We get it, it happens – you missed the live show. Not to worry! Catch every little bit of the Showcase here. Until then, keep reading for our full list of everything announced. Now, without further ado, let’s dive right in!

Squad up with your buds and fight for the fate of humanity! From VirtualAge, the creators of Guardians Frontline, comes Guardians Planetfall. Players team up in groups of four in this sci-fi online co-op, battle mechs and aliens, and do whatever it takes to win a galaxy-wide war. Guardians Planetfall will enter early access later in 2026 and will be available on both Meta Quest and SteamVR. Read all about it.

Set in the 17th century, Bootstrap Island from MARU VR puts players in the shoes of a survivalist living off the land after being stranded with nothing but what they can scavenge. Battle the weather, wild animals, and a mysterious local tribe without in this roguelike survival adventure. Find Bootstrap Island on SteamVR and be some of the first to play the major update 1.1.0! Read about it here.

Grab your board and your bravery and take on some wild hills in Tomy Horst’s, Board of the Future. Players can choose the pace they play; cruise around and do some cool tricks, or upgrade your board to experience faster and more challenging stages. Wishlist this hoverboard simulator on Meta Quest today before the launch later this year.

This Fall, Singular Perception brings a co-op roguelike adventure set in space to SteamVR: Sol Protocol. Conquer the skies with your squad in a spaceship that you man together and discover parts of deep space you’ve never seen before. Sol Protocol goes into early access in September 2026 and you can join the free playtests through Discord. Read more here. 

Just when you think you’re stuck up a creek without a paddle, Salmon Man comes to the rescue! Embody a man made of salmon in Valem Studio’s physics VR platformer, explore waterways, and climb upstream with nothing but, well, a paddle. This July, Salmon Man goes multiplayer on Meta Quest and SteamVR. Learn more today!

From Hypnos Team and Farmear Games comes the first-ever playable Backrooms metro level, C.A.B.A. Ever wondered what it would be like to explore the Piramides station when no one else should be around? Download the demo today and get ready to experience the metro like never before in the game’s full release coming soon for Meta Quest, SteamVR, and PSVR2.

Retake your power in Master Crowd Games’, The Magician VR: The Cursed Wand. Once disgraced, you need to prove to the magical world that you deserve your powers and that you’re really, really, really… sorry… about that little interdimensional invasion. Grab your wand, battle enemies, and cast spells to keep you safe. Wishlist the game on Meta Quest this September 2026. Learn more here.

Ever wanted to travel the world? Explore things in a new way with Astral Shore Games’, Puzzles of the World. Take a load off, relax your body and mind, and discover dozens of destinations through your own creativity and curiosity in this virtual reality puzzler. Puzzles of the World Version 1.0 goes live on July 23rd, 2026 for Meta Quest. Read about it here.

Feel the need for speed? Can’t find the rush that you’re craving? Push performance bikes to the max in LANESPLIT, by FunkyMouse, set to hit SteamVR on June 23rd, 2026. Feel the power by playing the demo and wishlisting this driving simulator today! Read about it here.

Does your curiosity usually get the better of you? Hone your investigative skills with DetectiveVR, a thrilling virtual reality narrative from Studio CHIPO Y JUAN, Valem Studio, and VRKiwi. Interview key witnesses, explore new venues, and control what happens next. Grab DetectiveVR On September 9th, 2026 on SteamVR and PSVR2. Read about it here.

The fate of the world is in your hands! Team up with friends and take on the Evil Lord Sunder in Heroes Together VR from Basement Bunker Labs. The co-op roguelite combines exploration, teamwork, and challenges that will test your virtual mortality. This September, Heroes Together VR goes into early access for Meta Quest 3.

Fitness meets fun with the arcade-style driving simulator, Pedal Rebel VR, from Toasterface Games. Hop on your exercise bike, dive into the action, and do whatever you can to avoid a collision. Pedal Rebel VR arrives in early access on October 5th to Meta Quest and SteamVR. Read about it here.

Mixed reality sandbox, BrushHammer, brings the popular miniature painting hobby to life. From Soliton Interactive, players can sit in their own space comfortably, choose from a growing collection of mini figures, pair them with accessories, and paint away! Wishlist BrushHammer today on Meta Quest. Read more here.

Feel the freedom of flying in Titan GameZ’, FLYON RC, where players become pilots and fly drones, RC planes, and helicopters in either mixed or virtual reality. The party game flying simulator is set to hit the Meta Quest store this summer.

Are you musically-inclined? Maybe not? No matter, anyone can play Theremin, a mixed reality musical experience by Paul M. Christian. Get in tune with your theremin, express your musicality, and take advantage of an endlessly tuneable instrument. Pick it up on Meta Quest on July 1st, when Theremin will introduce its new Ghost Hands feature, allowing players to drop their controllers for handtracking. Learn more here.

Grab your headset and create your fate in United Games’ VR puzzler, Cards of Destiny. Immerse yourself in a unique tabletop experience where you are a god, and you choose whether the citizens of your world are blessed or cursed – or somewhere in between. Cards of Destiny goes into early access on August 28th for Meta Quest and SteamVR. 

Mixed reality puzzle platformer, Disembodied, comes to Meta Quest on October 15th, 2026, allowing players to experience physics-based hand tracking in their own room. From Middle Man Games, players can use their hands and take on levels that will challenge their stealth and puzzle-solving abilities. Wishlist Disembodied today for Meta Quest. Learn more here.

It’s the VR collab you’ve been waiting for! Combine your love of minigolf and The Brothers Chaps in one out-of-control place. Walkabout Mini Golf and Homestar Runner present the Distraction Pack, full of the characters you love from the hilarious 2000s cartoon. Add the update to your repertoire on June 25th for Meta Quest, SteamVR, and PSVR2.

Get moving in mixed reality with Fantail’s action-packed party experience, Game Night. Fly solo or team up with your besties and discover mini challenges that include arcade action, sports, and puzzles – all in your own space. Grab a copy of Game Night for Meta Quest today and take advantage of the co-op update on June 12th. 

Mixed reality gets a whole new look and it’s spookier than ever! Scan and then transform your entire house into a horror game where evil spirits linger around every corner. Hauntify, from Virtual Go LLC, sets to terrify with ten different supernaturals, adding a multiplayer update in 2027 for Meta Quest. 

Take the beloved color-by-numbers hobby and bring it into mixed reality with Color-A-Cube from AlterEyes! Enjoy hours of free content, including 18 unique voxel models that players can click and color at their own pace in MR or VR. Puzzle people can look forward to a full launch date for Color-A-Cube on June 18th for Meta Quest and PICO. Learn more today!

Can you beat the AI and survive? False Horizon Games presents Project NEOS, a sci-fi VR thriller where the player must escape from a spaceship that is entirely controlled by an AI that’s entirely intent on destroying you. Join the official False Horizon Discord community and sign up for alpha testing today. Learn more here. 

Looking for a first-person-shooter with an all-new, fast-paced twist? Something strange is going on in the Candy Kingdom, and it’s up to you and your best buds to bring the world back to its former glory. Sugar Madness, from JollyCo, transports players into a fantastical place where strategy and skill are paramount to survival. Add Sugar Madness to your Meta Quest library now! Use our exclusive promo code UPLOADVR-224665 at checkout to get Sugar Madness 20% off!

From PMH Interactive LLC comes a VR survival horror game where someone, or some…thing, is always watching. The Obsessive Shadow Chapter 2 is the continuation of the original story where you step into the shoes of 16-year old Justin, trapped in an eerie ghost town, and stalked by a being that isn’t interested in playing games. The scary survival narrative is set to launch on Meta Quest, SteamVR, and PSVR2 later in 2026. Read about it here. 

Explorers, it’s time to pack up and hit the caves! Imagine climbing through the depths of some of the most iconic real-life and VR-created cave systems out there. Immerse yourself in 3R Games’ Cave Crave this July, prepare for another unforgettable simulation – Cave Crave’s addition of the Tham Luang Cave for Meta Quest, and coming to SteamVR and PSVR2. 

Why be yourself when you can be a robot with jets for hands and wheels for legs?! Not only is Jetpack Clankers free, it’s multiplayer, so you can grab your friends and party your own way. WooorldXR invites you to embrace the chaos of massive arenas and high-energy matches, as well as a collection of arcade-style games when you need a break. Jetpack Clankers goes into early access on June 16th. Learn more here.

Become the driver you’ve always hoped to be and drive trucks like a pro in SoloDiveInteractive’s driving simulator, POLY TRUCK. Virtually practice your driving precision, complete challenges to unlock perks, and be on the lookout for the elusive Golden Trucks. Wishlist POLY TRUCK for Meta Quest today! Read more here.

Discover a virtual world where everything around you is made of micro voxels and you have to fight to survive! Voxel Playground by CyDream places players in a state-of-the-art physics sandbox, meaning when you make something go boom, you see it go boom exactly how you’d expect. Build structures, fight creatures, use weapons– the list goes on! Coming soon to SteamVR, players can take advantage of the upcoming update with new maps, items, and mods.

Reimagine the classic 90s style horror game, but in virtual reality! Grab your gear and get ready to discover Already Dead, from Mooncall Games. This spooky old-school survival puzzler offers first-person interactions with fixed-camera, third person gameplay. Learn the game lore and more when Already Dead launches this Fall for PSVR2.

Hold on tight because this is gonna be a fast ride! Hyperlane Highway, from Ryality Studio, invites players to take everything they love about speed and times it by 10. This VR hoverboard roguelite transports players into a neon, cyberpunk-style world where they need to dodge enemy fire, attack with dual wielding blasters, and build a loadout – all while steering through neon hyperlanes. Hyperlane Highway is available to wishlist for Meta Quest and SteamVR, with a full launch scheduled for Q4 2026. Read about it here.

Looking for the next favorite calm, cozy game to add to your collection? Introducing Interlocked: Puzzle Island, from Armor Games Studios, where you can relax on your very own puzzle island and solve tactile, three-dimensional burr puzzles. With your little bird friend, discover handcrafted puzzles you’ll need to twist, pull, and dismantle to complete. Interlocked: Puzzle Island is available now for Meta Quest, and coming soon to SteamVR with brand new puzzles.

Are you up for a new mystery? Do you find yourself asking why and finding clues everywhere you go? iWorlds Studio’s controversial escape room, Dark Trip, invites players indulge in some little pink pills and rely on the hallucinations that follow to solve puzzles and investigate a creepy crime. On June 12th, this psychedelic project drops its latest update - Compartment of Souls - on SteamVR. Dark Trip can also be found on Meta Quest in early access.

So, you like skateboarding, but do you really know skateboarding? Taking from the spirit of the 70s freeride culture, BOMB THE HILL, from Pokodzima Studio, ramps up the nostalgia in a brand new skateboarding experience where players will weave in and out of traffic, race down some killer hills, battle their rivals, and of course, enjoy the whole roadtrip-style atmosphere. BOMB THE HILL is available for Meta Quest today, and will release on SteamVR for the first time later this summer. Check it out here.

And closing out the show was the brand new game announcement of horror first-person-shooter, Rustmourne! This VR sci-fi horror experience is inspired by classics like Half Life: Alyx and Dead Space, with VR-designed interactions at the forefront of the design. Players can explore ancient corridors and discover what waits in the dark – run, hide, or chop ‘em up to survive. Wishlist Rustmourne on SteamVR today! Read more here.

Thank you again for another The UploadVR Showcase. We’re so grateful for everyone involved this season, and already can’t wait to bring you the best the VR has to offer again in December. See you then! In the meantime, if you have info about an upcoming project, don’t forget to reach out to the editorial team and tell them all about it at tips@uploadvr.com.

The psychedelic horror escape room game Dark Trip got a major update today during the UploadVR Showcase. The "Compartment of Souls" update adds the 15th escape room to the game.

The new update is live on Meta Quest where the game has been in Early Access since February 2025. Since then, Dark Trip has seen continuous updates and improvements on Meta's platform. On June 4, Dark Trip's closed playtest on Steam became available, where the game is available both with PC VR support and conventional flat controls.

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 You progress by solving escape room style puzzles, and occasionally by taking pills to force a hallucinatory state that transforms the environment. 

Dark Trip is available now in Early Access on Meta Quest, and will be coming to SteamVR in the future.

The new game reveal trailer, seen here, closed out the showcase:

The developer describes Rustmourne as "a VR Sci-fi Survival Horror with detailed, VR-designed interactions, strongly inspired by Half-Life: Alyx and Dead Space. Traverse the corridors of an ancient, derelict structure, and face the tortured beings in it: hide, run, or cut off their limbs to survive."

Invoking the name of Half-Life: Alyx has been a double-edged sword for developers. Since its release in 2020, Alyx has set a high bar for other VR games to clear, narrative shooter or otherwise, and the results have been mixed at best. Just from the trailer, it does appear to lean more Dead Space in its environments and creature design, albeit with clear VR interactions.

Rustmourne is available to wishlist now on Steam. At the time of this article, there is no news on additional platforms.

During today's UploadVR Showcase, Pokodzima Games announced that their upcoming downhill skateboarding game Bomb the Hill will be racing onto SteamVR this summer. The newly announced SteamVR release of Bomb the Hill will launch alongside the previously known Meta Quest version.

A new trailer includes QR codes to direct would-be skaterbois and skatergoils to the game's shop pages where you can wishlist it today.

Bomb the Hill was born from a prototype built for the Oculus Publishing Ignition program, a funding initiative for Quest games announced by Meta in 2024. This program offered a path to funding projects targeting 'midcore' players with a particular interest in simulation, sports, and social projects.

In Bomb the Hill, you'll race down dangerous mountain roads, weave through traffic at insane speeds, battle desperate rivals, perform tricks, and survive brutal crashes. The game blends realistic downhill skating mechanics with atmospheric storytelling and a road-trip vibe.

Bomb the Hill is coming to Meta Quest and SteamVR this summer. The planned price is $19.99.

We already knew the game was coming to Steam later this year. A new trailer at today's UploadVR Summer Showcase confirmed the neon-soaked FPS will also hit Meta Quest headsets:

Hyperlane Highway is a solo developer project where you lean your entire body to steer your hoverboard through neon-lit hyper lanes while dual wielding blasters. The hoverboard will match your body's movement in a locomotion system designed to minimize motion sickness induced from artificial VR movement.

Playtesting is open right now in developer Ryality Studio's Discord. The Early Access period is expected to last about six months, allowing time to balance the game from player feedback and add new upgrades, weapons, and environments.

Hyperlane Highway can be wishlisted now on Steam and Meta Quest.

Watch the trailer here:

Poly Truck is a physics-driven, tactile truck simulator with an interactive low-poly cockpit where every key turn, gear shift, and cabin control responds directly to your virtual hands. It also supports driving via the analog sticks and face button inputs on the Quest controllers for those who prefer that method.

The gameplay loop requires drivers to navigate the map seeking out and collecting golden trucks until the main trailer required for delivery unlocks. Completing that delivery unlocks the next level. The game was built using Godot, a less popular game development engine among VR developers than Unity and Unreal Engine.

Truck sims like American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator have been popular amongst PC VR players for years and while Poly Truck is obviously not in the same realm of graphical fidelity, standalone VR players have had precious few viable alternatives.

Poly Truck can be wishlisted now for Meta Quest 3 headsets ahead of its planned Q4 2026 release.

The game's website has been up for some time, but the first official trailer dropped at today's UploadVR Summer Showcase:

Jetpack Clankers is the newest title from Wooorld Inc., a departure from its previous titles, Google Earth-based exploration experience Wooorld and Geoguessr-like location guessing game Where On Earth.

In Clankers, players are transformed into robots with jets for hands and wheels for legs racing around huge arenas at breakneck speeds. It also touts a host of activities like arcade games, toys, a special game called Clankball, and creating musical beats with friends.

Jetpack Clankers releases in Early Access on Meta Quest on June 16. Its official website also says "Steam Frame and PC VR support coming soon."

The first Obsessive Shadow game took place in a single home (or your own home in its upcoming mixed reality update) in the 1980s. Chapter 2 expands outside as shown in the reveal trailer:

Chapter 2 is set in 2006, twenty years after the first game. Old Diamond Drive, the street of the home from the first game, and its surrounding neighborhood is mostly abandoned. Players take on the role of sixteen year old Justin, who has lost a bet to a friend and has to stay in the creepy community for one night. In true horror trope fashion, Justin only brings a camcorder and a flashlight. It feels like the setup for a late 90s or early 00s horror film.

The Obsessive Shadow Chapter 2 is expected on PS VR2, Quest, and SteamVR sometime this year.

Watch the reveal trailer here:

Project NEOS (a working title subject to change) is described by developer False Horizon as "John Wick meets Ellen Ripley," taking inspiration from immersive sims like 2017's Prey and 2022's Gloomwood. Taking all of that into consideration with the gameplay shown in the trailer, it's fair to presume you will be armed and able to defend yourself, albeit with a limited amount of ammo that forces a fair amount of stealth gameplay to stay alive.

False Horizon is currently holding alpha playtests on its Discord. The trailer does not specify which VR platform the game is being built for. That said, the cel shaded art style in the trailer has grown popular with developers building for standalone VR platforms and False Horizon has posted about its project in r/OculusQuest on Reddit with the 'Standalone' tag.

As announced during today's UploadVR Showcase, the full release of cozy VR color-by-numbers game Color-A-Cube is coming June 18. Color-A-Cube combines voxel art, crisp interactions, satisfying pops, and sparkling completion effects into a relaxing, creative paint-by-numbers experience.

The full 1.0 release includes over 100 voxel models, new story-driven coloring experiences, weekly free model drops, monthly DLC releases, and crossover content with other games.

A release trailer was shown during today's UploadVR Showcase, embedded here.

Developed by AlterEyes, best known for VR mech action game Big Shots, Color-A-Cube is a free to download app described as a “relaxing voxel coloring experience that brings cube-based worlds to life.” Color-A-Cube is currently available in early access, with various themes and models available.

We'll have a hands-on impression article posted on the full build's release day. Stay tuned for that.

Color-A-Cube is available now on Meta Quest and PICO.

After a lengthy development cycle, Disembodied is coming to Quest this year, on October 15. Disembodied is a mixed reality platformer that turns your real hand movements into precise, physics-driven gameplay. You'll guide a pair of disembodied (!) hands through a range of different challenges, including platforming sections, stealth areas, and puzzle-solving levels, while interacting with the environment in a natural way.

You'll also collect power-ups and use hand gestures to activate them. And there's a level editor, too, allowing you to create your own levels using hand tracking, which can then be uploaded for the community to enjoy.

Disembodied was first shown back in 2024, during UploadVR's Summer Showcase, after which we chatted with the game's developer, Kevin Walker.

"In Disembodied you control your disembodied hands with your... hands," Walker wrote to us. "The game is mixed reality, and uses only hand tracking. Your hand movements are copied 1:1 to the disembodied hands, which you must maneuver through small levels, featuring various mechanics and challenges."

Disembodied finally has a release date and you can wishlist the game on Quest ahead of its release on October 15.

Most VR music apps focus on a single instrument and performance with the game. Solo developer Paul M. Christian aims to change that in Theremin's next update, revealed at today's UploadVR Summer Showcase.

Watch the trailer here:

The Ghost Hands add-on will allow players to record motion loops and perform in ensemble with cloned versions of themselves. This allows players to layer melodies on top of one another in harmony, as shown in the trailer.

A theremin is a hands free musical instrument that typically consists of a box with two metal antennas. These create an electromagnetic field that senses the musician's position. Sound is generated by moving your hands in the proximity of the two antennas, varying the electromagnetic field depending on hand position and distance to the instrument.

Theremin is out now on Meta Quest. The Ghost Hands add-on will be available July 1.

BrushHammer is a mixed-reality game that lets you build, collect, paint, and display miniature figures. You'll pick from a huge collection of minis, kit bash them with different parts and accessories, and paint them using tools like spray cans, airbrushes, shading brushes, decals, and shiny coatings.

Gameplay was shown in a trailer as part of today's UploadVR Showcase, and we've embedded that below.

In addition to painting figures, BrushHammer lets you show off your masterpiece in your space, send photos to friends, and climb from total newbie to legendary painter in Career Mode, where you'll complete commissions, impress picky judges, and spend your hard-earned points in the hobby shop on new tools, accessories, and upgrades for your creative setup.

BrushHammer Miniature Painter is now available to wishlist on the Meta store.

Here's the new story trailer:

The real life exercise bike integration is as low tech as it gets. Simply strap or otherwise attach your controllers to your legs and the game handles the rest of the legwork (pun intended), similar to Dance Dash. The bike is steered by leaning side to side with handling improving at higher speeds.

Dodging traffic also builds up energy to overcharge the bike for higher speeds and increased score multipliers to climb the global leaderboards. Earned points can be used to unlock new bikes, songs, levels, achievements, and challenges.

Pedal Rebel can be wishlisted now on Steam and Meta Quest. It releases on October 5.

Watch the trailer here:

It originally launched only supporting hand tracking. Controller support was added after player feedback earlier this month. The full release will feature seven levels of relaxing miniature building in stylized locations around the world:

• Kyoto, Japan
• Venice, Italy
• Banff, Canada
• Paris, France
• Agra, India
• Cuzco, Peru
• Svalbard, Norway

In addition to the actual building process, each environment has a small booklet with bite-sized facts about the location, offering insight into its history, architecture, and culture.

Typically, pre-order discounts are ten to fifteen percent off. Having been in Early Access for free since January of this year, developer Astral Shores Games is offering an aggressive 33% off for anyone who pre-orders the game before July 23.

Puzzles of the World can be pre-ordered now on Meta Quest 3/3S.

Announced during today's UploadVR Showcase, Detective VR is coming to PlayStation VR2 and SteamVR on September 9. The narrative-driven mixed reality and VR investigation game allows you to control time, collect clues and interview witnesses in passthrough mixed reality mode, where you'll hear unreliable testimonies and confront suspects to find out what happened.

Detective VR has been available on Quest since February 2025. In our review of the Quest version, we called it fun, inspiring, suspenseful, and "a delight to play."

Detective VR focuses extensively on story, mixed reality gameplay, and hand tracking, allowing you to pinch to take photos and thoroughly examine documents and crime scenes with a magnifying glass. It's possible to play with controllers, but hand tracking makes the experience really shine. When Detective VR launched on Quest, we chatted with the game's developers specifically about the way they sought to implement hand tracking.

“Our goal was to create [no] friction between the player and the story; the interactions had to become natural, almost invisible. That's why mixed reality and hand-tracking were so important… you feel at ease, interacting in the comfort of your environment.”

You can unravel the mysteries of Detective VR when it lands on PlayStation VR2 and SteamVR on September 9. It's out now on Quest.

The announcement was made during today's UploadVR Summer Showcase. Watch the trailer here:

Lanesplit rewards daring, faster riding with score multipliers coming from higher speeds and tighter lane splitting. Slow riders and crashes are punished with having their scores reset to zero. The game supports solo and co-op gameplay in multiple traffic conditions and weather settings. Players can select from bikes with different attributes like handling, traction, and stopping power depending on the race at hand.

For those looking for a more chill experience, a Zen mode removes all traffic from the roads for isolated, open road rides.

Lanesplit released in January and currently has a 'Mostly Positive' rating from 322 user reviews. It is currently on sale on Steam for 34% off through June 24, one day after the VR support update.

Salmon Man's description on the Meta Horizon store says it is "made for players who love difficult games and the satisfaction of earning every victory." That is a nice way of saying it is designed to be frustrating and when we reviewed it, it lived up to the billing, though it managed to remain fun in spite of the rage.

Developer Valem Studio will up the ante with a multiplayer update in July. The update was revealed at today's UploadVR Summer Showcase:

Players will have the added stress of competing against each other as well as the environment to make their way upstream using only their paddles. Success will unlock new paddles and achievements. Previous updates added an extreme Lava Mode in February 2026 and a new mountain map in April.

Salmon Man is out now on Steam and Meta Quest.

A new trailer confirming a September release debuted at today's UploadVR Summer Showcase:

Players take on the role of a down-on-his-luck magician attempting to reclaim his former glory. In doing so, he accidentally sparks an interdimensional invasion.

Wielding the titular cursed wand, you are tasked with defending the fantasy city of Crowville in multiple gameplay modes. The Nightmare mode is a take on the classic endless wave mode while Incursions incorporates more strategic methods and tower defense tactics. According to developer Master Crowd Games, both modes connect to the main story campaign.

The Magician VR: The Cursed Wand can be wishlisted now on Meta Quest.

A new trailer was revealed at today's UploadVR Summer Showcase showing more of the co-op gameplay. Watch the trailer here:

Sol Protocol supports up to three players working together to manage the team's spaceship, helm gun turrets to defend against enemy ships, and land to explore abandoned stations for loot and ship upgrades. Players can assume one of three different roles, Captain, Pilot, or Gunner, depending on the task at hand.

Developer Singular Perception (Epyka) has been running open alpha playtests on Quest 3/3S since March and originally planned its Early Access release for April. At the time of this article, the Early Access release is only planned for Meta Quest, with no news on the planned Steam version.

Sol Protocol can be wishlisted now on Quest and Steam.

C.A.B.A. (Center of Anomalies of Buenos Aires), is a short first-person survival horror experience launching with full VR support on PlayStation VR2, Meta Quest, and SteamVR, plus flat versions for PS5 and Steam.

Set in a Buenos Aires subway station that shouldn't exist, the game is a terrifying trek through a subterranean liminal space. You can't fight what walks the tunnels down here; you can only try to escape.

A trailer has been shown during the UploadVR Summer Showcase 2026, and we've included that below.

Survival games taking place in liminal spaces have seen massive popularity in recent years, as the phenomenon of basements and office buildings being extra spooky takes hold in the public consciousness. The Exit 8, a terrifying walking simulator, has been scaring players in record numbers, while Backrooms, a feature-length film based on a post on an internet forum, has found exceptional success in recent days.

Though an exact release date has not yet been revealed, you can wishlist C.A.B.A. now on Quest, PlayStation VR2, and SteamVR.

Maru VR has revealed the release of Major Update 1.1.0 for Bootstrap Island, the Robinson Crusoe-inspired VR survival adventure game. The update adds a new cumulative progression system, an early-game inventory solution, dangerous new nocturnal predators, bHaptics support, and several gameplay improvements.

A new trailer for Update 1.1.0 was shown during today's UploadVR Showcase, which you can see below.

Our review of Bootstrap Island's 1.0 release was complimentary. Mike wrote, "Bootstrap Island exits Early Access as a fully realized VR survival adventure that stands up to any top game in the genre."

However, survival games can be extremely challenging for new players. Today's update seeks to ease the early game friction. To start, new tools and unlocked items are now tied to a player's cumulative survival time across all playthroughs. This means that every day survived contributes toward future unlocks, ensuring that even when a run ends in failure, it's not pointless.

Managing resources in early game is easier now, too, with the addition of a crate that can be filled with resources and supplies and carried around the island.

Bootstrap Island is available now on SteamVR. A PlayStation VR2 port has been announced, and can be wishlisted here.

First revealed during December 2025's UploadVR Winter Showcase, Guardians Planetfall is an ambitious new cooperative shooter that throws players into a desperate battle for humanity’s survival across a war-torn galaxy. We got a closer look at the upcoming game via a new trailer during today's UploadVR Showcase.

The trailer is embedded here:

Designed for fast-paced tactical combat, Guardians Planetfall allows players to assemble into squads of up to four soldiers and take on dangerous missions across procedurally generated planets and sprawling space installations. Every deployment will present new challenges, with dynamic environments and unpredictable encounters ensuring that no two battles play out the same way.

Players will face a wide range of threats, including relentless alien forces, elite Void soldiers, and towering war machines capable of turning the tide of battle in an instant. Success will depend on teamwork, strategy, and quick decision-making as squads fight to secure objectives and push back enemy advances across multiple fronts.

Building on the foundations established by Guardians Frontline, the new title aims to deliver larger-scale engagements, deeper cooperative gameplay, and a richer science-fiction setting tailored specifically for virtual reality.

Our earlier coverage of Guardians Planetfall described the game as "Helldivers 2 for VR," and this latest trailer only reinforces that idea. It also (if I may be so bold) looks cool as hell.

Guardians Planetfall will launch in early access on Quest 3/3S and SteamVR in 2026. Players eager to join the fight can wishlist the game now, and join the game's Discord to keep updated on future announcements from the development team.

In a Discord statement, Mighty Eyes detailed what led to this decision:

The last few years have been tough. For VR as a market, for Wanderer, and for our studio. We had ambitious plans and for the most part we think we executed them as well as we could. Sadly, it wasn't enough. The game performed solidly on console but we just didn't see the mobile uptake we'd counted on. What we'd banked on didn't pay off.

We're eternally grateful for the chance Sony took on us – their belief in this IP from the start (and their continued commitment) made so much of what we achieved possible. We're also thankful and humbled by the support we received from Meta and Pico along the way. There are genuinely good people behind these platforms who backed us through and through.

We're still figuring out what's next for Mighty Eyes amidst this (very) volatile market. But we won't be developing Wanderer 2, and ongoing support for Wanderer: The Fragments of Fate isn't something we're able to continue.

Wanderer: The Fragments of Fate was first announced in 2023 with sequel Wanderer 2: The Seas of Fortune revealed in February 2024 with a teaser clip of a pirate flag. Fragments of Fate had a troubled development process with multiple delays until its eventual release in April 2025 on Meta Quest & PlayStation VR2. A SteamVR port followed in October 2025.

We played Fragments of Fate at release, saying the puzzles were still top notch, but technical issues and a poor combat system hurt the overall experience.

Wanderer: The Fragments Of Fate Review - An Ambitious Puzzle Adventure In Need Of More Time

Wanderer: The Fragments of Fate is an ambitious puzzle adventure with amazing potential, but is sorely let down by performance issues. Our full review.

UploadVRPete Austin

Shortly after release, Mighty Eyes laid out a roadmap to address the concerns of players and upgrade the Quest 3 version. Its last update, Patch 1.5, was eight months ago at the time of this article. Fragments of Fate currently sits at a score of 3.4 with 486 ratings on Quest, 3.94 with 772 ratings on PS VR2, and a 'mixed' rating with 132 on Steam.

We learned very little about Wanderer 2 after its announcement, with Fragments of Fate taking center stage in Mighty Eyes' development updates and third party VR showcases.

We will continue to monitor Mighty Eyes' development and report any additional updates.

Wanderer: The Fragments of Fate is available on Meta Quest, PS VR2, and Steam.

When revealing Steam Frame back in November, Valve said it would ship in "early 2026". For pricing, it told UploadVR it was "aiming" to sell Steam Frame for less than the $1000 Index full-kit.

But given the global memory shortage resulting from the rapid growth of AI, come February the company announced that it would need to "revisit" its "exact shipping schedule and pricing".

This month, in a blog post launching the 'Steam Frame' Verified program, Valve confirmed that both Steam Frame and the Steam Machine consolized PC will launch "this summer", meaning sometime in the next three months.

Steam Frame Hands-On: UploadVR’s Impressions Of Valve’s New Headset

UploadVR’s David Heaney and Ian Hamilton went hands-on with Steam Frame at Valve HQ, trying both standalone use and PC VR.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Steam Frame Verified

Just as Steam Deck has a 'Steam Deck Verified' tag for Steam store listings to note games that Valve has tested to work well on the handheld, there is now a 'Steam Frame Verified' program too.

Valve says the 'Steam Frame Verified' tag "focuses on the experience customers will have with the device out-of-the-box in standalone mode", and doesn't apply to how a game will perform when rendered and streamed by a gaming PC.

The program was announced at GDC 2026 in March. But whereas back then Valve said the tag would require VR titles to hit 90FPS, as you can see in the slide in the linked article, the company has since reduced this requirement to 72FPS, matching the store requirements of competing standalone headsets like Meta Quest and Pico.

Valve now lists the requirements for VR titles as "a minimum of 72 fps at 1728×1728 during normal play", while for flatscreen titles running on Steam Frame on a giant floating virtual monitor, the requirement is 30 fps at 1280×720.

Developers can read about the Steam Frame Verified requirements on the Steamworks website.

Pallets Arriving In The US

XR enthusiast Brad Lynch's Discord team of dataminers and sleuths has noticed pallets of Steam Frames are already arriving at Valve's warehouses in the United States.

The shipments were spotted on the supply chain intelligence website ImportYeti.

When the new Steam Controller was spotted arriving via the same method, the product ended up launching just over 3 weeks later.

That doesn't necessarily mean the same will happen for Steam Frame, but it does suggest that the headset may launch closer to the start of summer than the end. We'll keep an extremely close eye on Valve in the coming weeks to find out.

Article updated after publication to note Valve changing the Steam Frame Verified tag's VR FPS requirement and pallets of Steam Frame being spotted arriving in the US.

Developers have been able to extend their smartphone apps to access the camera and microphone of Meta's smart glasses since December, if the user enables developer mode and grants permission, through the Wearables Device Access Toolkit SDK. But the only output they could send to the glasses was audio via Bluetooth.

Last month, Meta added support for bringing apps to Meta Ray-Ban Display's heads-up display (HUD), through two separate paths: Extended Smartphone Apps and Standalone Web Apps.

Extended Smartphone Apps

The same Wearables Device Access Toolkit SDK developers have been using to access the glasses camera in their smartphone apps can now send UI content to the display.

Within the display area, developers can show text, images, buttons, icons, and videos, using Meta-provided UI components, styled and laid out within FlexBox containers.

Developers implement these components in the same language they likely already use for the rest of the app, Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android.

For the extended smartphone apps path, raw input from the Meta Neural Band is handled by Meta's operating system. The user can navigate between and click on the buttons developers placed using the same finger swipe gestures they use for the rest of the operating system, and the smartphone app will receive these click events to run code on the phone and update the display.

Essentially, the extended smartphone apps path just lets the HUD be used as a highly managed and controlled external display with button navigation and input, but the core of the app continues to run on the user's smartphone.

Interested developers can find the documentation for this here. Distributing these apps still requires the user to enable developer mode.

Standalone Web Apps

The Web Apps path for Meta Ray-Ban Display is a completely new stack for development on the Meta Ray-Ban Display, where apps made with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can run natively on the glasses.

This path is far less constrained, letting developers use whatever kind of user interface web framework they want, and provides access to Meta Neural Band swipes and taps, motion and orientation data from the IMU in the glasses, GPS location of the connected phone, and local on-device storage – all using open web standards. And the apps can run without the smartphone connected.

Technically, what Meta did here was just give the glasses the ability to open any web URL in a lightweight on-device browser. But given that the in-lens display is 600×600 and the only available inputs are directional swiping and tapping, most websites are effectively unusable, so the idea here is to build mini web apps specifically designed for Meta Ray-Ban Display.

Developers are responsible for hosting these web apps, and can use any hosting solution they want, as they would with any other website, as long as it supports HTTPS. Meta does not provide hosting. Free options include GitHub Pages.

This approach has the advantage of meaning the apps can be easily and instantly tested and iterated upon without putting on the glasses, using the arrow and enter keys on a keyboard to simulate Meta Neural Band swipes and taps.

The path for adding web URLs as apps to Meta Ray-Ban Display is to navigate to the smartphone app settings, then tap App Connections, then Web Apps, and add the URL. The Codex and Claude Code plugin can also generate a QR code that developers can share to launch into the phone app's Web Apps section, which will automatically ask to add the URL. The user needs to have developer mode enabled for their glasses.

Interested developers can find documentation here.

Full AI Coding Agent Support

For both development paths, Extended Smartphone Apps and Standalone Web Apps, Meta fully supports AI coding agents.

This includes installable plugins for OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code, auto-loaded instructions for GitHub Copilot and Cursor, and a fallback AGENTS.md file for other systems.

Meta also has a public Wearables MCP server for live documentation search, meaning agents can always reference the most up-to-date details on how to properly develop for Meta Ray-Ban Display.

This all makes it possible to "vibe code" apps for the glasses, meaning any owner with basic technical knowledge can build their own information overlays, real-time data displays, micro-apps, utilities, and media streaming tools.

(If you're unaware, AI coding agents have significantly improved in the last year or so, and are now capable of building entire apps without the user ever needing to write their own code).

Display Recording

The firmware update that brings support for building visual apps also brought support for display recording on Meta Ray-Ban Display.

A major issue I faced when reviewing Meta Ray-Ban Display at launch was the inability to show you, our readers, what I was seeing. Sure, you could stick a camera up to the lens, but the waveguide is designed for a human eye, not a sensor, and I've never seen any attempt at this accurately depict what I saw. These camera capture techniques also preclude actually wearing the glasses.

Now, Meta Ray-Ban Display owners can record the display, with the output showing it superimposed on the camera view, and including any playing audio.

This was arguably an essential feature for Meta to ship alongside visual apps, as it lets developers show the world their experiments on social media. It also makes it easier for journalists, influencers, and creators to show off the capabilities of Meta Ray-Ban Display.

Interesting Apps So Far

Since support for building and testing visual apps went live last month, we've seen a number of incredibly impressive initial experiments from developers already.

Some remain private solo demos, while others are available for any Meta Ray-Ban Display owner to use.

While by no means a comprehensive list, here's just a small collection we've noticed:

Ghost Run: Racing Your Past Self

Software developer Stijn Spanhove, of In The Pocket, built a web app that let him race his past self by manually hardcoding in a GPX (GPS Exchange Format) file from a past run recorded by Strava.

The screen leverages the compass of the glasses for orientation and the GPS of the connected smartphone for the location, tracking you and your past self on a blue line representing the path.

Spanhove says he's planning to make a public version of this connected with Strava.

YouTube, TikTok & Twitch Clients

While I don't personally find Meta Ray-Ban Display's monocular display system visually comfortable enough to want to watch videos on it, owners willing to put up with the eye strain had been crying out for wider support than just the built-in Instagram Reels app.

A pseudonymous developer going by the handle AeroSummit has satisfied this need by building Meta Ray-Ban Display web apps for YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch.

While it's technically already possible to access this site, AeroSummit has crafted a simplified interface designed to fit into the 600×600 display space and work well with only the swipe and tap inputs of the Meta Neural Band.

They're available through Herald Hub, AeroSummit's unified app launcher for the glasses.

DOOM

The original 1993 DOOM has become one of the most widely ported pieces of software in history, and getting it to run on every kind of digital device from thermometers, calculators, and even HDMI adapters has become a fun challenge for hacker-minded developers.

So naturally, XR developer Timur Abdrakhimov has already ported it to Meta Ray-Ban Display.

An AI Agent That Orders Uber & DoorDash

The most impressive part of Google's I/O demo of the upcoming Warby Parker and Gentle Monster smart glasses was Gemini's ability to agentically operate your connected smartphone to do things like order Uber and DoorDash.

Developer Rohan Arun is building a cross-platform agent called Super, designed to perform agentic actions without the need for a phone, and the first glasses Super supports is Meta Ray-Ban Display.

Arun shared a clip of the app being used to order Starbucks, with no input required beyond voice.

Smart Home Control

The ability to control smart home devices by simply looking at them and tapping your index finger to your thumb is an ideal future use case of XR.

Unfortunately, it's not possible today, at least not without significant manual setup. But the next best thing is being able to control your devices from your glasses with a few swipes of your fingers, without getting up or having to call out to a speaker with your voice.

Krzysztof Wrona, a developer at Mondly, shared a short clip of a demo of exactly this. It's not currently publicly available for others to try.

A Reader-Mode Web Browser

As we described earlier in the article, the technical foundation of web app support on Meta Ray-Ban Display is essentially that the glasses now have a built-in web browser to access web URLs. But given that the in-lens display is 600×600 and the only available inputs are directional swiping and tapping, most websites are effectively unusable.

Another one of AeroSummit's creations is a web browser, a web portal with a simplified interface for DuckDuckGo search that implements a simplified reader mode for the websites you access.

Let Us Know!

If you have an interesting experiment or published web app for Meta Ray-Ban Display, please contact us to let us know.

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 soon!

The filing with the Maine Attorney General's office alleged that account usernames, associated emails, VRChat+ subscription status, and login history including device information, hardware identifiers, and IP addresses were exposed, while passwords, payment information, and government ID documents for age verification were not compromised.

It was submitted by a "Scott Caruso", listed as a 'Director" with an official VRChat email address of scaruso@vrchat.com. And multiple news outlets reported it as a VRChat data breach, without verifying that it was real.

Shortly after the reports surfaced, a VRChat community manager dropped a rebuttal on VRChat's Discord service:

This same messaging was posted in response to messages inquiring about the breach on Reddit:

We emailed scaruso@vrchat.com to check whether the address even existed, and it bounced back immediately as nonexistent. We also cannot find a single mention online of a Scott Caruso working for VRChat, or any social VR company at all.

We reached out to VRChat directly for an official statement and it replied with the same statement regarding the alleged breach and the employee who reported it:

"VRChat did not submit this Notice of Data Incident, and the employee/email cited does not exist.

We have no reason to believe that our data or systems have been compromised.

We are in the process of contacting the Maine Attorney General's office to have this removed."

We will continue monitoring this situation and update this article if any new information emerges.

The CleanSheet games overall have reached over 180,000 paid players across PS VR2, Meta Quest, and Pico. Developer Incisiv says CleanSheet Soccer 2 was built for PlayStation fans who pushed for a version of Quest's CleanSheet Soccer Pro to play on their platform. Incisiv ditched the subscription model of the original for a self-contained premium offering.

Here's the release trailer:

CleanSheet Soccer 2 has multiple training modes to target specific goalkeeping drills. Examples are Lightning Hands, which targets hand speed, while Matrix Reflex challenges players to stop rapid-fire deflections. All of the match situations are motion-captured for better realism. The game also has a Shot Creator mode where players can build their own custom training drills. Aside from drills, there are global leaderboards to chase and performance tracking to measure your improvement.

The career mode offers one of three fictional clubs, Stanton United, Forgehill Rovers, and Waveport City, with their own stadiums, identities, and progression tracks. Being that this is a PlayStation title, there is a full trophy system as well for the platinum trophy collectors of the world.

CleanSheet Soccer 2 is out now on PS VR2. We have a copy of the game and will post our impressions soon.

Connect is Meta's annual XR conference, its primary event since the last F8 in 2021. Originally called Oculus Connect, from the first in 2014 until the sixth in 2019, the event sees the company announce VR, AR, and smart glasses hardware, software, and new developer tools, as well as show off some of its research towards the future of XR.

"Come join us at Connect September 23–24 at our campus in Menlo Park, California, and get the first glimpse of what's coming to the next computing platform. We'll have an evening keynote and developer sessions where we'll share the latest in VR, wearables, metaverse, and AI."

When teasing the event last month, Meta pointed to the fact that its smart glasses are "one of the fastest-growing consumer electronics categories in history", with over 7 million units sold in 2025 and daily usage tripling year-over-year, and that it "pushing VR forward as the biggest investor in the industry".

So what might we expect at Connect 2026?

On the VR/MR side, it's likely that Meta will at least tease, if not formally announce, the ultralight headset with an open periphery design and tethered compute puck that leaked internal memos from December revealed is set to launch in the first half of 2027.

Graphics Depicting Meta’s Next Headset Found In Quest Firmware

Graphics depicting Meta’s upcoming ultralight headset with a tethered compute puck, codenamed Phoenix, have been found in Quest firmware.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Earlier this year, following the scaledown of Meta's VR spending, closure of most of its acquired studios, and retreat of Horizon Worlds from VR, multiple executives confirmed that the company is still working on building future headsets, despite rumors to the contrary.

Meta CFO: We’re “Building Future Headsets” & Still “Have Optimism” In VR

Meta CFO Susan Li says the company still has “optimism in the future of VR”, and confirmed that it’s still “building future headsets”.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

On the smart glasses side, The Information recently reported that Meta plans to launch four new models this year, codenamed “Modelo”, “Luna”, “RBM2 Refresh”, and “Mojito VIP”.

It's unclear what “Modelo”, “Luna”, or “Mojito VIP” are, though one of them may be the Prada Meta Glasses that CNBC reported last year were in the works. Meanwhile, “RBM2 Refresh” almost certainly refers to a refreshed version of generation 2 of the regular Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which launched at Connect 2025.

The Information also reports that Meta will start testing Artemis, the codename for its first consumer true AR glasses. Previous reports have suggested Artemis will be sleeker than the Orion prototype but with a narrower field of view. And it seems as if Meta will be beaten to the punch by Snap.

We'll bring you full coverage of Meta Connect 2026 in September.

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 soon!

The claims were made by Mark Zuckerberg speaking to investors during the company's Q1 2026 earnings call.

In February, Meta's fashion, branding, and hardware partner EssilorLuxottica (which Meta owns a stake in) revealed that 7 million units of Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta glasses were sold in 2025 alone, and that the devices had become the "dominant driver" of its wholesale growth.

For comparison, Quest 2 sold an estimated 20 million units in two and a half years, while Steam Deck sold around 4 million units over the same timespan.

Near the start of this year, Bloomberg reported that Meta and EssilorLuxottica were discussing doubling or even tripling smart glasses production capacity. It's unclear whether this has yet happened.

It's undeniable at this point that smart glasses are a successful consumer product category, both in terms of sales and retention. The question now is whether Meta will maintain its lead once serious competition from Apple and Google arrives.

Google Gemini Smart Glasses Launching In Fall To Take On Meta

Google-powered smart glasses from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster are launching this fall to take on Ray-Ban Meta.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

At I/O 2026 Google confirmed that smart glasses with Gemini, from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, are launching this fall.

Apple is also widely rumored to be launching its own smart glasses in 2027, and this could further squeeze Meta's market share – though the company may be hoping that the total future market for smart glasses is large enough to have space for all three companies in the long term.

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 soon!

Gentle Monster and Warby Parker are rising competitors to EssilorLuxottica, Meta's partner, which owns the Ray-Ban and Oakley brands, is the largest eyewear company in the world by far, and has almost 4000 stores in the US alone. While far smaller in scale, they offer similar stylish designs. The US-based Warby Parker has over 270 physical stores in North America, while glasses from the South Korean Gentle Monster brand have become popular with younger people in the US and are worn by celebrities like Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, and Billie Eilish.

Google first announced that it was working with the two companies on smart glasses to compete with Ray-Ban Meta back at I/O 2025, though at the time didn't share a specific release timeline or hardware details.

At I/O 2026, Google revealed that the first Warby Parker and Gentle Monster smart glasses powered by its technology will arrive "later this fall", and confirmed that these first devices will not feature a display, despite the company's repeated 2025 demos focusing on the in-lens display of its prototypes.

The Warby Parker device resembles the Ray-Ban Meta Scriber style, and could easily be mistaken for it, while the Gentle Monster option looks nothing like anything Meta and EssilorLuxottica have put out so far, instead bringing Gentle Monster's own design language to smart glasses.

Google previously said it will also work with Kering Eyewear, another one of EssilorLuxottica's competitors, in the future.

As with Ray-Ban Meta, the Warby Parker and Gentle Monster glasses have cameras, speakers, and microphones, and communicate with your phone. But Google's two major advantages over Ray-Ban Meta are Gemini and Android.

While Meta's Muse Spark model has mostly closed the intelligence gap, Gemini 3.5 Flash more deeply integrates into existing services like Google Maps for turn-by-turn audio directions and Nano Banana to edit the images you capture.

When connected to your Android phone, Gemini can also launch and take agentic action in apps like DoorDash and Uber, letting you order food or a ride with a command to Gemini, without needing to manually interact with your phone.

This capability stood out as a highlight of Google's live demo, wherein Google's Android XR lead Shahram Izadi and Android XR PM Nishtha Bhatia once again took the stage to show off what smart glasses can do, including asking Gemini to provide turn-by-turn directions and to order "my usual order at that coffee shop", prompting the AI system to take control of her phone, launch DoorDash, and operate it to order her coffee. Remarkable.

Unlike all the past demos from the duo, this time the glasses lacked an in-lens display. But the demo showed how this can be partially made up for through integration with Wear OS, Google's smart watch platform. After taking a photo using the camera glasses, and asking Gemini to edit it, Bhatia was able to preview the captured image (albeit a very tiny preview) on the Pixel Watch on her wrist.

Google hasn't yet said what kind of pricing to expect, nor any real specifications of the hardware. While the renders seem to show two cameras on the front, Google refused to confirm whether there are one or two cameras present, or any other specific technical details.

With Meta Connect 2026 set for September 23, Google could be facing an uphill battle to enter the market. Meta and EssilorLuxottica sold 7 million units in 2025 alone, and the Ray-Ban brand has become synonymous with the category. It's still very early days, though, of course, and the advantages of Gemini and deep Android integration could be a serious threat to Meta's position later this year.

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 soon!

Outblast can be played on flatscreen or in a VR headset, at least for the Steam version. Playing in VR gives you a 360 view of the environment, increasing the challenge as enemies can come from literally anywhere. Sometimes hazards fill the screen, other times you have to search the widened battlefield for any stragglers in order to advance to the next wave.

While playing with VR controllers, you steer your cutting edge C11-28 ship with the left joystick and fire by holding down the right joystick. While you can move in any direction, the weapons only fire left and right - something to keep in mind during the intense shootouts to come.

When starting Outblast, you have the option of playing through Arcade Mode, in which you attempt to clear through the game in a single run, or Stage Select, which unlocks after you clear the first level. There are five different levels, or “districts” for you to clear through, each ending with a punishing boss battle. The objective of each level is to shoot away each wave of enemies before they can annihilate your fighter.

You only have a limited number of lives, and you lose one whenever you are hit by an enemy or laser blast. Likewise, you are given a set time limit, but you gain extra time whenever you clear a wave. If you run out of lives or the time expires, the mission ends and your score is tallied and ranked on an online leaderboard. You can view the leaderboards for Arcade Mode and each individual stage in the main menu.

As you blast away the mechanized cubes and robot centipedes in your way, you collect data fragments that increase your score and build up your energy meter. Once your meter is full, you can spend it to unleash a special weapon attack with the left trigger. You can also use a boost with the right trigger. Boosting is handy while trying to move past the falling block enemies, and you can chain bursts for added distance by timing your trigger presses just right - just make sure not to crash into an enemy while speeding.

There are various power-ups you can collect that grant you extra lives, increase your ship’s rate of fire, or even cause data fragments to fly toward you with a magnet pick-up. Some of these power-ups are contained in a force field that you need to shoot at before you can safely access them.

Outblast’s graphics and visuals go for a Tron-like retro-future vibe, with cyberpunk backdrops, neon outlines and a synthetic soundtrack. Be warned though, it can be easy to lose track of your ship amidst the numerous glowing projectiles and the fact that your ship itself blends a little too well into the background. This is especially true when playing in VR Mode, and spinning around to get your bearings in a 360 space can get dizzying at times.

All in all, Outblast is a fun and challenging throwback to the arcade stick-shooters of old, with the added dimension of being fully immersed in the high-tech battlefield thanks to virtual reality. As I've noted before, the game is every bit as difficult to clear through as those classic coin-munchers, so be prepared to repeat the first district over and over again as you struggle to take on Outblast's swarms of machine enemies.

That sense of presence is what makes story-driven VR games so memorable. Whether they ask you to solve a mystery, survive a haunting journey, or step into the shoes of an unforgettable character, the best of them do more than entertain. They make you feel like part of the story.

Here are some standout story-driven VR games that prove just how powerful interactive storytelling can be. These have been selected by Mike and James, UploadVR's games writers, and we'd love to hear about your favorites in the comments section.

Before Your Eyes (PlayStation VR2)

As I (James) get older, I often find myself thinking about how quickly time seems to pass. My kids are growing up faster than I ever expected, and I wish I could slow things down and hold onto the little memories that seem to disappear almost as soon as they happen. This phase of life that I'm in has made Before Your Eyes resonate with me in a way few games have. It's also one of the most mechanically interesting games I've ever played in VR (or anywhere).

Before Your Eyes tells the life story of a recently deceased soul being ferried to the afterlife. Using eye-tracking (or simple controls in non-VR versions) the game advances whenever you blink, causing moments to slip away whether you're ready or not. It remains one of the most powerful stories I've ever experienced, using its unique mechanic to reinforce themes of memory, loss, family, and the fleeting nature of life.

It's only about 90 minutes long, but can obviously be experienced over and over, and each time is a bit different. Our review said it well: "there’s nothing else quite like Before Your Eyes."

Get it on PlayStation VR2.

RuinsMagus (Quest, PC VR, PlayStation VR2)

A JRPG-inspired dungeon crawler in which you take on the role of a novice mage exploring ancient ruins in search of powerful artifacts. Through spell-casting combat, dungeon exploration, and interactions with a colorful cast of characters, the game gradually uncovers the mysteries surrounding the city's past and the secrets hidden there.

While it was often knocked for repetitive level design, it features high production value and fully realized side characters. The story is strong, including a touching love story at the midway point of the game, and a terrific arc for your sidekick Iris and the game's villain. Overall, it's a great game for fans of fantasy anime and character-driven stories.

Get it on Quest, PC VR, and PlayStation VR2.

Dyschronia: Chronos Alternate (Quest, PS VR2, PC, Pico)

A three-part time-traveling murder mystery that plays more as an interactive visual novel than a fully realized VR game. It takes place in a future city where crime has supposedly been eliminated. You take on the role of Hal Scion, who uses a unique ability to dive into memories and reconstruct past events while investigating an impossible murder that threatens the foundations of this seemingly perfect society.

Through detective work and narrative-driven puzzles, the game unfolds into a complex story filled with twists, conspiracies, and questions about truth and free will. This one won't be a good fit for everybody (visual novel-style games are polarizing). Still, it features fantastic characters and an intriguing plot for those patient enough to play it.

Get it on Quest, PlayStation VR2, PC VR, and Pico.

Ghost Giant (PlayStation VR, Quest)

Our review said it well: "Ghost Giant has all the warmth and wonder you’ve come to expect from VR storytelling."

In this story-driven VR adventure, you play as a gentle giant spirit helping a young boy named Louis navigate life in the small town of Sancourt. Through light environmental puzzles and interactions with the world around him, you gradually form a bond with Louis and uncover a surprisingly emotional story about friendship.

Beneath its charming storybook presentation is a heartfelt and mature tale that tackles difficult themes, such as depression and neglect, with uncommon sensitivity.

Get it on PlayStation VR and Quest.

Call of the Sea VR (Quest)

Call of the Sea is set in the 1930s, and follows Norah Everhart as she journeys to a remote South Pacific island in search of her missing husband. As she explores ancient ruins and uncovers the secrets of a lost civilization, she begins to unravel the mysteries of the island.

The game combines environmental puzzles and exploration, and while these elements are strong, they're not the game's greatest strength. Its terrific story and gorgeous visuals help to elevate its somewhat basic puzzle gameplay.

Get it on Quest.

Edge of Nowhere (Rift)

Edge of Nowhere is a third-person VR adventure from Insomniac Games that follows Victor Howard, an adventurer who travels to Antarctica in search of his missing fiancée. What begins as a rescue mission quickly turns into a descent into madness as Victor encounters strange creatures, impossible landscapes, and horrors inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft (specifically, At The Mountains of Madness, a story written in 1931).

This game came out over ten years ago, and yet it's still one that we think about often enough. While it certainly is not perfect, it's worth playing even a decade later.

Get it on Rift (Meta Store).

Lies Beneath (Quest)

This survival-horror game follows Mae, a college student who returns to her hometown of Slumber, Alaska, after learning that her father has gone missing. As she searches for answers, she uncovers terrifying secrets lurking beneath the town and finds herself trapped in a nightmare filled with monsters, mystery, and psychological horror.

The game's striking comic book-inspired presentation gives the story a unique and memorable style. Its combination of engaging storytelling, distinctive visuals, and effective horror makes it one of VR's standout story-driven experiences. But it's spooky and scary, so beware...

Get it on Quest.

Red Matter 2 (Quest, PlayStation VR2, Steam, Pico)

Red Matter 2 is a stunningly presented sci-fi VR adventure in which you explore a lunar base and uncover the truth behind the mysterious substance known as Red Matter. Combining environmental puzzles, exploration, platforming, and light combat, the game builds an intriguing Cold War-inspired mystery within a richly detailed retro-futuristic universe.

The game will initially draw you in with its stunning visuals (indeed, Red Matter 2 presents some of the best graphics on Meta's headsets). But its engaging story is what will stick with you. While the narrative can be mysterious and occasionally cryptic, it delivers a compelling sci-fi adventure filled with twists, strong atmosphere, and a constant sense of discovery.

Get it on Quest, PlayStation VR 2, Steam and Pico.

Hidden Memories of the Gardens Between (Quest, PC VR)

Hidden Memories of The Gardens Between is a puzzle adventure that follows childhood friends Arina and Frendt as they revisit key memories from their past, manifested in the form of stunning thematic islands. Through time-manipulation puzzles, the game explores themes of friendship, growing up, and the lasting impact of shared experiences. It's also super gorgeous to look at!

The game is especially worth playing not just for its heartfelt story, which deals with nostalgia and memory, but also for its amazing implementation of time-based VR puzzle elements.

Get it on Quest and PC VR via Steam.

The Last Worker (PC VR, PSVR 2, Quest)

An immersive narrative adventure set in a bleak future where you play as Kurt, faithful employee of the world's largest retailer, Jüngle. The game blends first-person exploration, stealth, and work-simulation elements as Kurt is pulled into a moral conflict between obedience to capitalism and activism, with a story built around automation, labor, and the human cost of efficiency.

It is worth playing today primarily because the story feels sharp and timely. The game’s writing leans into satire, and critics singled out its narrative as one of its biggest strengths. Our review noted, "By taking aim at late stage capitalism, this over-the-top journey offers a fine narrative and great satirical humor, coupled with tense but enjoyable stealth missions."

Another bonus: it's a hybrid game, playable in VR or on a standard screen.

Get it on PC VR via Steam, PSVR 2, and Quest.

And those are just ten of our favorite story-driven VR games. Was your favorite included? What did we miss? Please share your favorites in the comments section below, so more people can enjoy the special storytelling potential of VR.

Individual immersive experiences can be difficult for headset owners to find unless there is a strong campaign behind them, or they are easy to spot inside apps that people are already browsing. For smaller immersive studios, being featured by Apple in the App Store or Apple TV app can offer a temporary lift in views before other content is rotated in to be promoted, but without internal or external discoverability support beyond that, studios often struggle to get their content seen.

There is some great narrative immersive content out there and Amplium offers a way to make it easier for Apple Vision Pro owners to discover more of it once they download the app.

Helping More Immersive Video Become Discoverable

Amplium is currently home to just over 10 immersive video experiences, each of them free to watch, and more titles are actively being added from studio partners. The app itself is also free to download.

Hibiki Sato, Co-Founder & CEO of Amplium, shares that their focus is to help to make it easier for the studios behind immersive video content to “encode, host, and distribute it.” While all content is free for now, there will be paid content added soon. “Since the market is still very new, the priority for our current creators has been reach and feedback, getting their work in front of a wider audience …rather than charging for it right away.”

Right now, Amplium is focused on work that benefits from the visual fidelity and spatial audio possible for immersive video on Apple Vision Pro.

Sato shares “We only work with content shot on the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive, run it through our own encoding pipeline, and play it back in our own player. Owning the whole chain, from source to playback, means each piece looks as close to the creator's original as possible.” Amplium also intends to integrate live immersive streaming “as the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive 100G arrives.” That focus on visual and audio fidelity gives Amplium a sense of consistency across the catalog, even as the types of experiences and directing styles vary.

The Curated Mix Makes Amplium Worth Visiting

The best reason to get Amplium is the variety of types of experiences that it is adding, some extremely different from what you may find in Apple TV. Amplium is not confined to a certain type of content like a platform like Apple TV may be. The current catalog already ranges from short thrilling documentaries to more experimental immersive experiences.

There are some immersive videos on there that got me so excited because of the quality of direction in which the creators clearly consider how it feels to visit each live-captured story, and subtle elements that can make the virtual visits feel more real. For example, Shibuya Freefall by Chiaki Mayumura from NHK Technologies is an enjoyable music video experience that takes you to some incredible city views as well as a fun, colorful dance performance. KICK from altitude.101 takes you to the French Alps so you can get a glimpse into what it's like for freeriders up there, and enjoy the views and sounds of everything from the sunrise to their daring ski jumps.

More content including sport-related immersive videos is coming such as a short documentary that follows an athlete during the Ironman. Amplium is also producing immersive video for the app, starting with an experience featuring Japanese football legend Keisuke Honda alongside other national team stars.

A Simple Interface Keeps The Focus On The Experiences

Amplium is intuitive to use. Simply scroll through the available videos to select what you would like to experience. As with other immersive video on Apple Vision Pro, you can also easily pause, rewind, fast forward, jump between scenes and adjust the audio while watching.

As more titles are added, along with paid experiences, the browsing experience could benefit from more structure to ensure content is still simple to browse and discover, based on interests. And if Amplium chooses to add features like categories for genres, and the ability to search across a growing catalog, this could give them more insight into what viewers are looking for to help inform what content to add next.

Amplium integrates Sign in with Apple, making sign-in easy for users and also empowering them with the ability to personalize the user experience as they learn more about individual behaviors. This also gives Amplium a way to send email updates based on users’ interests, alerting them to immersive videos they may not have discovered yet.

What I didn't fully appreciate at the time was how the temple arrived in New York City. Surrounded by crowds and moving between galleries, I never stopped to consider that the massive structure before me had been carefully dismantled stone by stone in Egypt and reconstructed inside the museum.

It wasn't until I explored Dendur Decoded, a new immersive experience from The Met, that the story truly clicked.

Developed in partnership with immersive exhibition platform Atopia, the immersive exhibit is available as a free VR experience through the Atopia app on Meta Quest headsets, while also being accessible through a standard web browser. It allows visitors to explore the Temple of Dendur from anywhere in the world through interactive storytelling, historical context, and digital reconstruction.

That deeper understanding was exactly what The Met hoped to achieve.

"We have been telling the story for a long time about why it was at The Met, and it just isn't clicking for a lot of people," Brett Renfer, Project Manager for Emerging and Immersive Technology at The Met, told UploadVR. "Let's bring it to a new medium. Let's do a lot more showing rather than telling."

Why Dendur?

The Temple of Dendur wasn't chosen at random.

According to Renfer, the monument consistently generates some of the most common questions visitors ask at The Met. Many wonder whether the structure inside the museum is real. Others question how an ancient Egyptian temple came to reside in New York City.

Those questions helped make Dendur a natural starting point for The Met's first internally developed immersive experience. Rather than asking visitors to absorb the temple's history through exhibit text and displays, the project places them inside the story itself.

For The Met, the project serves a broader purpose than visitor engagement alone.

The same digital assets used to create the immersive experience can also support conservation, research, documentation, and future interpretation of the collection. Renfer described the work as having multiple lives, serving both public-facing experiences and the museum's long-term preservation goals.

Building The Met's First Immersive Experience

While Dendur Decoded is delivered through the Atopia platform, Renfer said The Met played a central role in shaping both the experience and its educational goals.

The project began as an exploration of how the museum's growing archive of 3D assets could be used in new ways. Renfer created early prototypes using The Met's existing scans to demonstrate how visitors might interact with digital representations of artifacts and environments in immersive spaces. Many of those assets were created through photogrammetry and other 3D capture techniques originally developed for conservation, research, and documentation purposes. In the case of the Temple of Dendur, The Met's imaging team combined more than 28,000 photographs to create a detailed 3D model of the monument.

"We had never done an in-house VR project," Renfer said. "We did all the content and the concept and all the scanning."

Atopia ultimately became both a development partner and distribution platform. According to Renfer, the collaboration combined The Met's curatorial expertise and archival research with a team that brought experience from game development and immersive design. The two organizations worked together to translate historical research, photography, audio, and 3D scans into an experience designed specifically for virtual environments.

The collaboration also extends beyond Dendur Decoded. The Met's second immersive experience, Oceania: A New Horizon of Space and Time, takes a different approach. Rather than recreating a physical museum space, it places visitors inside a purpose-built immersive world inspired by the cultures and landscapes of Oceania, connecting artworks to the broader geographic and cultural context from which they emerged. 

The partnership also reflected a practical reality of museum technology projects. While The Met maintains extensive 3D capture programs for conservation and research, those highly detailed scans are not automatically suitable for real-time rendering in VR. Atopia's team helped optimize and adapt those assets while preserving their historical accuracy.

For Renfer, the project was as much about building institutional knowledge as it was about launching a single experience.

"We need to build this tacit knowledge," he said, describing the project as an opportunity to learn how audiences engage with immersive content and how the museum might approach future initiatives.

Why The Met Prioritized Reach Over Hardware

One of the more surprising lessons from the project had little to do with virtual reality itself.

While Dendur Decoded and Oceania: A New Horizon of Space and Time are available on Meta Quest headsets, The Met deliberately avoided treating VR as the primary destination for the experiences.

Instead, the museum focused on accessibility and reach.

"We need to pick the platform that just has the biggest reach," Renfer said. "A lot of people have been like, 'Don't you think the content was better for the Vision Pro audience?' I hear you, but we were doing our first thing and then there's the reach kind of thing."

That decision appears to have been validated by the data.

According to Renfer, roughly 85% of traffic to the experiences comes through web browsers rather than VR headsets.

For a project built around immersive technology, the numbers reinforce one of The Met's core goals: reach. While VR headsets offer a uniquely immersive way to experience the content, web access makes it possible for far more people to engage with it.

The web-first approach also aligns with The Met's broader mission of accessibility. Renfer said the museum wanted to ensure the experiences could reach students, educators, and curious visitors regardless of whether they owned a headset.

That philosophy also influenced the design of the experiences themselves.

As someone who spends a significant amount of time in VR, one of the first things I noticed was how approachable the controls felt. Navigation options were clearly explained, interactions were straightforward, and the onboarding process never assumed prior VR experience.

According to Renfer, that simplicity was intentional.

The Met conducted extensive user testing throughout development and embraced a universal design approach aimed at welcoming newcomers without creating barriers for more experienced users.

"We really believe in universal design," Renfer said. "Something that's good for helping any user into it is good for everybody."

The result is an experience designed to welcome newcomers without alienating more experienced VR users.

The experiences also make room for quieter moments of reflection. In Dendur Decoded, visitors eventually find themselves alone with the temple beneath a moonlit sky, while Oceania: A New Horizon of Space and Time concludes with a peaceful ocean vista at sunset. Neither sequence is primarily focused on teaching historical facts. Instead, they encourage visitors to pause and absorb what they have just experienced, using atmosphere and presence in ways that traditional exhibits cannot easily replicate.

Taking The Long View

Unlike a startup chasing the next hardware cycle, The Met approaches immersive technology with a very different timeline.

The museum's 3D imaging teams are already creating detailed digital records of artifacts and environments through photogrammetry and laser scanning, often for conservation and research purposes rather than public-facing experiences. Those digital assets can then be repurposed for projects like Dendur Decoded while continuing to serve archival functions behind the scenes.

That long-term perspective also influences how the museum evaluates emerging technologies.

During our conversation, Renfer discussed growing interest in technologies such as Gaussian splats, which have become increasingly popular for creating highly detailed 3D representations of real-world environments. While The Met is experimenting with the technology, its preservation teams remain focused on standards and formats that can remain useful for decades.

"The team is really focused on what is the standard because everything we're doing is trying to be archival," Renfer said.

The same philosophy shapes how the museum thinks about platforms.

Although Dendur Decoded and Oceania: A New Horizon of Space and Time were developed with Atopia, The Met was careful to ensure that the work would not become permanently tied to a single vendor.

"We built this as our IP," Renfer said. "Everything we built in the platform came back to us."

For a museum that traces its history back more than 150 years, that level of portability is important.

"We're a 155-year-old institution," Renfer said. "Let's make this and then we'll use it somewhere else in five years."

Beyond The Museum Walls

When I visited the Temple of Dendur with my daughter, I saw an extraordinary monument. It wasn't until I explored Dendur Decoded at home that I fully understood the journey that brought it to New York.

That outcome reflects what The Met hopes immersive experiences can accomplish. Projects like Dendur Decoded and Oceania: A New Horizon of Space and Time are designed not to replace the museum experience, but to extend it, giving visitors new ways to engage with art, history, and culture beyond the gallery walls.

"We have been telling the story for a long time about why it was at The Met, and it just isn't clicking for a lot of people," Renfer told UploadVR. "Let's bring it to a new medium. Let's do a lot more showing rather than telling."

Dendur Decoded and Oceania: A New Horizon of Space and Time are available free through the Atopia app on Meta Quest VR headsets and can also be accessed through a web browser.

Put simply, that means the main structures of the virtual world will occupy the same space as your real walls and furniture. The developer, PikPok, calls this "hyper reality", and it works by leveraging Quest 3's scene understanding feature.

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The PC VR version of the game, on the other hand, will have fully developed immersive environments, as most PC VR headsets don't have the ability to generate a mesh of your physical environment.

The game is the latest entry in its Into the Dead series. The original Into the Dead was a 2012 smartphone game, and the series made the jump to VR with the Samsung Gear in 2015 and Oculus Rift in 2016, and recently to Steam with Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days, a 2D side scrolling survival game currently in Early Access. PikPok also has prior VR experience with Rival Stars Horse Racing: VR Edition.

Here's the trailer for the new game:

We have seen many games utilize your play space for mixed reality gaming like Drop Dead: The Cabin's Home Invasion, Resolution Games' Spatial Ops, Vanbo BV's Laser Dance, and Cyborn's Wall Town Wonders. But all of those examples start with camera passthrough and add virtual elements to it, whereas Into the Dead: Crimson Heights is a fully VR experience that uses the scene mesh, and the recognized furniture within it, to guide how entirely virtual levels are created.

The basic idea PikPok is implementing here is not new. There were a few prototypes of it on research hardware in the 2010s, and it was presented by Meta's Reality Labs Chief Scientist Michael Abrash as an interesting future use case of VR headsets with environment meshing back in 2018, at Oculus Connect 5. But as far as we're aware, this is the first VR game from a studio, not counting solo developer experiments, set to actually be built around the idea.

Sometimes eight years is the length of the path from research to products. Keep that in mind when you read about new XR research on UploadVR and elsewhere.

Into the Dead: Crimson Heights comes to Quest 3 headsets and SteamVR sometime in 2027.

PikPok says more details will be revealed at Gamescom in August.

The Boys: Trigger Warning is out today on PlayStation VR2. The made-for-VR game is adapted from the successful Amazon TV show, and features a totally new story set in the world of The Boys, and voice acting by several of the show's cast.

In The Boys: Trigger Warning, you'll choose stealth or chaos, use unstable Supe powers like telekinesis and laser eyes, and engage in brutal fights against enemy Supes.

You play as Lucas Costa, a normal dude whose life is ruined when the Armstrongs, a washed-up but still lethal family of Vought Superheroes, turn his family's day out into carnage. The Boys drag you back from the brink, juice you with powers, and throw you headfirst into their underground war against Vought and its Supes. With Butcher and Mother’s Milk guiding from the shadows, you set off on a no-mercy quest for revenge.

We reviewed the game when it launched on Meta's headsets in March, with Mike concluding that, "Trigger Warning mostly plays it safe, delivering a run-of-the-mill stealth game lifted by the world it is set in. [...] the game strikes a good balance between power complex and a genuine sense of danger." You can read the full review here.

The Boys: Trigger Warning is available now on the PlayStation Store. The game normally costs $29.99, with a limited-time price of $23.99 for PlayStation Plus subscribers. The game is also available on Meta's Horizon Store.

Announced in April, Muse Spark is the first AI model publicly released by Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), the group formed last year by Mark Zuckerberg with billions of dollars in hiring of top talent across the AI industry. It includes employees with the largest salaries in history.

Meta says Spark is the first in its Muse series, which succeeds its Llama series. While Llama models were open-source, Muse Spark is not, though the company says it "hopes to open-source future versions of the model".

The Llama series had fallen significantly behind the AI models of OpenAI (GPT), Google DeepMind (Gemini), Anthropic (Claude), and xAI (Grok), a failure that drove Zuckerberg's decision to lay off much of the team behind it and embark on the series of billion-dollar hires.

Despite being a relatively "small and fast" model, benchmarks suggest Muse Spark rivals larger models from leading AI labs in some areas, though it's still significantly behind in others.

Meta says it matches the performance of Llama 4 Maverick, its previous best model, while using 10x less compute. Its small size makes it suitable for "instant" responses on both traditional platforms and on smart glasses, where response time can be crucial for real-world queries.

"Meta Superintelligence Labs rebuilt our AI stack from the ground up, moving faster than any development cycle we have run before.

Muse Spark is the first model in our new Muse series — a deliberate and scientific approach to model scaling where each generation validates and builds on the last before we go bigger. This initial model is small and fast by design, yet capable enough to reason through complex questions in science, math, and health. It is a powerful foundation, and the next generation is already in development."

On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Muse Spark scores 52, compared to the 57 of Gemini 3.1 Pro, 60 of GPT-5.5 and 61 of Claude Opus 4.8.

The move from Llama to Muse also brings a visual rebrand of Meta AI, with the old blue-purple gradient ring being replaced by a segmented ring of eight 3D, purple-pink gradient ovals.

In May, Muse Spark replaced Llama 4 in powering Meta AI on all Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses – with the notable exception of Meta Ray-Ban Display.

Meta AI on Meta Ray-Ban Display is still powered by a custom version of Llama 4. Replacing Llama on the display is likely taking extra time because in this context the system also generates a visual response for many queries, drawing on web images, not just a spoken text output.

In our review of Meta Ray-Ban Display we described how Llama 4 felt like an anchor on the AI features of the glasses, and noted that the superiority of Gemini could be a major advantage of the upcoming Google-powered smart glasses from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster.

With Meta's Muse series, that gap may be narrowing. However, Google isn't resting on its laurels either, with Gemini 3.5 Flash released in May at Google I/O. Whether Meta can truly compete and reestablish its place as a fifth leading AI lab remains to be seen, yet this will be crucial to achieve its long-term goals of smart glasses with always-on "contextual AI" before, or at least at a similar time as, Google and other looming competitors.

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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 soon!

Announced in April, Unity said the extension "deepens the companies’ long‑standing collaboration in virtual reality".

“Meta is the world’s leading VR platform, and we’re proud that Unity powers the majority of its top‑selling VR games,” said Alex Blum, COO, Unity, in a prepared statement. “Great content is what makes VR successful. By pairing Meta’s hardware and OS leadership with Unity’s role as the assembly point for interactive content creation, we’re making VR accessible to more developers so they can develop, deploy, and grow their games and business applications on Meta’s VR devices.”

“Unity is a critical partner for Meta across multiple initiatives, including our investment in the VR developer community,” said Ryan Cairns, VP, Virtual Reality, Meta, in a similar statement. “By extending our long-standing partnership, we’re making it easier for developers to bring high‑quality, performant experiences to the millions of people who use Meta’s VR devices.”

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The announcement came just over a year after Meta deprecated its proprietary XR Plugin for Unity and recommended that developers use the built-in Unity OpenXR plugin, alongside Meta-specific OpenXR extensions and the higher-level optional Meta XR Core SDK.

The close partnership between the two companies was strained at Meta Connect 2025, however, where Meta's flagship VR announcement was the release of its own Horizon Engine for Horizon Worlds, Horizon Hyperscape, and Horizon Home, which it said was technically superior compared to Unity and could support 4x faster loading and 100+ users in the same instance.

"This engine is fully optimized for bringing the metaverse to life. It is much faster performance and to load things, much better graphics, much easier to create with", Zuckerberg claimed.

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Of course, in March, Meta announced that Horizon Engine would fully refocus on flatscreen platforms, smartphones and the web, dropping support for virtual reality, as part of the wider retreat of Horizon Worlds from VR.

With Horizon Engine out of the picture for VR, Meta seems to be rebuilding its partnership with Unity, and the engine has once again become the company's primary recommendation for building games for its headsets – though it now recommends its Meta Spatial SDK for bringing flatscreen apps to Horizon OS.

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 soon!

Since the release of Oculus Go in 2018, Meta's standalone VR operating system has seen numerous visual changes, but the general interface architecture remained essentially the same.

You had a floating horizontal menu bar slightly below you, called the Universal Menu, showing the time and your device battery levels on the left, and a combination of shortcuts to pinned and recently launched apps on the right. Almost all operating system interfaces, including core features like the app Library, Quick Settings, and Notifications, opened as regular 2D windows, treated like any other, meaning any regular 2D app would cause these core interfaces to shift around.

Imagine if your phone's app library, or control center, or the Windows Start Menu, was just another windowed app. That's how Meta's XR operating system used to work.

Then, in May last year, Meta started a very slow rollout of a full Horizon OS UI overhaul, called 'Navigator', which moves the main system interfaces like Library, Quick Settings, Notifications and Camera into a new large overlay that appears over both immersive and 2D apps.

With Navigator, system interfaces no longer shift around when opening other windows, and it's far quicker to launch new apps because the library is the default UI panel.

Navigator has gone through a number of refinements since its rough initial version. For example, it originally had a murky gray background with an oval shape that severely obscured your view of what was behind it, which just didn't look good, and this was replaced by simply dimming the background.

Navigator also launched with both Apps and Horizon Worlds listed in the central launcher interface, and without a Friends list interface.

In October, Meta added a separate Worlds tab, meaning the App library was no longer polluted with Horizon Worlds. And then earlier this year, following the announcement that Horizon Worlds is moving away from VR, Meta removed the Worlds tab from Navigator entirely.

Meta also got rid of Horizon Feed, the default 2D app that used to launch when you cold-booted your Quest headset, meaning that Quest headsets now boot straight into a grid of your apps, just as you expect a mobile computing device to do.

The 7 tabs of the Horizon OS Navigator, as of June 2026, now stand as:

• You: lets you switch users and set your online status, and also has shortcuts to edit your avatar and profile.
• Notifications
• People: a grid of your friends, linking to their profiles.
• App Library
• Quick Controls: brightness, volume, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Screenshots/Recording, Travel Mode, and other core settings & toggles.
• Show/Hide Windows
• Toggle between Passthrough & VR Home

And in the App Library, you can now reposition the app icons where you want them, and create folders to organize them, just as you can on pretty much any other major consumer operating system.

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Arguably, the biggest remaining flaw of Navigator is that it still doesn't fully incorporate all system-level features as part of the overlay. In the above bullets, by "shortcuts to" I mean that it opens a regular 2D window straight out of the previous Horizon OS interface paradigm. With all the same issues. It's somewhat surprising to see Meta roll Navigator out widely before solving this. But it's still a net improvement compared to what came before.

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 soon!

Khalifa plays Taylor Graves, a former boxer and Muay Thai fighter invited to compete against the Ark Society's Tim Quinn, a corporate CEO who dabbles in fight sports. In the mission, titled 'The Wizard,' Agent 47's mission is to intervene and keep the in-over-his-head Quinn alive.

Here's the trailer, partially narrated by Khalifa himself.

The Wizard is the latest in Hitman: WOA's Elusive Target series, free short-time missions that date back to the 2016 Hitman game. This mission revisits the Isle of Sgàil, a popular location in the Hitman community repackaged for a new mission by fan request.

Past Elusive Targets have starred known performers like actors Milla Jovovich, Sean Bean and Jean-Claude Van Damme, rapper Eminem, and MMA fighter Conor McGregor.

Hitman World of Assassination is available in VR on Steam and PlayStation VR2. The Wizard is a free add-on to the game available now until July 5.

In Inwigo, players will explore haunted mansions to unlock gameplay mechanics, outsmart adaptive monsters, uncover treasures, and survive an interactive ghost story where choices and teamwork shape the narrative, according to Dirty Pearl.

Here's the trailer:

Each mansion has its own threat with different attacks. Per Dirty Pearl's press release:

Every house has its own supernatural threat. Some stalk you when you’re alone. Some are excited by your fear. Others turn the house itself against you. Learn how they behave, or become part of the house.

Additionally, no two runs are alike as treasures and secrets will shift locations and threats will adapt to players to keep the gameplay fresh. Like most extraction scenarios, all loot is lost if the players do not survive.

Following the playtest, Inwigo is currently planned to launch in Early Access on Meta Quest on June 23. It is available to wishlist now. The playtest is live now through June 7.

Note: The game is also listed on Steam. We've reached out to the developer to clarify if the Early Access launch includes Steam. The press release we were sent only specifies Meta Quest.

Vertigo Games was, until now, comprised of two different studios: Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The Amsterdam team was formerly Force Field Entertainment before becoming Vertigo Games Amsterdam in 2021.

This team had been together since 2015 with a portfolio including the following games and apps:

Metro Awakening (2024)

Easily Vertigo Games Amsterdam's highest profile title, Awakening was one of several planned VR titles in partnership with Deep Silver and Oculus Studios. Meta announced this deal at Meta Connect in 2021. The whole of Vertigo Games was acquired by Koch Media, also the parent company of Deep Silver, in 2020.

We reviewed Metro Awakening, saying "Vertigo Games has once again delivered a mesmerizing VR gaming experience. One that serves as a testament to the studio’s proven record of creating adventures geared to provide atmospheric immersion and deep storytelling."

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Time Stall (2019)

Time Stall is a time-manipulated physics based puzzle game published by Oculus Studios.

National Geographic: Explore VR (2019)

Based on the now Disney-owned company, Explore casts the player as a photographer sent to document and photograph Antarctica and Machu Picchu, Peru for National Geographic magazine.

Anne Frank House VR (2018)

Anne Frank House is an educational app exploring the life of Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl who hid in the annex of an old office building in Amsterdam with her family for 2 years during the Second World War. It remains one of the best historical apps in VR and is still available for free.

Coaster Combat (2017)

Originally a Samsung Gear & later Oculus Go VR title, this on rails target shooter was ported to Quest in 2020.

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Landfall (2017)

Landfall was a tactical shooter for Oculus Rift that has since been delisted.

Vertigo Games Rotterdam, the remaining studio, is the team behind the Arizona Sunshine games, The 7th Guest VR, After The Fall, Skyworld & Skyworld: Kingdom Brawl, and recently published Maze Theory's Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow. At the time of this article, there is no word on if the Rotterdam team has been affected.

This continues a rough 2026 of layoffs and studio closures in the VR ecosystem following Meta shuttering most of its first-party studios, the closures of two nDreams studios, layoffs at Polyarc Games, Cloudhead Games, Mighty Coconut, and Kluge Interactive, and Rec Room shutting down. Also, the aforementioned Maze Theory is currently in administration in the UK, a process meant to potentially rescue a failing business.

Creator Marc Zimmermann has spent years exploring that side of VR.

Zimmermann approaches VR from the perspective of an immersive filmmaker and environmental artist. His work focuses on mood, movement, sound, and emotional immersion rather than traditional gameplay systems.

That philosophy first took shape in his award-winning VR short film Conscious Existence (Meta Quest | Steam) before evolving into Realms of Flow, a highly customizable immersive experience built around meditation, breathing, spatial audio, and surreal environmental design.

After speaking with Zimmermann recently, it became impossible to see Realms of Flow as just another VR meditation app. It reflects nearly a decade of experimentation with immersive cinema, environmental storytelling, and emotional atmosphere in VR.

From VFX To VR

Zimmermann's path to VR began long before headsets entered the mainstream.

He studied animation and visual effects at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg in Germany, where he developed a passion for digital environments, atmospheric filmmaking, and visual storytelling.

"I always loved to create my own personal projects and use environments to tell stories and create emotions," Zimmermann explained. "I want to create an atmosphere with a place, with a landscape, with a space."

At the time, he was more interested in traditional filmmaking and visual effects work inspired by large-scale environmental cinema.

"Like Lord of the Rings," he said. "Replacing green screens and creating epic landscapes."

VR only entered the picture near the end of his studies after experimenting with an Oculus DK1 headset sitting inside the school's R&D department.

Initially, Zimmermann attempted to adapt one of his earlier short films into VR before realizing the medium demanded an entirely different approach.

Instead, he created Longing For Wilderness in 2016, an early three-minute 360-degree VR experience designed to move viewers from a noisy city into a calm natural environment.

That project eventually led to Conscious Existence, the stereoscopic VR short film that would shape everything that followed.

Why Conscious Existence Still Connects

Even today, Conscious Existence remains one of the more memorable immersive experiences available in VR. What stays with you isn't interaction. It's the atmosphere, narration, movement, and the incredible sense of scale.

Zimmermann sees much of VR's emotional power in presence itself.

"There were a lot of users complaining about the non-interactiveness of the short film," he said. "But at the same time I saw there was an opportunity there to create dense atmospheres and emotional spaces."

When I showed Conscious Existence to my wife recently, despite her general discomfort with VR headsets, the experience immediately connected with her emotionally. The child narration, environmental scale, and sensation of floating through forests and landscapes created a surprisingly powerful reaction.

"I get messages from people saying they are tearing up or that a certain scene reminds them of something in their life," Zimmermann said. He hears it a lot.

Why Zimmermann Stepped Away From Traditional VR Design

After the success of Conscious Existence, Zimmermann attempted to move further into interactive VR through an Unreal Engine project called DeepStates (available on Steam, though development has ceased).

The idea was ambitious.

He wanted to combine high-end realtime environments with meditation systems, breathing exercises, binaural audio, and evolving environmental effects that transformed as users relaxed.

But eventually, the technical demands started crowding out everything he actually cared about.

"I noticed that working in Unreal Engine and creating these realtime optimized environments was 80% technical stuff and only 20% actual concept and art and sound design," Zimmermann said.

Users increasingly demanded deeper interactivity, gameplay systems, and exploration mechanics.

For Zimmermann, that was never the goal.

"I just want to create these dense atmospheres," he explained. "This kind of journey that you go into and get sucked into."

That realization eventually led him toward Realms of Flow.

Building Realms of Flow

Rather than turning Realms of Flow into a more game-like experience, Zimmermann intentionally moved in the opposite direction.

Realms of Flow builds directly on the atmosphere and emotional immersion of Conscious Existence. The same emphasis on movement, environmental immersion, and emotional pacing runs throughout the app. But this time, Zimmermann built customization systems around those experiences.

Breathing synchronization, humming exercises, spatial sound design, environmental depth adjustments, meditation timers, visual modulation, and interactive focus elements all work together to create highly personalized experiences.

The app can feel overwhelming at first because of the sheer number of available settings.

Zimmermann is aware of that.

"There's a lot of settings," he admitted. "But I try to hit the sweet spot between accessibility and allowing people to fine tune things for themselves."

What surprised me was how technically deliberate many of the visual decisions are.

Zimmermann uses 180-degree stereoscopic presentation instead of 360-degree video to maximize perceived image quality on standalone headsets like Quest 2 and Quest 3.

He also uses dark environments strategically.

Darker scenes allow video compression systems to dedicate more bitrate toward important visual details rather than wasting bandwidth on bright peripheral imagery.

Other visual tricks include slightly pushing environmental spheres farther away from the viewer to increase perceived clarity and dynamically modulating environmental depth based on breathing rhythm.

The result is an unusually sharp and visually convincing immersive experience on standalone VR hardware.

VR As Reconnection Rather Than Escape

The most interesting thing Zimmermann told me had nothing to do with any technical decision. Despite creating deeply immersive virtual environments, he does not see VR as a replacement for reality.

"You take the headset off and reality feels even more vivid afterward," he said. "You appreciate life even more."

For Zimmermann, the goal isn't to escape the real world. It's to help people experience it differently when they return to it.

Beyond Consumer VR

While Realms of Flow exists primarily as a consumer app today, Zimmermann has already started exploring broader wellness and commercial applications.

The app is currently being integrated into sensory pod systems created by Amsterdam-based company Sensiks, which combines immersive visuals with environmental effects like wind, scent, and temperature changes.

Zimmermann also described conversations involving hospital wellness programs and enterprise XR management systems.

"I hope more businesses will use it for hospitals, retreats, elderly homes, and wellness spaces," he said.

He's careful not to overclaim. He views it as an atmospheric tool, not a clinical one.

Looking Forward

Zimmermann says Realms of Flow is nearing completion, with only a small number of planned experiences remaining before he moves toward future projects.

He's not sure yet what comes next.

Marc Zimmermann is not particularly interested in chasing mainstream VR trends.

In a VR industry still largely driven by games and constant interaction, he's continuing to focus on atmosphere, emotional immersion, and experiences designed to slow people down inside the headset.

Realms of Flow is available on Meta Quest for standalone VR, as well as Steam and the Meta PC VR Store for PC VR.

A Fisherman's Tale put players in a matryoshka doll-like lighthouse controlling a small, medium, and large sized version of the titular fisherman simultaneously. Maskmaker brought interdimensional traveling by putting on and removing different masks. A Fisherman's Tale 2 (formerly Another Fisherman's Tale) allowed players to detach their head and parts of their body. Innerspace has always created unique games with mechanics not likely to be replicated in other titles. Spymaster's time manipulation system is another triumph for innovative gameplay with endless possibilities for mission scenarios.

Not surprisingly, I found Spymaster incredibly charming. The low poly art style, light & breezy voice acting, sound design, and the missions themselves all connote a world that doesn't take itself too seriously, even if the subject matter itself is serious. Much like the I Expect You To Die series, Spymaster wants you to smile and have a good time as you're saving the world.

The basic gameplay loop combines precision, time manipulation, situational awareness, and a bit of speed running into a tidy package that can be picked up and put down in short sessions. Each mission can be accomplished in just a couple of minutes, but expect to spend an extended amount of time fine tuning your run to hit all of the main objectives (and optional side objectives). The first couple of missions are admittedly very easy to allow time for the mechanics to settle in, then the game kicks into gear.

Spymaster has multiple characters, each with their own tools/weapons and personality quirks. You will hop back and forth between them, rewinding time via a wristwatch on the operator's (i.e. your) wrist to retake control at a point of your choosing.

As an example, a mission based in a Venice, Italy inspired location has multiple drones stationed throughout that will end the mission if either spy is in their line of sight for more than a few seconds. That alone means moving one spy, Tic, forward first to gun it down. This allows Mulligan, the second spy, to zip line to a building in what would have been plain sight of said drone. As Mulligan, you land from the zip line and race downstairs to zap two drones waiting in an alcove with your taser and another on a bridge over the canal.

Back to Tic, who has other guards to take out in a central building before lowering a drawbridge to let Mulligan into the room to secure a briefcase. Mulligan, briefcase secured, gets on a gondola for a gondolier to very slowly paddle towards the extraction point, while being attacked by drones on other gondolas and building patios. Back to Tic, who can either race from building to building to the extraction spot, or stop to take out all of the drones attacking Mulligan. Oh by the way, Mulligan's taser has unlimited charges, but a short range of effect and a cooldown time. Tic's pistol is more effective from range, but she has limited ammo.

This entire scenario can be completed in less than 90 seconds. I know because one of the side objectives challenges you to beat that time. I spent nearly a full hour in this mission, constantly rewinding and swapping characters to figure out which agent needed to take out which drone for maximum efficiency. I had Tic do most of the combat, which came back to bite me at the extraction point when I ran out of bullets and got killed. So I turned back time and made Tic pause long enough for Mulligan's gondola to arrive to tase the final drone. Dying isn't a threat here with the time rewind feature so much as an inconvenience. I thought I had the run figured out, only to have to make more adjustments.

After each mission, a cinematic replay of the successful run from multiple camera angles plays. This is a bit dicey in places because depending on your timing, there may be several seconds of no action because the spy is elsewhere at that time. It's an interesting presentation idea that needs more time in the oven before the final release. After this, it's back to the boat that serves as the spy team's hub for the next mission or to replay a previous mission to complete missing side objectives or get a faster time.

It's tough to put a gameplay time on this game because you could just as easily race through it in a couple of hours doing the bare minimum or spend upwards of eight hours if, like me, you are a bit Type A and care about efficiency.

Spymaster - Final Verdict

Innerspace's flair for eccentric, surreal gameplay continues with Spymaster. It's a fun romp of an espionage adventure that is not like anything I've played in VR. The formula also lends itself to expansions with new, more intricate mechanics and different spies. It lives and dies on the mission gameplay, which thankfully is executed very well.

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.

CleanSheet Soccer Pro, the follow up to the original goalkeeper-focused CleanSheet Soccer, launched as a training simulator with a subscription fee attached. James Stafford of developer Incisiv said this new entry was built in direct response to demand from the PlayStation community.

Here's the trailer:

The new game has been rebuilt specifically for PlayStation, removing the subscription fees and relaunched as a premium (read: paid) standalone experience. CleanSheet Soccer 2 features enhanced visuals, full trophy support, a retooled career mode, and interactive coaches that assign challenges based on how players perform.

The original CleanSheet Soccer is available on PS VR2, Meta Quest, and Pico XR. Per Stafford, the first two games have reached a combined 180,000 players.

CleanSheet Soccer 2 can be wishlisted on PS VR2 now ahead of its June 11 release.

CM Games has announced that they've lowered the price of their time-twisting VR puzzle game UnLoop, available now on Quest, SteamVR, and Pico. The price drops from $24.99 down to $17.99.

UnLoop is a VR puzzle game that tasks you with proceeding through a series of compact, room-based puzzles, each designed so as to be impossible to pass. At least, impossible on your first try.

Each time you die or run out of time, a ghost of yourself will appear and replay exactly the actions you took in the last life. You'll use as many lives as you need to choreograph sequences of interactions between your current self and past selves in order to clear the puzzle. Our hands-on impressions piece called it "a great premise for a puzzle game." At the new, lower price, it's an even better buy.

UnLoop Hands-On: Sci-Fi Puzzling On Repeat

UnLoop is a fresh, time-bending VR puzzle game from the creators of Into the Radius, launching you into a clever self-co-op experience with a dash of sci-fi espionage.

UploadVRPete Austin

UnLoop is available now for Quest, SteamVR, and Pico, at the new price of $17.99. At time of writing, SteamVR is offering an additional 20% off.

The official Vision Pro support for the two PC VR simulators leverages the OS-level foveated streaming feature Apple added to visionOS 26.4, a feature that Nvidia's CloudXR SDK leverages. Foveated streaming leverages eye tracking to maximize visual quality in the region of the display you're currently looking at.

To be clear, while the name CloudXR implies the PC is in the cloud, and this is Nvidia's primary focus for the technology, in the case of X-Plane 12 and iRacing, the visionOS client apps connect to your local gaming PC as the rendering source.

When the visionOS streaming clients for X-Plane 12 and iRacing were announced in March, it was thought that their major advantage over existing tools that let you stream PC VR content to Apple Vision Pro, primarily ALVR, would be the foveated streaming.

Since then, however, we've seen multiple tools released that enable this for your entire PC VR library, with the free and open-source Clear XR supporting OpenXR titles and $15 KRVR now supporting SteamVR content too.

KRVR Supports Apple Vision Pro’s Foveated Streaming For SteamVR Games

KRVR, a $15 visionOS app, lets you play any SteamVR game from your PC on Apple Vision Pro with foveated streaming.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Still, there are some advantages to the dedicated streaming clients for X-Plane and iRacing.

Both offer a simplified launch process, directly connecting to the simulator software on your PC with essentially no friction.

iRacing's client also automatically tracks your physical racing wheel and segments it out with passthrough, leveraging Apple's ARKit SDK. Meanwhile, the X-Plane client lets you manually mark out a passthrough cutout, as you can with KRVR.

You can find X-Plane Streaming Link and iRacing Connect on the visionOS App Store. Both apps are free, though you'll need to own the sims on your PC to connect to them.

The tradeoff of using Nvidia's CloudXR SDK is that every foveated streaming solution so far exclusively supports Nvidia's Ada and Blackwell GPU architectures, meaning RTX 40-series and 50-series graphics cards, and this is the case for X-Plane and iRacing too.

Supernatural was originally created by Within, the immersive technology company founded by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin, before being acquired by Meta in 2023. The new company, called Supernatural Health, says it plans to launch a new Supernatural experience on Quest this fall. In its FAQ, the company describes the new version as retaining the “same coaches, same DNA, same mission” as the original service, while also making clear that the transition will not simply continue the existing Meta-owned platform unchanged. 

The announcement comes five months after Meta halted development of the service. In January, the company said Supernatural would no longer receive “new content or feature updates” as part of a restructuring that also saw multiple VR studios shut down. At the time, UploadVR reported that subscribers could continue accessing the existing workout library, but the coaches who helped define the service would no longer appear in new content.

While the existing workout library remained available, Meta's decision left the platform's long-term future unclear. UploadVR later reported that Supernatural continued ranking near the top of the Meta Quest charts even after Meta paused content updates and laid off much of the team behind it. The same report noted that Supernatural’s subscription model, brand recognition, and strong engagement made it one of the few clear consumer success stories in VR fitness, even as users began exploring alternatives.

Now, Supernatural Health says the platform is being rebuilt by original Within founders Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin alongside returning coaches and a small core team. The company says the existing Meta-operated version will remain available through December 3, 2026.

The return of the coaches addresses one of the biggest concerns raised by subscribers after Meta halted development earlier this year. When Meta halted new content earlier this year, UploadVR noted that subscribers could still work out with Supernatural’s existing library, but only through archived coach recordings. The coaches, who had become a defining part of the platform’s identity and community, appeared to have no future role in the service.

Supernatural Health is also warning users that the transition will not be seamless. Existing accounts and subscriptions will not automatically transfer to the new platform, which will use fresh accounts and a new privacy policy. The company says it is exploring ways to preserve user history such as streaks, badges, join dates, favorites, and workout history, though it has not guaranteed that all account data will carry forward.

Music licensing remains another challenge for the new company. UploadVR previously identified expiring music rights as one of the biggest uncertainties surrounding Supernatural’s long-term future. Supernatural Health now says the new service will include “as much of the original catalog” as possible while continuing to expand and evolve its music library over time.

The company also confirmed pricing will increase under the new independent structure. The service will return to its pre-Meta pricing of $20 per month or $200 per year. Users who join as Founding Members will be eligible for a discounted first-year rate of $180 annually. Supernatural Health says the higher pricing is intended to support employee salaries and benefits, music licensing, new features, and a sustainable career path for coaches.

Supernatural Health did not disclose financial terms surrounding the transition away from Meta ownership. In its FAQ, the company described the move as reflecting “a shared belief that Supernatural’s community is best served by a focused, independent team,” while also saying Meta had been “supportive throughout” the process.

The transition is notable because Meta has historically retired VR services rather than transferring them to new ownership. Supernatural's continuation under an independent company marks a different outcome for a Meta-owned VR property.

Supernatural Health says additional details regarding account migration, signup procedures, and the launch timeline will be shared in the months ahead.

On May 6, I Am Cat surprise launched onto PlayStation VR2, and it seems it's done well in its first month on Sony's headset. I Am Cat has claimed the number one most-downloaded spot in both North American and EU markets.

I Am Cat is a sandbox adventure game in which you play as a cat, use arm-based locomotion to scamper and claw your way around Granny's house, completing quests and causing mischief as only a cat can. The game has been a massive success on Quest, Steam, and Pico, and holds a nearly perfect 4.9 out of 5 stars rating based on over 77,000 user reviews on Meta's Horizon Store.

I Am Cat Heads Into The Yard & Garage On Quest & Steam

Become cat in the yard and garage in I Am Cat on Quest & Steam.

UploadVRIan Hamilton

The full sales chart for May 2026 shows buyers in the EU and North America still enjoying VR mainstays like Moss and Moss II, Job Simulator, Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge, and the ever-popular Beat Saber.

The complete chart is embedded below.

It shouldn't be surprising that a highly-anticipated game like I Am Cat would claw its way to the top of the charts in the same month that it shadow dropped on the system. It will be interesting to see if the game can maintain this momentum through June and beyond.

I Am Cat can be found on the PlayStation Store for $14.99. It's also available on Quest, Steam, and Pico.

Since the launch of the original Vision Pro, the iPad version of Steam Link has been available on visionOS through the App Store. While this allowed for easily playing your flatscreen Steam library in the headset, it limited you to having a window with the 4:3 aspect ratio of an iPad, yet streaming the wider aspect ratio of your PC, leading to black bars on the top and bottom of the window – something entirely unnecessary in XR.

The iPad app also limited the window's resolution to that of an iPad, around 2732×1537 for 16:9 content.

With the visionOS app, released on the App Store a few weeks ago, the Steam Link window supports up to 4K streaming resolution, dynamically matches the aspect ratio of the PC you're streaming from, and lets you adjust the curvature of the window to your liking.

Valve Launches Steam Link On Pico Headsets & Vive Focus Vision

Valve launched Steam Link on Pico headsets and HTC Vive Focus Vision, making it easier to wirelessly stream SteamVR games from a PC.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

As well as supporting gamepad or mouse & keyboard navigation in the Steam Big Picture interface, the new app lets you use the gaze-and-pinch interaction system of Vision Pro to launch games, looking at an entry in your Steam library with your eyes to select it and pinching your thumb to your index finger to launch it.

Valve also says the native visionOS client "improves network performance" compared to the iPad app.

Testing the app out on Vision Pro, I found the 4K quality to be a massive improvement over the iPad app, and the latency feels lower too. The gaze integration, however, awkwardly snaps a mouse-like cursor between library items, so I disabled that and stuck to navigating with a connected Bluetooth gamepad.

No VR Support

The glaring omission, of course, is PC VR support. While Steam Link on Meta Quest, Pico, and Vive Focus Vision headsets lets you play your SteamVR games, the visionOS client is entirely limited to flatscreen content.

There seem to be two distinct versions of "Steam Link", one for flatscreen devices and the other for VR headsets, and Apple Vision Pro's client is very much so a variant of the former. It seems similar to the tvOS version, with the above-noted XR additions.

KRVR Supports Apple Vision Pro’s Foveated Streaming For SteamVR Games

KRVR, a $15 visionOS app, lets you play any SteamVR game from your PC on Apple Vision Pro with foveated streaming.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Third-party developers have addressed the demand for PC VR streaming on Apple Vision Pro, though. The open-source PC VR streaming tool ALVR has been available on the App Store since a few months after the M2 Vision Pro launched, and recently Clear XR and KRVR have launched with support for the foveated streaming feature introduced in visionOS 26.4.

X-Plane and iRacing also recently launched their own dedicated visionOS clients for their PC VR simulators, also leveraging Nvidia's CloudXR, offering seamless automatic connection as well as automatic alignment and passthrough cutout of your physical peripherals, your HOTAS or racing wheel setup.

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 soon!

This is not the only visionOS app for playing your SteamVR games, and nor is it even the first to support the foveated streaming feature Apple introduced in visionOS 26.4. ALVR, which has been available on the App Store since a few months after the M2 Vision Pro launched, supports playing SteamVR games from your PC, and in March a Canadian software engineer released Clear XR, which lets you play OpenXR games from your PC. Both are free and open source, with the ALVR client available on the App Store and Clear XR available on TestFlight, while both have a streaming server on GitHub.

KRVR is a paid closed-source app, which, with its most recent updates, delivers the two best aspects of ALVR and Clear XR in one solution: it lets you play any SteamVR game, even non-OpenXR titles, with foveated streaming to maximize visual quality in the region of the display you're currently looking at.

As with Clear XR, KRVR's developer leverages Nvidia's CloudXR SDK, which has full ready-to-go support for Apple's foveated streaming feature.

The $15 app has a relatively polished interface and a few standout features compared to ALVR, which still doesn't support foveated streaming, and Clear XR, which hasn't been updated since March:

• Passthrough Cutouts: Similar to Virtual Desktop on Quest, KRVR lets you trace out portions of your space, which will display real-world passthrough instead of VR. This lets you bring your racing wheel, HOTAS, desk, or other physical areas of your room into VR. You can edit these passthrough cutout zones at any time.
• PC Desktop: You can view and interact with your PC monitors, with multi-monitor support. While playing a VR game, you can interact with your PC's other physical monitors.

As with ALVR and Clear XR, Sony's PlayStation VR2 Sense tracked controllers are fully supported, though you can also use other input devices like a gamepad or mouse and keyboard.

The tradeoff of using Nvidia's CloudXR SDK is that it exclusively supports Nvidia's Ada and Blackwell GPU architectures, meaning RTX 40-series and 50-series graphics cards. The current PC I'm using has an RTX 3090, so unfortunately, I can't test KRVR at the moment.

If you do have the required GPU and an Apple Vision Pro and want to try it, you can find the KRVR visionOS client on the App Store for $15, and the Windows PC server app on GitHub – though note that the source code is not available.

X-Plane and iRacing also recently launched their own dedicated visionOS clients for their PC VR simulators, also leveraging Nvidia's CloudXR, offering seamless automatic connection as well as automatic alignment and passthrough cutout of your physical peripherals, your HOTAS or racing wheel setup.

In a blog on its website, Spatial CEO Jinha Lee points to rising costs as the driving force behind this decision:

The cost of hosting and scaling open multiplayer 3D worlds has grown significantly and continues to climb. We explored every alternative: revised pricing models, tiered hosting plans, and partnership structures. Every path forward would have meant passing rising costs directly to you at levels that are not sustainable for independent developers and small studios. We were not able to find a model that kept the Creator platform viable without compromising the experience you and your communities deserve.

This decision only applies to the creator platform. Spatial will maintain its enterprise-level customers moving forward.

We should also note that Spatial built an in-house studio, Wooster Games, the team behind the immensely popular social VR game Animal Company that boasts over half a million active daily users as of July 2025.

Animal Company Now Has 1 Million Monthly & 500K Daily Active Players

Animal Company is now the 5th highest grossing Quest game for first year revenue, reaching 500k daily and 1 million active monthly players.

UploadVRHenry Stockdale

Lee says the company will focus its efforts on its original IP projects through Wooster Games.

You can read the full blog about the shutdown here, which details the timeline in full. Any creators with worlds on Spatial will need to download their assets by July 27. Anything left after that date will be deleted.

After a busy spring, summer kicks off with two VR showcases: our own UploadVR Summer Showcase on June 12 & the VR Games Showcase in late June. As such, expect this article to be updated multiple times throughout the month with announcements from those and other events.

For now, here are the VR games with scheduled release dates in June.

Note: games scheduled for a 'June 2026' release are not included in this article as they do not have firm dates. For a broader list of new releases expected in 2026, check out our ongoing watchlist article here.

Dates listed here come from storefront listings, direct communications with developers, and developer social media channels.

An asterisk (*) indicates a game planned to release in Early Access

Fishing Party VR - June 1 (PC VR)

Fishing Party VR is a physics-based fishing simulation with twenty unique species of fish to catch across five different locations.

Store links - Steam

Sky Legends: An Aeropostal Epic - June 3 (PC VR)

Sky Legends, is an early 1900s adventure centered on an investigation into 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. It released on Meta Quest last month and supports both motion controllers and hand tracking.

• Store links - Steam

Outblast - June 4 (Quest, PC VR)

Outblast is a fast-paced arcade shooter pitting players against a rogue viral intelligence. The campaign spans five different futuristic locations and unique boss fights. The Steam version will also have flatscreen support.

• Store links - Steam, Quest

Sugar Madness - June 4 (Quest)

Sugar Madness is an on-rails wave shooter from JollyCo (Jolly Match 3) with solo and co-op gameplay. This family-friendly adventure pits players against Dr. Sour, a madman who has transformed the sugary inhabitants into dangerous 'candymorphs.'

• Store links - Quest

The Boys: Trigger Warning - June 9 (PS VR2)

The Boys: Trigger Warning is a stealth action game based on the comic book and TV series of the same name from developer Arvore (Pixel Ripped). I reviewed the game when it released on Meta Quest earlier this year, feeling like the game "plays it safe, delivering a run-of-the-mill stealth game lifted by the world it is set in."

The Boys: Trigger Warning Review: Uninspired Stealth Boosted By Source Material

The Boys: Trigger Warning is tough on the eyes, but still hits all the tropes one expects in a stealth action game, for better or worse.

UploadVRMike Johnson

• Store links - PS VR2

CleanSheet Soccer 2 - June 11 (PS VR2)

The followup to the Quest exclusive CleanSheet Pro has been built exclusively for Sony's current generation headset. This new entry does not have a subscription fee, focusing on gameplay and replayability with better visuals, full trophy support, and a revamped career mode.

• Store links - PS VR2

Downtown Club (1.0 release) - June 11 (Quest)

Competitive street racer Downtown Club leaves Early Access this month after nearly two years. Since our Early Access review, the game has added multiple new cars and courses. The final release, according to developer Commuter Games, will add voice chat for multiplayer races, improvements to the AI drivers, rain, and slipstream.

Downtown Club Early Access Review: A Solid Chassis On Which To Build

Downtown Club is a fun but sparse early access VR racer with full virtual controls, beautiful visuals, and a promising future. Our early access review.

UploadVRJames Tocchio

• Store links - Quest

Spell Siege - June 18 (Quest)

Spell Siege is a gesture-based magic wave defense game. Defeating enemies earns players 'Sou Essence' that can be cashed in for new spells and special runes to amplify the spells' power.

• Store links - Quest

Starvault - June 18 (PC VR)

Starvault is a VR MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) first person shooter featuring multiple heroes and abilities in 5v5 hero-shooter-style combat. Starvault is currently free to play on Meta Quest with a limited starting selection of heroes to choose from. Per the developer, the Steam version will be a paid app with everything in the game unlocked right away.

• Store links - Steam

Project S - June 30 (Quest)

Project S is a tabletop real time strategy game inspired by classic RTS games from the 1990s. This is a solo developer project with additional planets planned as future DLC add-ons.

• Store links - Quest

If we missed any games, feel free to reach out to us at tips@uploadvr.com. This article will be updated with any new additions, cancellations, or delays.

June 2026 brings the popular (and ridiculous) rhythm game Trombone Champ: Unflattened and the magical adventure game Maskmaker as the Monthly Games. The catalog also sees the addition of the high-energy platformer Outta Hand to Horizon+.

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

• Into Black, a first-person action adventure game that tasks you with exploring and escaping from the depths of a mysterious alien planet. Get it for 50% off this month.

Here's a closer look at the Monthly Games for June.

Trombone Champ: Unflattened

Trombone Champ: Unflattened! lets you play your virtual trombone to over 58 tracks, spanning anthems, marches, classical bangers, and folk classics. Each piece is handcrafted to keep you honking and sliding to your heart’s content, with plenty of surprises and unlockables along the way to keep you coming back for more. In addition, numerous add-on packs have been released to expand the musical rhythm game's repertoire.

Maskmaker

Maskmaker comes from A Fisherman's Tale creators, Innerspace VR. It's an interesting and intriguing puzzle game in which you play as a maskmaker's apprentice tasked with exploring a magical land and discovering the secret identity of The Maskmaker.

Our review called it a game whose "best moments achieve an intricate balance between body-swapping puzzling that helps lift the veil on some of the story’s deeper themes."

Outta Hand

A somewhat overlooked platformer that blends Crash Bandicoot with Gorilla Tag, Outta Hand is a high-energy adventure that kids (and kids-at-heart) will love. You play as a loveable lab experiment that's been scheduled for termination. You must leap, slap, and swing with your ridiculously long arms, escape the hostile facility of the evil Dr. Vendelvom, and free your fellow experiments, too.

Our hands-on preview called Outta Hand "something that becomes the next natural progression of the Gorilla Tag movement system. Not only is it an evolution of that system, but it offers more mechanics and a sense of flinging freedom with satisfying bouts of combat interspersed throughout."

Horizon+ Games Catalog Games

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

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

• After the Fall
• Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs
• Asgard's Wrath 2
• Beat Saber
• Blacktop Hoops
• Breachers
• Crime Shop Simulator
• Deisim
• Demeo
• Demeo Battles
• Dungeons of Eternity
• Escaping Wonderland
• Fruit Ninja
• Ghosts of Tabor
• GOLF+
• Green Hell VR
• iB Cricket
• I Expect You to Die 3
• In Death: Unchained
• Into the Radius
• Job Simulator
• Medieval Dynasty New Settlement
• Moss
• Onward
• Outta Hand
• Pets & Stuff
• Pistol Whip
• Premium Bowling
• Project Demigod
• Puzzling Places
• Racket Club
• Real VR Fishing
• Red Matter 2
• Shave & Stuff
• Starship Home
• Table Troopers
• The 7th Guest VR
• The Climb 2
• The Light Brigade
• The Thrill of the Fight
• Thief Simulator VR
• Titans Clinic
• Vacation Simulator
• Walkabout Mini Golf
• War of Wizards
• Zero Caliber: Reloaded

Outta Hand Review: Short, Sweet & Sublime VR Platforming

Outta Hand is an absolute platforming thrill on Quest. Read our full review here:

UploadVRHarry Baker

Horizon+ Indie Catalog Games

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

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

Meta says it's the result of a "six year collaboration" with the European Space Agency (ESA).

Quest 3 will be far from the first XR headset to arrive at the ISS.

All the way back in 2015, Microsoft sent an original HoloLens AR headset to the ISS with a Remote Expert Mode so ground crews could help astronauts with repairs and a Procedure Mode that overlaid equipment tutorials for novel systems.

In 2017, Oculus sent a Rift VR headset to the station where ESA astronauts Thomas Pesquet and Alexander Gerst used it for microgravity neuroscience experiments.

And in 2023, HTC sent up a Vive Focus 3 to support astronaut mental health by providing 360-degree immersive videos of serene locations on Earth.

For all three previous missions, the headset's tracking system had to be heavily modified to work properly in microgravity. On Earth headsets use the accelerometer in their IMU (inertial measurement unit) to measure the gravity vector to align to the orientation of the ground, but trying to use this in space would cause constant drifting. For the Rift mission, Oculus swapped out the Rift's Constellation tracking system for a third-party solution better suited to be customized for microgravity. Meanwhile, HTC modified the Vive Focus 3 tracking system to track one of the controllers fixed onto a wall as an anchor point, so the headset has a fixed point to align its movement to.

For Quest 3 now, the modification is less extreme. According to Meta, the team behind the Travel Mode shipped in 2024, originally for airplanes and now supporting trains too, has extended it to work in microgravity too. Planes, trains, and space stations – that has a ring to it. Whereas on planes the IMU chip's accelerometer is mostly ignored, on the space station it will be entirely ignored, with the headset tracking entirely from visual cues from its cameras.

HTC Sent A Vive Focus 3 To The International Space Station

HTC just sent a Vive Focus 3 headset to the International Space Station to support astronaut mental health.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

The Quest 3 spacewalk training will be part of the station's swan song era. In-orbit construction of the ISS began in 1998, and the aging station is currently set to be deorbited in 2031, with private companies taking the mantle of human presence in Earth orbit while the countries behind the ISS, with the notable exception of Russia, are moving on to build the Artemis Moon Base instead.

When they arrive on the Moon sometime in the 2030s, the inhabitants of the Artemis base will almost certainly have headsets of their own, with all the significant advancements in XR technology we expect to see over the next 5-10 years. As well as the applications for training, headsets could improve the quality of life for these deep space astronauts, giving them a private cinema for entertainment and virtual relaxation environments to feel as if they're back home.

You Can Visit Space Stations In VR At Home

While astronauts sometimes use VR to feel like they're on Earth, you can do the opposite at home to feel like you're on the International Space Station with Mission: ISS. It's free, available on Quest and the Meta PC VR store.

Mission: ISS Is A Free Space Simulation That Makes You The Astronaut

Virtual reality is a great platform for users to experience fantastic worlds and wonders, but it’s also a portal into the real life wonders very few humans get to enjoy. Outer space is one of, if not the, most incredible of those wonders and VR users are getting an

UploadVRCharles Singletary

VR Experience Puts You Inside The First Commercial Space Station

Vast’s VR experience puts you inside Haven-1, set to be the first-ever private sector space station next year. It’s available on Quest, Apple Vision Pro, and PC VR.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

You can also visit one of the planned private successor stations to the ISS in Vast Haven-1 VR, which is also free and available on the Meta Horizon Store for Quest, Apple's App Store for Vision Pro, and Steam for PC VR.

Realcast has released Just Hoops Nano, a new mixed reality mini basketball game. The release comes as something of a surprise, given the game was previously announced to be coming "this summer."

Designed around hand tracking, Just Hoops Nano drops a mixed reality basketball arcade game into your personal space and uses natural hand gestures to 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. The game can also be played with controllers.

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. There are over 20 dynamic levels, moving hoops, longshots, and game modes like Around the World and Zen Mode, an endless shooting session with no pressure.

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

We'll have a hands-on impression piece on Just Hoops Nano in the coming days. If you can't wait, Just Hoops Nano is available now on Meta's Horizon Store for $7.99. 

As part of Sony's annual Days of Play promotional event, PlayStation VR2 is getting a $100 price cut, bringing the cost of the headset from $399 to $299. The sale runs through June 10 and also includes free shipping and additional discounts on hardware and accessories in select regions. Full details and specific deals can be seen on the PlayStation Blog.

The PS VR2 deal comes along with broader hardware discounts, PlayStation Store sales, PlayStation Plus bonuses, and community events across the PlayStation ecosystem. Sony says this year’s event will feature discounted PS5 and PS4 games, along with promotions on accessories including DualSense controllers, the Pulse Elite headset, and Pulse Explore earbuds.

PlayStation VR2 Review: Next-Generation VR Gaming For PS5

PlayStation VR2 heralds the next-generation of console-based VR on PS5. We’ve had the chance to put Sony’s new headset through its paces over the past week, so how does it hold up? Here’s our PSVR 2 review. After years of waiting, PSVR 2 is finally here and

UploadVRHenry Stockdale

Sony's latest VR headset is a great piece of hardware that's been widely praised for its excellent displays, eye tracking, and immersive haptic feedback. The PlayStation VR2 normally retails for $399. The new, temporary price of $299 is quite appealing, and it will be interesting to see if this sale will move consumers to splash out the cash on a PS VR2.

The full details of the sale will launch on Sony's Days of Play website starting May 27 at 12:01 AM.

Compass is like that. It's uncomplicated, a bit sparse, and as a video game, unapologetically simple. But it's also endearing, unique, and like my favorite bike, a whole lot of fun.

What Is Compass?

Though it may sound reductive, Compass is a game about flying. While it's true that Compass tells a story, that it's full of NPCs and quests, that there are puzzles to solve and cosmetics to earn and a ship to upgrade, all of this is secondary. At its core, Compass is all about exploring the skies.

You play as a scout, guiding and supporting an airborne caravan of anthropomorphic alien animals as it treks across a cosmic skyscape on a quest to deliver a giant egg to "the great incubator" while outrunning the attacks of an enormous space whale. It sounds odd, and that's because it is odd. Delightfully so.

The gameplay loop is essentially this: you fly to the central hub of an open-world area, chat with some NPCs, accept some quests, then explore the map in your ship. Throughout the overworld you'll find crystals which can be harvested and used to unlock areas shrouded in mist, within which are contained the game's out-of-cockpit traversal puzzles. You'll solve these, energize conduits, and link the various subareas to the central hub so that you can power up a wormhole and jump to the next zone. Once there, you'll do it all again, coming ever closer to delivering the egg and completing your journey.

Taking Flight

One thing that Compass understands better than a lot of games is that simplicity matters. Flying the ship isn't about managing systems or memorizing buttons. It's about instinct, and the sensation of grabbing the yoke with both hands and feeling your body subtly lean into turns.

Compass' controls are tactile and direct, responsive and forgiving. You plunge the yoke forward to dive, pull it back to climb, and turn left and right to bank. The control sticks allow fine control in all directions, too, though this is muted.

The control scheme works really well. Within minutes of starting the game, I found myself banking my nimble little airship between floating structures in the sky, dipping beneath enormous suspended ruins and swooping left and right in instinctive imitation of leaning a motorcycle into a long curve on an empty road.

You fly through this weird sky, discovering places and ruins and islands of floating stone, strange little huts with even stranger little dudes inhabiting them. You'll find hostile turrets to be juked, minefields to maneuver through, and other dangers worth avoiding. You'll be shot and blown up, you'll repair your ship, you'll salvage some cargo, and you'll swoop through marshmallow clouds, always discovering something new just beyond the horizon.

There are many moments of quiet in which all you're doing is flying through an open sky while distant structures drift by and strange, ambient music hums softly in the background. In short, if you can get yourself into the right frame of mind, it's a nice place to be.

The Puzzles

If flying is the core pillar of Compass, another is its puzzles. Unlocking these crystal-gated puzzle zones forces you out of the cockpit. The game shifts to environmental traversal sections that involve using your grappling hooks to navigate fragmented ruins, flipping switches, blocking or redirecting beams of energy to reactivate towers and push the caravan onward.

These puzzle areas are generally simple, mechanically, but they serve an important role in adding variety to the game. They increase in complexity the further we get into the game. While they never become truly difficult, like the puzzles in early Zelda games, they make you feel clever.

Turbulence

To say that Compass gets everything right would be a lie. Though flying generally feels engaging and fun, longer play sessions tired me out and I ended up wishing for simpler stick-based flight controls.

Additionally, the game can feel repetitive. Most quests involve tracking down lost objects and returning them to their owners. And most zones feel a bit too similar in both aesthetic and directives. The puzzles are competent without ever being especially memorable. And some players will find the slow exploration tedious (if you didn't like Wind Waker's boating, you're gonna hate this).

And lastly, the world of Compass can feel sparse. The minimalism that makes the world feel mysterious can also leave it feeling underdeveloped. I kept waiting for the game to surprise me with something radically different, a new biome or a deeper narrative turn, or more elaborate puzzles, but these never fully arrived. Compass sort of hints at a larger, stranger universe than the one it ultimately delivers, which is a shame, because what's here is really, really good. I just wish there was more.

Compass will not be for everyone. Players looking for constant progression, combat, or spectacle may find its gameplay slow and its pacing monotonous. But for the right player, someone willing to accept its rhythm and enjoy the simple act of exploring, it offers a very compelling experience.

Compass Review: Final Verdict

I found myself consistently charmed by Compass. So many modern games are afraid of empty space. They're built with fear that players will become bored if every moment isn't packed with stuff; mechanics, voice acting, waypoint markers, yellow paint, the dopamine flood of endless rewards. Compass takes the opposite approach. It trusts that mystery and atmosphere will carry the player through.

Like an old motorcycle, Compass is simple and beautiful. It gives you a cockpit, an open sky, and somewhere cool to fly. For me, that's more than enough.

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

The three tracks are all available today and will download automatically when the application updates.

Here's a brief teaser:

The new original track is “Phantom Fangs” from Zakka G, joined by Boom Kitty x MDK’s "Killshot" and Skybreak & Daeya’s "Astral Blossom."

This continues a strong 2026 for Beat Saber after shock drops of tracks by Bad Bunny and Twenty One Pilots, and the Prodigy Music Pack.

It should be clarified, as we do whenever new Beat Saber content pops up, that we previously reported the end of ongoing PlayStation VR2 support last year. As such, these tracks are only available for PC VR and Quest players.

Beat Saber is available on Quest, Steam, and PlayStation VR2. It also joined the Horizon+ games catalog earlier this year.

The response to Altered Echoes has mostly been positive, including my review of the game at release. That said, if you read player reviews, particularly the negative ones, the lack of smooth turning & inability to disable the vignette of protagonist Dark Six's hood have been common points of contention. For some, it was a dealbreaker that put them off buying the game altogether.

Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes Review - A Faithfully Terrifying Adaptation

Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is an excellent translation of the series to VR, lacking only in more robust VR comfort options.

UploadVRMike Johnson

Bandai Namco has addressed this in a May update. The smooth turning option has several speed presets ranging from 0.5x to 3x. The hood removal option is only available for the PC VR version of the game, with no indication if it will be added for Meta Quest and PlayStation VR2 at a later date. The post on Bandai Namco's website states it is "available on PC only due to performance limitations on other platforms."

I jumped back into the game on SteamVR earlier today, removed the hood, and played the game for an hour with no discernible impact on the game's performance. However, everyone's PC is different, so your mileage may vary depending on your PC's specifications. I personally have an RTX 5070 Ti GPU and an AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D, so there's not a lot it cannot handle.

Here are the other listed improvements:

• Improved climbable interactions and collision handling.
• Fixed several environment interaction behaviors.
• Improved AI behavior during investigations and chase situations.
• Improved visibility handling for nearby and held objects.

At release, the game FAQ on Bandai Namco's website expressly stated that the game was snap turn only and the vignette could not be removed as a precaution against motion sickness. The vignette was additionally said to be present for added immersion.

Respectfully, giving VR players options to tailor the comfort settings to their personal liking will always be the best accessibility practice. Everyone handles VR locomotion differently and a one-size-fits-all design methodology will always court backlash. This is evidenced by the developer's admission on the Horizon Store's developer post that both features were 'highly requested.'

Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is available now on PS VR2, Steam, and Meta Quest.

When Hello Games head Sean Murray posts a single emoji on social media, the No Man's Sky community starts speculating what it means. April's Xeno Arena update, a Pokemon-style creature arena battler, was teased with a simple stadium emoji. February's Remnant update was preceded by a safety vest. Murray has been doing this unique form of marketing since 2020, so when he posted a single bee this past week, the theories came fast. A cooking update? A tease for Hello Games' upcoming game, Light No Fire? A new beekeeper feature?

None of the above. Instead, it's The Swarm, where Travelers (players) have to work together to fend off an enemy "unlike anything we've seen before," according to Murray.

Here's the trailer:

In The Swarm, players will load into a personality test that divides each of them into one of three factions. These three factions will compete against one another to combat the Hive of Glass, a massive space bound structure that deploys hundreds of drone ships to protect itself. The Hive itself is also a weapon equipped with a central laser powerful enough to destroy entire freighter fleets and possibly space stations. It all sounds very Star Wars Death Star adjacent. As a lifelong Star Wars fan, I'm in.

The war with the Hive is waged on two fronts: in space and on the planet. Travelers on the ground will investigate and loot the remains of downed drones using the gravity gun introduced in the Remnant update. These drones have to be salvaged and researched to discover the secrets behind the Hive while Travelers also have to defeat planetary swarms.

The efforts of each faction will be tracked in the Space Anomaly and the Galactic Atlas, with the most effective of the three factions being memorialized in the Space Anomaly. This event is reminiscent of the monthly Cosmic Events in the now defunct Sanzaru Games' Asgard's Wrath 2, where players chose between two factions and competed for exclusive rewards. The Swarm also has exclusive rewards for participation, including a retro-styled suit of armor, a new rifle, and a huge new jet pack.

Regarding the community style challenge of The Swarm, Murray had this to say:

The prospect of all existing Travellers converging on a single area of the universe to take the largest space battles to date, against the back-drop of an ominous, mysterious Death Star like construct, with the ability to destroy space station sized objects… is going to make for some exciting weeks ahead for us and for players.

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

Recent years have seen more VR games than ever before. Major titles continue reaching Quest 3, Steam, PlayStation VR2, and Pico, with PC VR looking set for a renewed boost when Steam Frame launches. While Apple Vision Pro and Samsung Galaxy XR don't prioritize gaming, you can expect the odd release every so often. Whatever your headset, there are plenty more upcoming VR games to pick from

Our aim is to keep this wider list that we will regularly update, so you can better plan ahead or remind yourself of the upcoming VR games you had perhaps forgotten about. If we notice a game getting repeatedly delayed just before launch, said game will be placed in the 'TBC' section until a firm commitment is made.

This also won't replace our more in-depth monthly round-ups. As part of ongoing updates, we'll keep the current's month specific information below.

New VR Games & Releases June 2026: Meta Quest, PC VR, PlayStation VR2, & More

Looking for a list of all the new VR games and DLCs coming to Quest, Steam, PlayStation VR2, and other platforms in June? We’ve got you covered.

UploadVRMike Johnson

Since Meta has dropped Quest 1 support entirely, Quest games going forward will only support Quest 2, Quest Pro, and/or Quest 3 and Quest 3S. You can find the Horizon Store and mobile apps (iOS/Google Play) here. If a game is only on Quest 3/3S, that will be noted as more games leave Quest 2/Pro behind. We expect that list to grow now that Quest Pro and Quest 2 are discontinued.

Similarly, releases on Pico 4 Ultra, Pico 4, or Neo 3 Link will just say 'Pico' – those games are viewable through apps (iOS/Google Play) or the web store. The PlayStation Store naturally covers PlayStation VR and PS VR2 games. Most PC VR titles are on Steam, but some are also on Rift, Viveport, itch.io, GOG, and EGS. Samsung Galaxy XR games are on Google Play, while the App Store covers Apple Vision Pro. We'll note other platforms where relevant, too.

For now, here's our list of upcoming VR games on all major platforms.

July 2026

• SCP The Beginning - July 13 (PC VR)
• Edd Skeleton VR - July 14 (PC VR)
• Fixer Undercover - July 16 (PC VR)
• Paranatural - July 17 (PC VR)
• Roboquest VR - July 23 (Quest)
• Aeternum Infecti - July 24 (PC VR)
• Cybercore Protocol - July 26 (Quest)
• Amelia's Escape - July 2026 (PC VR, Quest)
• Blooming Conductor - July 2026 (Quest)
• Game I'm Prisoner - July 2026 (Quest)
• Snooker Billiard - July 2026 (PC VR)
• Surreal Sniper - July 2026 (Quest)
• Tomboy Adventure 2 - July 2026 (PC VR)
• Wild West Panic - July 2026 (PC VR)

Summer 2026

• Dagger Woods VR - Summer 2026 (PC VR, Quest, PS VR2)
• Flyon RC - Summer 2026 (Quest)
• MR Clean - Summer 2026 (Quest 3)
• The Great Flood - Summer 2026 (Quest)
• Tin Hearts: Act 1 - Summer 2026 (Quest)

Q2 2026

• Exoshock - Q2 2026 (PC VR, Quest)
• Korea IL-2 Series* - Q2 2026 (PC VR)
• Remnant Protocol - Q2 2026 (PC VR, Quest)

Q3 2026

• Echoes of Mora - Q3 2026 (PC VR)
• Codebreakers VR - Q3 2026 (PC VR, Quest)
• Memoreum - Q3 2026 (PC VR, PS VR2)
• Penguin Festival - Q3 2026 (PC VR)
• The Lightkeepers - Q3 2026 (Quest)

Q4 2026

• Agent Simulator - Q4 2026 (PC VR)
• Deliria VR - Q4 2026 (PC VR)
• Xenolocus - Q4 2026 (PC VR)

2026

• A Long Survive - 2026 (PS VR2)
• Alliance Tales: Battle for the Frontier - 2026 (PC VR)
• Already Dead - 2026 (PS VR2)
• Ascent Quest** - 2026 (PC VR, PS VR2)
• Automa - 2026 (PC VR, PS VR2, Quest 3)
• Blastmania - 2026 (PC VR)
• Bootstrap Island - 2026 (PS VR2)
• CONFINED: Leaving OKB-134 - 2026 (PC VR)
• COVR - 2026 (TBD)
• Detective VR - 2026 (PC VR, PS VR2)
• Dr Emmerson's Nocturnes - 2026 (PC VR)
• Evangelion: Cross Reflections - 2026 (TBC)
• Falcon Fall - 2026 (PC VR)
• Full Steam Undead - 2026 (PC VR, Quest)
• G-Rebels* - 2026 (PC VR)
• Guardians Planetfall** - 2026 (PC VR, Quest 3)
• Heroes Together VR - 2026 (PC VR, Quest)
• Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades 2 - 2026 (PC VR, Quest 3)
• HyperSkate - 2026 (PC VR)
• Into The Radius 2* - 2026 (Quest 3)
• Jurassic Lab: Dinosarium DNA - 2026 (PC VR)
• Knights of Fiona - 2026 (PC VR, Quest)
• Long Trip - 2026 (PC VR)
• Meteora - 2026 (PC VR, PS VR2)
• Monster Snap (PC VR)
• Mystic Academy - 2026 (PC VR)
• Nevrosa Rescape - 2026 (PC VR, Quest)
• Order 13 VR - 2026 (PS VR2, Quest, PC VR)
• Out of Sight VR - 2026 (PS VR2, Quest)
• Paper Play - 2026 (PC VR)
• Payday: Aces High - 2026 (Quest, PC VR)
• Pool of Madness - 2026 (PC VR)
• Primal Rumble* - 2026 (Quest)
• Remembrance - 2026 (PC VR)
• Squingle Arcade - 2026 (Quest, SteamVR, Apple Vision Pro, Pico)
• Survive The Night - 2026 (Quest)
• The Bounds VR - 2026 (PS VR2, PC VR)
• The Obsessive Shadow: Chapter 2 - 2026 (PC VR)
• The Secret Of The Cove - 2026 (Quest)
• The Warp Cephisso - 2026 (PC VR)
• Timeless Heart VR - 2026 (PC VR, PS VR2, Quest)
• Ultima Chess VR - 2026 (PC VR)
• VMX - 2026 (Quest)
• Zero Caliber Frostbite - 2026 (TBD)

2027

• Project Mix - Q1 2027 (PC VR)

TBC

• Adepts Arena (PC VR)
• Adrian's Quest (PC VR)
• Archer - Virtual Realms (PC VR)
• Assetto Corsa Rally*** (PC VR)
• Astro Hunters (Pico, PS VR2)
• BATTLEGROUPVR2 (Quest)
• Boneworks (Quest 3)
• Bow-Bots (PC VR)
• Boxing Underdog (PC VR, PS VR2)
• Brutal Strike (PC VR)
• Catana: Red Flowers (PS VR2)
• Chaos Method (PS VR2)
• COLD VR (PS VR2)
• Convrgence* (PC VR)
• Core Disruption (PC VR)
• Death Relives*** (PS VR2)
• Deisim (PS VR2)
• Disc Dimension (PC VR)
• Disc Frenzy (PS VR2)
• Disembodied (Quest)
• Dolphin Trainer VR (PC VR)
• Downtown Club* (Pico, Quest)
• Dungeon Seekers (PC VR)
• Eldramoor: Haven in the Mist (PC VR, Quest)
• Elemental Towers (PC VR, Quest)
• Ember Souls (PC VR)
• Eternal Battle (PC VR)
• Exer Gale (PC VR, PS VR2, Pico)
• Expansion VR* (PC VR)
• Face Jumping (Quest Pro)
• Farcaster (PC VR)
• ForeVR Darts (PS VR2)
• Fresh Tracks VR (PC VR)
• FYR: The Lost Island (PC VR)
• Garden Haven* (Quest 3)
• Geronimo (PC VR)
• Glitch Moba (PC VR)
• Gravity League VR (PC VR)
• GRIM (PS VR2)
• Gunman Contracts - Stand Alone (PC VR)
• Heroes of Forever (PC VR, PS VR2, Quest)
• Hide The Corpse (PC VR)
• Home (PC VR)
• Hunternet Starfighter (PC VR)
• Hush: In Search of Dominic Ward (PC VR)
• I Am Your Beast VR (TBC)
• Inter Solar 83 (PC VR)
• Into The Darkness (PS VR2)
• Into The Light VR (PC VR)
• Iron Guard: Salvation (Pico)
• Janet's Planets (Quest 3, PC VR)
• Jarpug (PC VR)
• Jurassic Snap (PC VR)
• Laser Dance* (Quest 3)
• Level Up Your Body (PC VR)
• Levity Race (PC VR)
• Low-Budget Repairs (Quest)
• LOW-FI (PC VR, PS VR2)
• Masters of Light (PC VR)
• Miami Heat (Quest)
• Million Dollar Decision (Quest)
• Multiverse Kaitenzushi: Learn Japanese Alphabet (Quest)
• MUSE (PC VR)
• OogaBonk (PC VR, Quest)
• Orion Drift* (Quest)
• Penguin Festival (Pico, Steam, Quest)
• Phasmophobia* (PC VR, PS VR2)
• Pneumata VR (PC VR, PS VR2)
• Postal 2 VR (PS VR2, PC VR, Quest)
• Poppy Playtime VR (TBC)
• Project Heist Boss: A Prison Boss Game (TBC)
• Project Xeno (TBC)
• R.A.I.D. (TBC)
• Real VR Fishing (Galaxy XR)
• Road To Yvhalon (PC VR)
• Runner (PC VR)
• Scared by Squares** (PC VR)
• Sight Unseen (PC VR, Quest)
• Skera VR (PC VR)
• Sky Climb (PC VR)
• Slender: The Arrival VR (PC VR, PS VR2, Quest)
• SPRAWL VR (TBC)
• Stop Dead (TBC)
• Successor*** (PC VR)
• Supersonic Fight (PC VR)
• System Critical 3 (PS VR2)
• Teahouse of Souls (PC VR, Pico, PS VR2, Quest)
• Tennis League VR (PC VR)
• The Bounds VR (PC VR, PS VR2)
• The Hollow Path (PC VR)
• The Mighty Eighth VR (PC VR)
• The Obsessive Shadow (PS VR2)
• The Signal: Stranded on Sirenis (TBC)
• Toxic Therapy (PC VR, PS VR2, Quest)
• Underworld Overseer (PS VR2)
• Unnamed Alien: Rogue Incursion Sequel (TBC)
• Unnamed Cloudhead Games Project (TBC)
• Unnamed Kojima Productions/Niantic AR Game (TBC)
• Unnamed Second Neon Genesis Evangelion XR Game (TBC)
• Unnamed Third Neon Genesis Evangelion XR Game (TBC)
• Unnamed Noetic Realms Action RPG (TBC)
• Unnamed Stress Level Zero Game (TBC)
• Vertigo Rush (PC VR, PS VR2, Quest)
• Wallace & Gromit in the Grand Getaway (PC VR)
• Wanderer 2: The Seas of Fortune (TBC)
• What Comes After (PC VR, Quest)
• Whispers of the Tarnished City (PC VR, PS VR2)
• Whispers of the Void (PC VR)
• Wildlife Doctor (Pico 4 Ultra)
• Wordbound (Apple Vision Pro, Quest 3, Steam)
• Xeno Wonderer (Quest)
• Xploit.Zero* (Quest)
• Xstall One - eVTOL Flight Simulator (PC VR)
• You Can't Scare Me (Steam)
• Z-Grav: Clash (PC VR)
• ZIX* (PC VR, Quest)

If there's a game we've missed that you'd like us to add or the information is incorrect/outdated, please email tips@uploadvr.com or use our Contact Us page to get in touch.

* denotes a game that either is currently available in early access on that platform, or a game that will have been released in early access by that time.

** denotes an early access launch.

*** denotes a game currently available (or will be available at that time) but without VR support yet.

The 'A Golden Opportunity' short adventure is a new quest line in Battlemarked's first campaign, Embers of Chaos. It introduces Acquisitions Incorporated's Omin Dran and new rewards for adventurers who complete the quest.

Watch the full trailer here:

Dran, voiced by Penny Arcade co-founder Jerry Holkins, can be found in the Emerald Tavern in the first campaign. Players who have already completed the campaign can select A Golden Opportunity as a standalone quest from the main selection menu.

Acquisitions Incorporated is a sourcebook in the fifth edition (5e) of Dungeons & Dragons from the creators of Penny Arcade, a popular web comic that began in 1998. It started from a partnership between Penny Arcade and DnD publisher Wizards of the Coast for the former to start an actual play podcast of several fourth edition DnD campaigns. After switching to fifth edition, Wizards of the Coast published Acquisitions Incorporated as an official sourcebook in 2019. This marked the first time any third party content was incorporated into DnD as canon.

The update also added some quality of life changes to Battlemarked. Difficulty settings and the 'no respawn' setting for dungeons are now available for the full campaigns. Previously, these two features were only available for one shot dungeons.

The 'Fastness of Green Shadows' quest in the Embers of Chaos campaign has been added as a one shot dungeon now. It was previously only playable during a full campaign run.

The full patch notes can be read here. I would recommend experienced players to check it out as there are several balance changes for the game's heroes affecting damage output and action point economy.

Demeo × Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked is available now on Quest, Steam, and PlayStation VR2.