These colossal battles are the undeniable highlight of the experience. Without spoiling too much, each creature is pocked with glowing crystalline weak points that must be destroyed. Accomplishing this is extraordinarily difficult. The giants are constantly moving, attacking, and repositioning while you struggle to maintain aim, manage stamina, navigate terrain, and avoid incoming attacks all at once.

These fights can be exhilarating, but also deeply frustrating. I died more than fifteen times fighting the first giant alone. Some of this difficulty feels intentional; Among Giants clearly wants players to feel overwhelmed and vulnerable. But other frustrations stem from technical roughness. At times, enemy attacks appeared to clip through environmental cover, and splash damage occasionally killed me despite being fully concealed behind rocks or walls.

And yet, when a giant finally falls, none of that frustration matters in the least. In VR, these creatures are truly enormous. Standing beneath them evokes a genuine sense of intimidation that simply would not translate the same way on a traditional screen. They are frightening in scale and overwhelming in presence. Approaching one feels dreadful. Defeating one feels unbelievable.

Between these encounters, the world is forever dangerous. Brutes hurl massive rocks from afar, ruthless droids patrol ruined facilities, and sand worms burst unexpectedly from beneath the terrain. The environment itself is just as threatening. Biomes crackle with lightning. Bitter cold and blistering heat drain your health or slow your movement. Certain tools or traversal techniques can mitigate these dangers, but you never feel wholly safe and secure.

What ultimately makes Among Giants worth discussing (and playing) is that it prioritizes emotion and experience over accessibility. Modern game design often treats friction as inherently negative. Any mechanic, any control quirk, any unusual whim inserted by the developer, any thing at all that risks confusing or frustrating players even for a moment, gets sanded away until the released game is as slick to hold as a cool river rock. Among Giants seems to reject that smoothing.

While I appreciate this deeply, it's likely true that many players will not. Some will give up after their tenth death. Some will bounce off in an hour. Some might never escape the opening scene. But there will be others, like me, who fall completely under its spell. As happened to me with Shadow of the Colossus in the early 2000s, Among Giants may very well open someone's mind to the unique possibility inherent to the medium. For some people, it might change everything.

Among Giants Review - Final Verdict

Among Giants is difficult, uncompromising, and occasionally frustrating. Its combat can feel brutal, and its refusal to guide the player will undoubtedly alienate some. But it's also one of the most atmospheric, ambitious, and immersive VR games I've played in years.

Few modern games trust players as completely as Among Giants does. Fewer still are willing to let mystery remain mysterious. Among Giants demands patience, curiosity, and perseverance, but for players willing to meet it on its terms, it offers something increasingly rare: the feeling that you've stepped into a truly new world.

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

Sky Legends casts players as a young lawyer in the early 1900s investigating an air mail transport company. The investigation spans over ten years of the company's history, told through interactive scenes where players will take control of different pilots and their planes. The game supports motion controllers and hand tracking.

Watch the announcement trailer here:

Super AC featured Sky Legends at Gamescom in 2025, where we went hands-on with an early build, saying "regardless of any hand tracking issues or overly simple puzzles, Sky Legends – An Aeropostal Epic certainly piqued my interest in aviation history and lets me immerse myself in achievements I've previously taken for granted."

Sky Legends: An Aeropostal Epic can be wishlisted on Quest 3/3S and Steam.

ENVER has released the biggest update yet for its breakout VR horror title, Scary Baboon. The new "Fight Back" update introduces combat mechanics and weapons for the first time, giving players limited offensive capability in a game which had previously had them mostly fleeing in terror.

The ability to fight back against the game's monsters has been one of the most requested additions from the Scary Baboon community, which has grown significantly alongside the game's success on Meta Quest. The social multiplayer VR horror game boasts millions of downloads, a 4.6-star rating from more than 60,000 user reviews, and a Discord community exceeding 220,000 members.

Scary Baboon is a fast-paced multiplayer VR horror game where players play as failed experiments trapped inside a dark, ever-changing laboratory. Every player is a different baboon running, hiding, exploring, and trying to survive against monsters, mutants, and other failed subjects roaming the facility's halls. Built around jump scares, chaos, player reactions, and shared moments, every Scary Baboon session is a new story of panic, discovery, and escape.

“Scary Baboon works because the community keeps pushing the game forward,” said Kyle Joyce, CEO of ENVER. “Players have wanted to fight back against the monsters for a long time, and this update finally lets them do it. But we’re not ruining what makes the game work: you might be able to hit the monsters [...] but they’re not going anywhere. Take it [too] far, they come back even harder.”

Scary Baboon's Fight Back Update is now available on Meta Quest.

Smaller experiences thrive in virtual reality. As an introduction for tweens to the technology, even more so. There are a slew of cartoony titles that are aimed at a younger audience thanks to the approachable entry point of its motion controllers. From Mythic Realms to Wreckin’ Raccoon, there is no shortage of wacky, creative adventures. Swinging your arms around as if holding a sword or conjuring spells might sound more enticing for a spry crowd than for a veteran of the medium. In that sense, Crepe Master is strictly aimed at that target demographic with its simple but fun mechanics.

Taking on the role of Hana, our young protagonist suddenly becomes a Magical Girl after accidentally touching her grandmother’s Sacred Pan. This is reflected in the characteristic floating hands in VR shown with white silk gloves while grabbing her magic wand and pan in her left and right hands, respectively. A floating, sentient crepe called Mother Crepe appears in the first tutorial to guide the main character through a nonsensical plot that includes facing an organization called F.a.R.T.S. and saving the universe. As one does.

Crepe Master is quite humorous. Giving the impression that it is totally aimed at juvenile gamers, most everything else does not make much sense. Considering it can be finished within 2 hours or less, this is probably for the best. The game primarily consists of fighting your way through 15 levels against three types of monsters and smashing machines to move forward. There are no secrets or interactable objects to speak of in any level. Thankfully there is more seasoning to this dish.

Enemies like big-eyed creatures, fire-spitting worms, and tanky enemies each have a unique mechanic to make them vulnerable to damage. Because the clever creatures can defend themselves from the basic right attack, using the wand to break their stance and create an opening is necessary. More elaborate, physical moves are required when engaging with the other foes. Described as a brawler, Crepe Master’s Sailor Moon inspirations come out in full when magical abilities are introduced.

Much like the magical girls that it is emulating, Hana has several spells at her disposal that can be activated by gesturing in specific ways. For instance, the Strawbarrier move to deflect projectiles from the worms spitting fireballs is used by crossing both arms in an X position. An even sillier move called the Bananattack is used by joining both fists to destroy the bulky enemies’ armor. Not to be confused with Kpop Demon Hunters’ Honmoon, the Honeyboom attack sticks enemies in place, triggered by squatting. This attack is mostly useful for an enemy-healing bee that is hard to pin down.

All of these moves have a cooldown period, so it’s not like it is possible to spam them infinitely. More powerful versions of these attacks exist, and they are activated by positioning the right hand up and the left hand at waist level. Posing exactly like the transformations of the Sailor Guardians, this is finally the introduction to the game’s cooking mechanic. Poking fun at itself in some dialogues, this move by the name of Crepo-Trance empowers each spell to deliver devastating variations of it. The Strawbarrier Megabomb, for example, quite literally acts like a mini atomic bomb.

A silly game at its core, Crepe Master is one of those fun distractions easy to pick up and play. Thanks to its more engaging and responsive spells and commitment to the Magical Girl bit, it is able to separate itself from the competition. Quick to finish but chipper to the end, its two-hour runtime will go by quick for any type of player. Food-based puns galore abound in this otherwise surreal journey that will surely keep energetic 12-year-olds busy on a slow afternoon.

Crepe Master is out now for Quest 3.

Secret of the Mimic's initial announcement promised PS VR2 support. Its PlayStation Store listing listed compatibility with the headset. Steel Wool even had demos of the game running on PS VR2 at PAX West in 2024. Then, in early 2025 at a Sony State of Play event, the new release date trailer suspiciously removed any mention of PS VR2. The store page was updated with a new trailer, also without the PS VR2 logo, and a June 2025 release date was confirmed for PC and PS5.

Five Nights At Freddy’s: Secret Of The Mimic Available Now On PlayStation VR2

Five Nights at Freddy’s: Secret of the Mimic is playable now on PS VR2, with PC and Quest to come later.

UploadVRMike Johnson

Shortly before the flatscreen release, game director Evan Lampi, confirmed that VR support was still coming post release, with no ETA on when that would happen.

We finally have clarity courtesy of a post from Steel Wool developer Rodney Brett. Here is that post in its entirety:

The decision was largely made when the sales of HW2 rolled in. The game did not perform to expectations(not even close to HW1). In general, HW1 was released at the peak of VR's mainstream popularity. Gamers were still very intrigued by the new and exciting medium and I remember going to GDC during and after HW1's release and seeing VR everywhere and at every booth. However, by the time HW2 was close to being released, a lot has happened and the VR market really shrank to just the niche crowd of enthusiasts that love the medium. I always compared the VR gamers to people that love playing driving games with the entire steering wheel/seat + peddles setup with force feedback or people that love to go all-out on HOTAS controllers for flight games. The ones that are into VR really love it and the rest really hate it.. with no in-between. That's because the hardware requires a steep initial investment. Ever notice that there aren't any "casual fans" of VR? You're either super into it, or you hate playing games in VR.

The dev costs for HW2 was a lot more than the first game on top of this, and it's not hard to figure that out on your own just by playing the second game. Simply compare the credits of the second to the first and that team size is at least 3x the team we had with the first game. So after that stark realization, we knew that there was no way we could sustain ourselves on VR-centric titles created by a large team anymore. Thus, priority shifted to flat.. but we still didn't want to entirely abandon the VR version, thus Devoted stepped in to complete it.

FNaF: Help Wanted 2 released in December 2023 on Steam and PS VR2, with a Quest port following in May 2024. The first Help Wanted released on Meta Quest in 2020, benefitting from the COVID-19 pandemic boost that VR in general experienced in 2020 and 2021.

As of this article, Secret of the Mimic's VR support is still limited to PS VR2, though Steel Wool said in a Steam post April 30 that PC VR support is still coming.

Five Nights At Freddy's: Secret of the Mimic is available now in VR on PS VR2.

Commuter Games has announced that their simcade VR racer Downtown Club's next update will push the game out of Early Access and into full release. The update, v1.4.0, launches on Meta Quest and Pico 4 on June 11.

In addition to the full release, update v1.4.0 also brings several new features and improvements to the core game. These include voice chat, in-game rain, slipstream mechanics, AI improvements, and more.

Downtown Club is a simcade racing game that offers both traditional thumbstick controls and full virtual controls. When I reviewed the game in Early Access some two years ago, I found it to be a fun and engaging racing game that was held back by a sparse roster of cars, lack of multiplayer support, poor rival racer AI, and an appalling soundtrack.

Commuter Games has been toiling away in the garage, implementing numerous updates since 2024 that have upped the horsepower and put new tread on the tires. Since those early days, many of my complaints seem to have been addressed. We'll take the freshly polished release for a spin when it hits the road in June. I'm all out of car metaphors.

Downtown Club's full release is coming on June 11. Until then, it's available in Early Access on Meta Quest and Pico 4.

I sat down planning to spend a few minutes with Outside The Lines VR. About half an hour later, I was still there, quietly coloring on a virtual canvas while everything else around me faded into the background.

Moments like that are why I keep coming back to VR.

I first came across Outside The Lines VR through a Reddit post from developer Harvey Ball, who was looking for feedback as he continued refining the app. I reached out, spent some time with it, and ended up having a longer conversation with him about how and why he built it.

Outside The Lines VR isn’t coming from a large team or a studio trying to build the next big hit. It’s a solo project from Ball, the original developer behind VRTK, an early toolkit used during the first wave of modern VR. You can see that experience here in how clean and easy everything feels to use. The app is immediately understandable and avoids some of the friction that can turn people away from VR.

On the surface, it’s a simple idea. This isn’t a painting tool or a full creative suite. You’re not sketching something from scratch, though there are open canvases if you want to. You’re picking up a pen, marker, or crayon and working your way through pre-designed images, one section at a time.

But after spending time with it, you realize that simplicity is actually the point.

That starts with how it handles the basics. The entire experience is built around just the trigger and grip, which makes it immediately approachable. You can use the entire app with a single controller, which makes it more accessible and keeps things simple for anyone new to VR. You pick up a pen, choose a color, and start filling in the lines. There’s no menu diving, no complicated toolsets, and nothing that feels like it’s getting in the way.

The onboarding deserves a mention too. The tutorial is straightforward, easy to follow, and always available if you need to revisit it. It doesn’t assume any prior experience and walks you through exactly what you need without overcomplicating things. It’s clearly designed with non-gamers in mind, which makes a difference in an app like this.

One thing I noticed pretty quickly is that it doesn’t rely on shortcuts. There’s no color fill here. If you want to complete a section, you actually have to color it in. At first that caught me off guard, but after a few minutes it started to click. The act of slowing down and working through an image is really the whole point.

It also avoids some of the small frustrations you tend to run into in VR. Pens don’t fall out of your hand or drop to the floor if you let go. You can easily reposition the canvas to whatever angle feels comfortable. It’s all designed to keep you focused on what you’re doing instead of constantly adjusting around it.

It sounds like a small thing, but it really does make a difference. You’re not thinking about controls. You're not adjusting your angle or grip to the app. The app adjusts to you. You’re just coloring.

There’s also more flexibility here than you might expect once you start digging into it. You can switch into mixed reality, remove the desk and easel, and place the canvas wherever it feels most comfortable in your space. I found myself adjusting it frequently, tilting it or bringing it closer depending on how I was holding the pen.

You can also scale the canvas, which ends up being more useful than it sounds. Making it larger helps with finer detail, while shrinking it down lets you cover more area quickly. It’s not something you have to use, but once you realize it’s there, it becomes part of how you work through an image.

Even small things, like being able to move the menu and pen placement to the left or right side, add up. If you’re left-handed or just more comfortable approaching things a certain way, it’s easy to make the app feel like it’s set up for you without ever having to think about it.

All of that sits just under the surface. There are a lot of ways to adjust the experience, from mixed reality and easel positioning to opacity and more, but none of it gets in your way if you just want to start coloring.

Mixed reality mode was particularly enjoyable for me, since I was able to be present in my physical space and continue conversations with family members even while coloring in the app.

That said, there are a few areas where Outside The Lines VR still feels like an early effort.

The artwork is probably the first thing some people will notice. A large portion of it is AI-assisted, which may not land the same way for everyone. There’s plenty of variety, and it works for what the app is trying to do, but it doesn’t always have the same personality you’d expect from hand-drawn collections. To his credit, Ball told me he plans to bring in work from real artists over time, which would go a long way toward giving it a stronger identity.

There is a single virtual environment right now - a simple, clean indoor space that is functional and unobtrusive. It’s easy to imagine how different environments could enhance the mood, especially for an app that leans so heavily into relaxation. Think coloring on a tropical beach or on the surface of the moon.

And then there’s the broader question of audience. This is a very specific kind of experience, and not everyone is going to connect with it right away. Ball acknowledged that challenge, wondering whether the overlap between people who enjoy coloring and people who spend time in VR is as large as it seems. After spending time with it, it’s easy to see who this would appeal to, even if that audience hasn’t really been reached yet.

None of these are deal-breakers, but they do shape what the app is and who it’s really for. If you already enjoy coloring, or you’re looking for something in VR that’s more relaxed and low-pressure, this fits naturally. It’s also an easy recommendation for people who aren’t traditional gamers, or anyone who finds most VR experiences a little overwhelming.

Outside The Lines VR Review - Final Verdict

Outside The Lines VR is a simple idea, executed with a lot of care. It gives you a quiet place to spend some time and mostly stays out of your way while you do it.

If that’s what you’re looking for, it delivers exactly that.

Outside The Lines VR is available on the Meta Quest store for $9.99.

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

One More Delve was previously shown off at the Spring 2026 VR Games Showcase earlier this year, impressing visitors with its striking cel-shaded art style and the fact that it was built by one student developer. It was eventually released in Early Access on April 27, with a full release planned for this summer.

One More Delve's primary draw is its physics-based combat, which has you swinging and aiming weapons to battle monsters in a dark dungeon. These weapons include a wide range of one-handed and two-handed swords and axes that medieval fantasy fans have come to expect from the genre, as well as bows, shields, and magic spells.

You have three different weapon slots: one for each hand and a third on your shoulder. To equip your weapon, you reach for one of your sides (or shoulder) and hold down the grip trigger. To use a melee weapon, you swing at your target, keeping in mind that the game takes into account how hard you swing to determine the strength of your blow. Collision detection can be dodgy if you are too close to the enemy (and enemies like to move right to you) but overall it is a satisfying experience.

Two-handed melee weapons like hammers need you to hold the triggers on both controllers to properly use, but they are just as fun as the one-handed options. Bows are a bit more cumbersome, due to the lack of a crosshair and the need to be precise with your aim. You also need to grab an arrow with the hand you aren't holding the bow with, nock it, then pull back like you would a real-life bow. Honestly I found myself sticking with magic and melee for the most part.

Speaking of magic, you have one magic spell equipped to each hand. To use them, you simply hold down on the upper triggers and reach out your hand to unleash a blast of powerful fire or lightning. There is a limited supply of Mana, and once it depletes you have to wait for the gauge to fill back up before you can use the spell again.

Health is also tracked by a gauge, and you can restore some after a grueling fight by reaching into the pouch on the middle of your belt, grabbing one of the available potions that emerge from the inventory, and dropping or throwing it to the ground to restore yourself or any other players you’re traveling with.

The enemies you will encounter run the gamut of usual dungeon crawler monsters; there are skeleton warriors, undead wizards, and poisonous scorpions looking to make you their next victim. Should you make it past them and reach the end of a dungeon (as marked by a door with a key) or your health run out completely, you choose which of your loot you want to keep and are sent back to the hub to regroup and try again.

Outside of questing, players can hang out in One More Delve’s social hub, which allows them to chat with other would-be adventurers and craft new weapons and armor using the materials they’ve gathered in their travels. To craft, you simply select the item you want in the forge, then physically hammer it from crystals you've collected on your journey. Once a weapon or armor piece is forged, you have to go to the armory section to select and equip it. You can also spend the coins you collect by defeating enemies and smashing random objects on health-restoring potions and new magic spells.

Online features are still being tested in this early access phase, but players can either invite others to their latest dungeon run or join a party to embark together from the start. If a player dies while playing online, someone else can revive them by holding out their hand at a prompt... provided they don’t get killed themselves.

Visually, One More Delve seems to draw inspiration from the likes of World of Warcraft, with dark, dreary landscapes that contrast with colorful monsters and vibrant magic. The constant blood splatter and dismemberment from defeated enemies give combat a visceral feel. The game’s music shares this ethos with a traditional medieval orchestral sound; you have peaceful harp melodies playing while you roam around the hub or in an empty dungeon, followed by more foreboding tunes when enemies emerge.

One More Delve still has a few rough edges to smooth out during this Early Access phase, such as the previously mentioned collision issues and visual glitches that cause some enemies not to vanish after being defeated. Still, there is plenty of potential here for a solid VR dungeon crawler, especially one that was made by a single person who's new to game development.

GOLF+ has revealed the "Save Muny" DLC for their golf simulator. The DLC reimagines the historically important course restored with a revived routing, restored greens, and thoughtful modern touches.

Opened in 1924, Austin’s Lions Municipal Golf Course (affectionately known as “Muny”) holds a unique place in sports history as one of the first desegregated golf courses in the American South. For decades, Muny embodied the ideals of inclusiveness and equality in sports by welcoming players from all backgrounds onto the same fairways.

Today, however, the course faces mounting pressure from Austin’s booming real estate market. Valuable land naturally attracts developers, who argue that the land on which the golf course sits could serve a broader purpose. Save Muny believes that not every acre should be viewed through the lens of profit. Public golf courses like Muny provide affordable recreation, green space, and a rare sense of community in cities which seem ever more expensive and exclusive.

More on the Save Muny initiative can be seen here.

Golf+ is out now on Quest for $29.99, while the Save Muny DLC costs $11.99.

At the time of this writing, the base game is also available as part of the Horizon+ subscription service's games catalog.

Innerspace games, like A Fisherman's Tale and Maskmaker, have always been notable for their unique mechanics and charming aesthetic, regardless of the subject matter they tackle. Spymaster, available today in Early Access, is no different. When we played a demo at GDC, even under the guise of an espionage thriller, the lighthearted appeal was palpable.

Watch the full launch trailer here:

In Spymaster, players control multiple agents in parkour and action laden espionage missions. The most unique mechanic is the C.A.S.S.E.T.T.E., a wrist mounted device that allows players to rewind time and fine-tune the agents' actions for speed, accuracy, and synchronization where needed.

Every mission also has side objectives for any completionists, additional tasks off the main path that can also be accomplished using the time rewind feature.

During a tumultuous time for VR gaming with multiple studio layoffs and closures, Spymaster Game Director Jeremy Moirano remains steadfast in his belief and explained why Innerspace went the Early Access route with its latest title.

While the VR market is navigating a transitional period, I’m convinced there is still a dedicated audience for high-quality, premium solo experiences built around unique VR mechanics and compelling narration. We’ve evolved alongside our players, choosing the self-publishing and Early Access route for the first time. Our goal is to build a community on our social channels that will help us refine the game, ensuring the final experience is the best it can be.

We will have our impressions of Spymaster published soon.

Spymaster is out today on Quest and Steam for $11.99.

The full tour is available on UploadVR's Youtube channel. This article is a full transcription of the interview.

UploadVR: "Hey, it's Mike Johnson from UploadVR. I'm here with some of the team from Mighty Coconut to talk about their new course, Blokhaven. So, I guess gentlemen, introduce yourselves and what your positions are at Mighty Coconut."

Henning: "My name's Henning. I am a lead level designer at Mighty Coconut. Hi."

Lucas: "And I'm Lucas Martell, I'm the creator of Walkabout Mini Golf."

Chris: "And I'm Chris Reyman, I make the music for Walkabout Mini Golf."

UploadVR: "Okay. So Henning, as I understand it, this was your brainchild. We just did the tour right before we sat down to do this interview, so this was kind of a course that you championed, that you wanted to put together. What was the primary driving inspiration for this, for Blokhaven?"

Henning: "The inspiration was this design movement called Bauhaus. I'm sure any designers or artists will have heard of that. In the late 19-teens, Bauhaus was a design movement that sprung out of wanting to do less with more minimalism. It was a reaction to the Victorian ornamentation and excess. Boy, I sound really nerdy right now."

UploadVR: "No, you're fine. It's a developer interview, these are meant to be nerdy."

Henning: "The primary principle of Bauhaus design would be 'form has to follow function'. In other words, the function comes first, and whatever the piece of design or art has to function as, you design the form with as little ornamentation and extra stuff as possible just to perform that function. So, it results in a minimalist look where they don't need a lot of colors, they don't need a lot of crazy intricate shapes. It's kind of back to basics: blocks, cubes, half circles, arches. And yeah, so that's the look of it, kind of through and through."

UploadVR: "Were there instances where something came back and you said, 'Okay, that's a little too detailed,' or 'We need to pull this back because it was a bit too much for this specific course,' that maybe in another course would've slid right through and made it in?"

Lucas: "I know something that you mentioned in the tour that I could even set up would be that a lot of times some of the set dec[oration] that we do, which is what we call all the extra little bits that we add on, like, I think we did a pass initially where there was ivy and a couple of things, and that was just too much. If it was too much detail that was getting added in, it really sort of fought with it. I think what helped with this course, though, was the really, really vibrant color palette kind of made it that you didn't want to have all of those extra little things cluttering up these beautiful, artfully arranged viewpoints that you're getting."

Henning: "Yeah, to look at it as we're looking at it behind us, with those bold colors that are about as far apart from each other as possible, it is very busy just to start with. Like, the blocks being arranged are busy already, so the set dec on top of that in some places ended up being too much and we had to pare down from that. And yeah, make some decisions to stick to the minimalism."

UploadVR: "Along the same lines, this feels like one of the more lived-in courses in Walkabout. A lot of the courses, it's just kind of you and whoever you're playing with on the course. This one is a fully functioning city, there's all kinds of animations here, people working in different roles. What inspired wanting to do a full-on town versus what you've done in the past, which is just kind of a beautiful space but a more empty space with not a lot of people in it?"

Henning: "My initial conception of this place was more of an art void space, like just pure design in a black or white sphere with nothing outside of it. But then, Lucas and Don convinced me that that was too nerdy, too empty, too stark... too dead. And we came up with the idea of the ship crashing and supplying this town with the blocks needed to build a fully functioning town. And then from there we had to build block people made out of the same blocks. And yeah, it just became a very busy town."

Lucas: "Yeah, this is definitely the most active course. You can probably even tell from the sounds that you might be hearing around us, but there's just a whole lot of activity, a whole lot of people moving around, there's construction on the back half of the island that you can hear off in the distance. I think one of the other things as well is that when we go more minimal with the style, it also means that then we can do some other things. And so I think that in this case, being able to build out a whole lot of the town that we normally wouldn't ever fully build to the same level became possible because we weren't as constrained trying to cram every single polygon we could get right into the area around the golf course itself.

So that's one of the benefits of when we go a little bit simpler, that then we can also go bigger. And I do think that because the design of it and just the look of those blocks and everything stacked on top of each other, it kind of became necessary to build out that entire town because even when you're at a distance like this looking back, you still need to feel like it's all functioning, like there's all stuff going on in there. And yeah, just the fact that there's so much extra stuff, I think from a distance you really feel that it's this lived-in world."

UploadVR: "Chris. So a lot of composers in video games, there's a specific tone that the game or the series might go for and it tends not to deviate from that too much. You have a very special job because this is the 40th course of Walkabout Mini Golf, and you've composed 40 very, very, very different scores for all those courses. Talk to me about the process of just trying to context switch over and over and over again. Is that a challenge for you to be going from, okay, this one is nautical jazz, and going from that to Passport Hollywood to Tokyo, having to switch your focus between those different styles as you're composing?"

Chris: "Well, I mean just in terms of there being such vastly different styles, one of the things that we've talked about is something like this course, I can imagine this expanding and being something more. I did the music for this course and thought, well, that could be a whole album. It's just like every course seems like a teaser in a way. It's like this could be expanded into a whole universe or Walkabout Mini Golf the movie or the series, right? But you know, it's really cool to be able to just immerse myself in this sort of vibe for a while and then turn around and do something else like Hollywood and be in that world.

So I mean that's just an exciting part of this work is being able to do all those different styles as opposed to like, oh, we've done this haunted house game and now everything I do is always only going to be in that sort of vibe and genre for the next four years. That would be kind of crazy-making. And in our process, I found that having a couple different courses I'm working on and bouncing back and forth from that are in vastly different styles, I find that just to be more helpful for me just in my process. It's not that it's hard to switch, it's that the switching helps reinvigorate the creativity I think, and just kind of work on one for a while and then say, you know what, I'll just focus on this other vibe for a while and get into a whole different headspace."

UploadVR: "How early in the design process do you get involved, Chris? Can you see some of the course before you start composing? How far along is the course when you get involved?"

Chris: "It really depends. It kind of depends on my schedule more than anything else, but when we started this 40-some courses ago, there was a bunch of things built out, but I was composing music based on just a one-line phrase of something, almost like a storyboard. Now, things are trucking along so efficiently at Mighty Coconut that I can go check out things that I haven't even started talking to Lucas about yet in terms of the music and get some vibes on what it is.

You know, this course I think I was able to pop in before we talked about it. And as soon as I landed here I was like, I get it. And then when we talked about it, it just kind of confirmed that, and then hearing Henning was the one that sort of came up with this idea like it should be nautical jazz, that just kind of clicked for me and made a very clear picture of what that's supposed to be. So yeah, I mean I've seen it evolve, because when we talked about it, I don't think there were any characters, there was none of the puppetry happening yet. But I think by the time I got here, there was a story with this shipwreck. Lucas would know better sort of where I end up coming in because he's part of the whole process."

Lucas: "Yeah, I mean it's usually fairly well along, and I think the main thing is that we want to make sure that everything has time to gel and we really know what the course is, and sometimes also what the music needs to bring to it. Because sometimes there will be an element like maybe there is a cozy vibe or an activeness that the music needs to help if we didn't quite get there purely on visuals alone.

Chris: "Yeah, I mean I was gonna say it does need to be very established what's going on 'cause I could be working on this as what it is, and then all of a sudden someone's like, you know what, it's supposed to be on the moon actually. So yeah, it's got to be pretty gelled, yeah."

Henning: "When I'm designing I put a temp track in just to have something to listen to that gives me the vibe of this place. How much do you hear that, Chris? And how much does that influence where you go? The temp track I chose for this one was Portico Quartet. If you want more music like this, go check them out. Portico Quartet."

Chris: "You know, temp tracks I think are always sort of a touchy subject with composers 'cause it is a tricky thing to try and capture the vibe of some music that someone's heard in its full form. And the music you shared was good! I really dig their stuff. And it does set the scene, and so it was helpful for me just to have access to that and listen to it and kind of try and piece apart what about this makes it work. Did that track have saxophone on it? Was that part of the element that sort of made it make sense?"

Lucas: "It had sax, but it didn't have any of the... I think all the other instruments were different because you leaned into a more... like when we said nautical jazz, I think the only thing that had was saxophone and sort of the six eight sort of rolling vibe, but that was really just the two elements that were similar."

Chris: "Yeah, and having something like that is super helpful. It's like, okay, saxophone, that kind of makes it sound more modern and like European I guess in the way that it was used, and more like jazz, and that gets you a long way there just having that little lift off point."

UploadVR: "Lucas, this is the 40th course in Walkabout Mini Golf. That's kind of a big number. How did you fall on this one being number 40? Was there any thought to shifting around the schedule, or is 40 not a significant number?"

Lucas: "You know, I think that we think a little less about the exact number and it's usually more how it all fits together. Generally, we tend to think in years, and throughout the year we're trying to hit a wide variety of tones. So a lot of times, it depends more what's around it, and we want to make sure that if we've got something that has similar elements that we're able to push them aside. I will say that this one was actually a bit of a schedule change because there is a course that's coming up that I think we've pushed off till October that this one swapped with because that one just needed a little bit more time, and because Henning really nailed the design and the gameplay of this one so early on, it was just in a better spot that we were able to release it earlier.

So we don't tend to do that very often, but occasionally for production reasons, we're just like, man, this one needs a little more time to cook and this one is really ready to go, so we poured gas onto this one. And I think that it worked absolutely fantastically because yeah, sometimes things just click and they come together faster, and sometimes they need another couple months."

Henning: "I didn't know I was working on number 40 when I was doing this. But nothing would have changed. It would have been a little pressure, it's true."

UploadVR: "You said it's the most animated course you guys have had. Did that extend the production time at all, or because this course was a bit simpler, did that time just get filled with the animation and it kind of balanced out?"

Henning: "The minimalism of the animation and the fact that I could just do it ended up being a boon for timing. I just knew what the characters were going to do and imagining all through the design process. And I come from animation, that was my job before Mighty Coconut, so the fact that I could just jump in and do it and not pass it around as a task for someone else saved us time."

Lucas: "I will also say that all of the timing on things goes back to the question you just asked a second ago about how we choose courses and the order that they come out in. Because we will often set the schedule not just by the tones, but also certain courses lean more heavily on certain departments. So if there's one course that is extremely animation heavy, we won't tend to put two of those back-to-back because that means that the person or two that are animating are going to be just overtasked a little bit.

Similarly, if there's something that is an extremely art heavy or extremely tech heavy course, the schedule on one doesn't... it's not like every single course has the exact same amount of time from every department allotted. And one of the other things that we say a lot internally is that we are not out to make every single course the best at every single thing. It's way better to pick the two or three things about this course that we want to be absolutely amazing and the best that we have ever done, and in this case I would say it's probably the design and the animation and how alive the course is.

So by focusing on those two things, then it wasn't as involved from a technical standpoint. So it's still doing some amazing things that we haven't done before, but it's not trying to do every single thing better than we've ever done it before because you just can't, and that's how you tend to get a lot of courses that feel the same because you're just trying to strike the same notes every single time."

UploadVR: That makes perfect sense. All right, last question, this is for each of you in turn. We'll start with Henning. Name one thing that you would like players to, like just point out to players as they're playing the course. Could be something small, could be like a specific hole, just name one thing you're saying, hey guys, look out for this.

Henning: Look out for the callback to the rideable whale out in the Santorini bay.

UploadVR: Okay. All right, Lucas?

Lucas: I will go really nerdy. I want everyone to fly around and like just, I love the water and the, the transparency that we get with that. So if you fly up to the top, check that out because it's really, really cool to see how this blocky sort of village rises up out of this really awesome ocean.

UploadVR: All right. And Chris?

Chris: Yeah, and I'll just say, I mean, I don't know if this is, you know, if I'm just coming late to the game with this, but on this course in particular, I feel like every single hole, you know, as I'm playing it, I also want to step back and just look at it and kind of take it all in, you know, from a bird's-eye view to kind of see the design of it and then, and then kind of go back in to play, play the hole. So I think I took longer to play through my round when I was playing this course because of that, 'cause there's just so much to appreciate in the design.

UploadVR: "Well gentlemen, thank you very, very much for your time today. Taking the time to do this tour and this interview, I really appreciate it.

Lucas: "Awesome. Thanks Mike."

Henning: "Thanks Mike."

Walkabout Mini Golf is available on Steam, PSVR2, Quest, Pico, and Samsung Galaxy XR. Blokhaven is out now on all listed VR platforms for $4.99.

The track veers off the paved road into a dirt side path that makes my car shake enough to consider getting the suspension looked at. Another car sideswipes me as it takes a tighter line on a turn, knocking me off course into a fence. I recover, but a part of the fence is stuck on my windshield for several seconds before falling away from the centrifugal force of the next turn. Dirt is kicking up all around my car, partially blocking my view. Just before the dirt gives way to paved road again, I look over to my passenger side, where the passenger door is damaged from the sideswipe and flapping open and closed. I can't help but smile. In terms of fun factor, FlatOut 4: Total Insanity VR delivers in spades.

The game has multiple gameplay modes, with some maps and options locked behind a points progression system earned by simply playing the game. The same goes for the vehicles. At the start, the Stunt mode only offers one car and other modes like Carnage and Beat The Bomb have a couple at the most. Be prepared for a bit of grinding to unlock more of the game, but it is so much fun it doesn't feel like a grind.

Take the Stunt mode, for instance. You drive down a ramp before ejecting your driver out of the car into either a set of giant Solo cups in an unhinged game of cup pong or staged block towers meant to be destroyed Angry Birds style. All three rounds are over in less than two minutes, followed by a look at the leaderboards, your final score, and then run it back.

Beat The Bomb is a series of ten to thirty second sprints from checkpoint to checkpoint with a bomb ready to explode if you don't make it. Unless you are really good out of the gate, this is over in maybe a minute. These are the shortest modes in the game, with the battle arena and traditional race modes lasting longer, but everything in FlatOut is designed to keep you coming back for more. I can do better than that becomes the inner monologue as you charge back in for more.

Visually, the game has a grungy grit aesthetic and moves fast enough that any visual flaws are quickly forgotten. There is some noticeable clipping and artifacting, particularly in fast, tight turns on bigger maps like the carnage races, but again, it passes so quickly that I had to be looking for it to notice. I did turn the body IK off later in my gameplay as I found the arm clipping when I looked left or right to be distracting. The sacrificed immersion was worth it, personally, since there is no way to customize the driver to look more like me. Another thing to note is everything in the cockpit, the speedometer, the rear view mirror, etc. all function.

Sound design is mostly good, though echolocating other cars from spatial audio was difficult as the sound of the other cars felt muted compared to everything else. This stood out most in the arena mode with so many cars running around that it was tough to isolate which direction an incoming hit was coming from. The soundtrack is excellent, invoking the vibes of late '90s and early '00s racers like Cruis'n USA, but with a harder rock edge.

I do not own a racing wheel, so I cannot comment on how good that support is, but there is a plethora of options to fine-tune it as needed. Analog driving was responsive and can also be refined with sensitivity options in the menu. The driver position and cockpit can all be adjusted for different types to get into the most comfortable view.

There are some Early Access issues, like menu behavior and positioning. In multiplayer, the names of other players were out of position sometimes and only rendered in one eye. I would like to see the pop up UI for the currently playing song moved as it overlaid instructions in some areas, like the Stunt mode. The 'Try Again' option by pressing the X button did not function at all, forcing me to exit the game mode back to the main menu, and reselect it. Everything I noticed is a fixable issue and hopefully will be remedied before the final release.

Overall, FlatOut 4: Total Insanity VR is a joy to play. Despite the stated issues, the core gameplay is already strong enough to make Total Insanity an easy recommendation.

Here is the full rundown of the showcase with links to individual articles for more information and trailers.

Also be sure to check out the new Humble Bundle game bundle featuring several Creature-published titles and the Creature Publishing sales Steam and Quest.

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, & Hand Grenades 2 New Game Announcement

Rust Ltd announced a sequel to its 2016 award-winning classic VR sandbox shooter. Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades 2 promises more looting and shooting as a sentient hot dog on Quest 3/3S and SteamVR.

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades Is Getting A Sequel, With Quest 3 Support

The award-winning VR sandbox FPS Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades is gettin a sequel, and as well as SteamVR, it’s coming to Quest 3 standalone.

UploadVRMike Johnson

• Store links - Steam, Quest 3/3S

Janet's Planets New Game Announcement

Intergalactic terraforming adventure Janet's Planets is the latest game from developer Really Interactive (Virtuoso), coming to Meta Quest and SteamVR.

Janet’s Planets Is A Narrative Terraforming Adventure Coming To Quest 3 & PC VR

Virtuoso’s developer has revealed its next game is an intergalactic adventure, Janet’s Planets, coming to Quest 3 and SteamVR.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

• Store links - Steam, Quest 3/3S

Creature to publish viral sensation Sock Puppet Superstar

Sock Puppet Superstar is a unique VR rhythm game whose clips garnered millions of views on TikTok. The game centers on a singing sock puppet controlled by your hands in VR to perform solos and two-handed duets. Creature announced it will be publishing the game on Quest and SteamVR.

• Store links - Quest, Steam

Compass Releases This Month on Quest and PC VR

Trebuchet's (Broken Edge) open world flight adventure Compass lands on Meta Quest and SteamVR on May 28. A PS VR2 version will follow at a later date.

Open-World Piloting Adventure Compass Coming To Quest 3 & PC VR This Month

Open-world VR flight adventure Compass has a release date, and it’s very soon.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

• Store links - Steam, PS VR2, Quest 3/3S

Language Puzzler Wordbound Confirms Steam Release

After gameplay footage of Kettle Games' Wordbound garnered ten million views across social media, the developer has scaled up its team to add a Steam version with flatscreen and VR support alongside the planned mixed reality Quest release.

Viral Language Puzzler Wordbound Confirms Hybrid Steam Release

Wordbound, a cozy mixed reality word game puzzler previously announced for Quest 3, is also getting a Steam release with VR and flatscreen support.

UploadVRMike Johnson

• Store links - Steam, Quest 3/3S

Crêpe Master! Hits Meta Quest May 7

Colorful beat 'em up adventure Crêpe Master! will release tomorrow, May 7, for Quest 3 headsets. As Hana, use your Sacred Pan to defend your world from an alien invasion.

VR Beat ’Em Up Crêpe Master Coming To Quest 3 In May

French indie developer Hallucinations Studio has revealed that its upcoming arcade beat ’em up Crêpe Master will release on Meta Quest 3 and 3S on May 7.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

• Store links - Quest 3/3S

Laser Dance Mimic Update Expected This Summer

Early Access mixed reality laser obstacle course Laser Dance will get a new update soon. The Mimic update adds six new levels and a new green laser that only moves when the player moves.

Laser Dance Mimic Update Adds New Levels & Challenges This Summer

A new update for Laser Dance will bring six new levels to the game and introduce a new green laser that only moves when you move.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

• Store links - Quest 3/3S

Deadly Delivery Goldmoon Update Available Now

VR horror co-op Deadly Delivery dropped a new update today adding the titular Goldmoon dungeons with new map events, enemies, cosmetics, and rewards.

New Deadly Delivery Update Is Out Now With A New Map Event, Enemies, And Rewards

Deadly Delivery dropped its latest update today with bigger lobbies, new enemy encounters, and more.

UploadVRMike Johnson

• Store links - Quest, Steam

Crossings Developer Interview

The developers of Norse mythology roguelike Crossings appeared to say they have released a new patch to improve the multiplayer and other quality of life fixes.

Crossings Review: A Gritty Rogue In Need Of Polish

Crossings is a visceral and engaging roguelike, but it has rough edges that show the more you play it.

UploadVRMike Johnson

• Store links - Quest, Steam

Sweet Surrender Update 16

The latest update for frenetic roguelike FPS Sweet Surrender adds a third weapon chip slot and over fifty new chips for increased run customization.

VR Roguelike FPS Sweet Surrender’s Latest Update, Out Today, Adds 55 New Upgrades

Sweet Surrender’s Update 16, out now, brings 55 new upgrade chips to the VR roguelike.

UploadVRMike Johnson

• Store links - Quest, Steam, PS VR2

Forefront 1.0 Feature

Forefront exited Early Access last month, moving to full release with a brand new map, progression unlocks, and weapon unlocks. Check out our full review below.

Forefront’s New Map Makes It Feel More Like Battlefield VR Than Ever

Large-scale VR shooter Forefront launches in full tomorrow. We tried out the new Clearwater map, which makes it feel more like Battlefield VR than ever.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

• Store links - Steam, Quest, Pico

Beat The Beats Gets A Level Editor Soon

High-impact boxing rhythm game Beat The Beats will get a level editor soon on Steam Workshop.

Beat The Beats Level Editor Coming Soon To Steam Workshop

VR rhythm boxing game Beat the Beats is getting a level editor on Steam Workshop.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

• Store links - Steam, Quest, PS VR2, Pico

Spymaster Releases May 7

Innerspace, best known for the A Fisherman's Tale games, releases time-warping spy adventure Spymaster in Early Access on Quest and SteamVR on May 7.

Spymaster Confirms May Release Date And We Played It Early

Time-bending espionage adventure Spymaster gets a release date and we went hands on with it at GDC.

UploadVRMike Johnson

• Store links - Quest, Steam

Prison Boss Prohibition Name Change & New Game Announcement

Trebuchet's 2025 Prison Boss follow up, Prison Boss Prohibition, has a new name: Crime Shop Simulator: A Prison Boss Game. Additionally, a new game in the Prison Boss universe, Project Heist Boss, was announced.

Trebuchet Reveals New Game, New Name & Big Discounts

Trebuchet announces a new game, new name, and discounts on Prison Boss Prohibition-related games.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

Flat2VR Studios Rundown

Flat2VR Studios had a developer feature covering their multitude of projects like the recently released Wrath: Aeon of Ruin and Trombone Champ Unflattened. Trombone Champ has new environments and custom trombones coming soon.

Also, Todd Jackson, the head of the Impact Labs playtesting team, announced that the team is taking testing sign ups for Flat2VR's new project, R.A.I.D. in F2VR's Discord.

The full Creature showcase can be watched on YouTube.

Trebuchet has made a number of Prison Boss-related announcements during today's Creature Feature & Friends game showcase. To start, they've teased a new game called Project Heist Boss (which we know little about). From the 30-second video announcing the new game, it looks to be a co-operative heist game with a tagline "Why craft when you can snatch?"

Closed alphas will be playable this summer via the Prison Boss Discord server.

Trebuchet also announced that their popular job simulator Prison Boss Prohibition has a new name. The game is now known as Crime Shop Simulator. In Crime Shop Simulator your job is to run an illegal merchandise stand to satisfy the needs of the locals after the Mayor has gone mad with power. The game's DLCs are also on sale for just 99 cents each for the next two weeks.

We reviewed Crime Shop Simulator (under its previous name) last year, and found it to be "a hilarious opportunity to test your criminal prowess in VR."

Crime Shop Simulator is out now on SteamVR and Quest.

The new game was revealed during the Creature Feature and Friends Showcase today.

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades 2 (nicknamed H3VR2) promises to continue the physics-based gunplay of its predecessor with tons of weapons, daily run challenges, gameplay modes, and leaderboards.

Watch the full announcement trailer here:

The game will feature multiple gameplay modes to accommodate a wide range of players. H3VR2's core mode, the extraction campaign 'Facility' mode, lets players battle enemies and loot resources for subsequent runs in a procedurally generated megastructure. Facility can also be played in a more casual, arcade-like setting.

The first H3VR has been lauded for having the best, most realistic gun handling in VR, which has been a point of friction for newer players. To address this, H3VR2 will also have a Learning mode for players unfamiliar with proper firearm usage. Weapons can be taken out to ranges for testing before diving into a run.

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades 2 can be wishlisted now on Steam and Quest 3/3S.

Announced during today's Creature Feature & Friends Showcase, Janet's Planets is a new VR terraforming space adventure in which your job is to transform dying planets and make them fit for new life. You'll meet all sorts of strange aliens, learn what makes them tick, and tailor worlds to fit their needs, all while a charming sci-fi story unfolds over a six hour play time.

You'll also be able to use Janet's "Sweetview" to instantly travel to a planet's surface, experiment in Sandbox mode, and take on daily challenges with global leaderboards.

Janet's Planets is being developed by Really Interactive, an indie developer based in Stockholm, Sweden that had previously created the original VR titles Toran (a short, and fantastic sci-fi puzzle game) and Virtuoso (a musical sandbox).

Janet's Planets is coming to Meta Quest 3 and SteamVR.

Wordbound imagines a world where every object is made of words. Players pull these objects apart to reveal letter tiles of their spelling, then remix those letters to spell and create new objects. The Quest version will support hand tracking at launch.

A new gameplay video, first revealed at the Creature Feature and Friends Showcase, can be seen here:

Alongside the already planned Meta Quest 3/3S version, Kettle Games has added a Steam release to its plans. From lead developer Andy Bacon:

After Wordbound's positive reception last year, we grew the team and our vision has become more ambitious. We're excited to tease this glow up of the game and bring it to a wider audience with the flatscreen version on Steam.

Wordbound can be wishlisted now on Quest and Steam.

As part of today's Creature Feature & Friends Showcase, Thomas Van Bouwel has announced an update for his mixed reality game Laser Dance. The Mimic Update, as it's called, will add six new levels to Laser Dance, and introduce new green lasers which only move when you do.

The update is coming to Laser Dance later this summer. Players who are interested in trying the update early may get the opportunity by joining the game's Discord.

Laser Dance turns your living space into a challenging maze full of lasers, where the goal of the game is to navigate the maze and reach certain places throughout the room. We reviewed the game when it debuted late last year, noting "it belongs in most libraries and should be a go-to party game."

Laser Dance is available now on Quest 3 and 3S. The Mimic Update will be coming later this summer.

Game studio Parallel Circles has announced that their rhythm boxing game Beat the Beats will be getting a level editor in an upcoming update. The level editor will be coming to Steam Workshop.

Beat the Beats is a VR rhythm boxing game on Quest, SteamVR, Pico 4 and PlayStation VR2, in which you get a workout throwing jabs, hooks, and uppercuts in time with an energetic soundtrack of over 45 tracks, plus challenging B-sides across 90+ levels.

Beat the Beats Review: Heavy Hitting VR Rhythm Action

Beat the Beats could become one of the best VR rhythm games. Our full review.

UploadVRHenry Stockdale

We reviewed Beat the Beats when it debuted on PlayStation VR2 in 2024, comparing it favorably to the wildly popular Beat Saber, and calling it "one of VR's best new rhythm games."

We also more recently covered the game's release on expanded VR platforms, where we found it to be "a well-designed, music-driven experience that keeps you moving and engaged."

Beat the Beats is out now on PlayStation VR2, Quest, SteamVR, and Pico 4.

Developed by Trebuchet, Compass is an open-world flight exploration game in which you play as a "scout" piloting an upgradable cargo ship through pastel skies full of beautiful clouds, floating islands, and incredible danger. You'll scout ahead of a roving airborne Caravan, charting a safe course through turbulent skies, solving puzzles, delivering cargo, and completing missions.

A new trailer has been revealed as part of today's Creature Feature & Friends showcase, and you can see that below.

In addition to high flying action, you'll also leave the cockpit, where movement mechanics will play a massive role in gameplay as you navigate hazardous floating landscapes and solve puzzles with your handheld grapples. The brief glimpses of Compass that we've had so far point to a vast adventure and an overworld ripe with quests.

We'll have a full review posted as soon as possible.

Compass is coming May 28 to Meta Quest and SteamVR. It will be coming to PlayStation VR2 as well, though an exact release date has not been announced.

Developer Salmi Games first released roguelike shooter Sweet Surrender in 2021 and has steadily updated the game since then, including a PlayStation VR2 port in October 2025.

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Sweet Surrender delivers core roguelite thrills with room to grow. Read on for our full Sweet Surrender review! That thing happened with Sweet Surrender. I played it for a few hours and came to what I thought would be my final conclusion. I’d confidently decided it was a simple,

UploadVRJamie Feltham

Update 16 dropped today during the Creature Feature and Friends Showcase, bringing the aforementioned 55 new chips, including medical precision, cross contamination, and aftershocks. A third chip slot has also been added, lessening the requirement to continually discard chips in favor of new ones and offering up far more variety during runs.

Sweet Surrender is out now on PS VR2, Steam, and Quest.