Ninja Warrior feels like a fun concept to make the jump into VR, until you consider the practicalities of adapting this experience for the medium. There’s something appealing about translating large-scale obstacle courses into a fitness game of sorts, but these courses featured in the original TV show involve Wipeout-esque feats of acrobatics, strength, and nerve to conquer. Never mind the space necessary to run, jump and dive through them.
Maybe, if you could traverse without using your feet but retaining that sense of athleticism, it could work.
Ninja Warrior VR takes heavy inspiration from titles like Fall Guys in its switch from reality TV to the virtual world, replacing its super-strength competitors with stylized ninja-like characters. The jump also shifts the aesthetics of the experience, and allows the experience to betray your initial expectations in one key aspect, the one thing transforming this into one of the most promising fitness-fueled party titles of 2025. Rather than moving with your feet, you move entirely using your hands.
It seems absurd at first, and certainly it takes some getting used to. While at first you would assume you might run on the spot or use analog sticks to move around each course, everything is controlled using motion controls and your hands. To move forward, you reach your arm forward and physically pull it back toward your chest to pull your character toward wherever you placed it. You can use either hand or both in quick succession to move at speed, but wherever you place that hand, it will remain firmly planted in place until you place down your other hand.
This is the main way you traverse just about every obstacle in the game. Want to jump? Push off from where you are with your hands. You can do this with one or two hands, but you will need to rapidly increase your speed at this task if you want to, say, jump across thin platforms with moving bollards spinning in sequence that will punish you for lurking too long. All against a surprisingly strict time limit that's longer than the real show, but not exactly friendly either.
The only use of buttons on the controller is the grip button for grabbing onto obstacles like hanging bars, such as the famous obstacle from the series that requires players to hang and jump between two sliding metal bars. This requires you to use all your skills to traverse and is quite challenging to overcome, and we’re still only in round 1!
While you could critique the game under these parameters for being too hard - it's also similar locomotion to Gorilla Tag or Orion Drift, which isn't what you'd expect - this arguably works well for Ninja Warrior VR. The reality TV show is a Herculean effort few can successfully beat, and making it too simple risks making it trivial for players when the full game releases.
With the commentators voicing in your ear, there’s still a lot of fun to be had by trying your luck, never mind how amusing it looks from an outsider’s perspective. Provided you’re careful, that is - during my experience, I accidentally punched the demo assistant more than once in the intensity of trying to traverse just this first obstacle course.
To me, though, that’s proof of everything Ninja Warrior VR does well, rather than a negative. You need space to play, and time to get used to moving with your hands. But after overcoming this hurdle you don’t just feel immediately hooked on the thrill of the challenge, you’re resolute and determined to clear these hurdles however possible. It’s tiring, but it’s exciting to overcome a challenge, setting yourself up slowly in just the right spot for a new obstacle, and to overcome it. With a crowd of friends or onlookers, as I had here, the cheers as you overcome that obstacle are both fueling and grin-inducing. It's a true joy, only possible by the rather bold direction the team has taken to bring this game to life.
Ninja Warrior VR is not a one-to-one physical recreation because that’s not feasible. While its cartoon appearance is unusual at first, it’s through this direction that MyDearest has maintained the spirit of the show and created something that could provide hours of entertainment in good company. That's from just the first round of the four-round gauntlet that makes up a typical Ninja Warrior match, and the team has promised future updates to keep expanding the game with more levels over time. If the team can maintain that schedule and the degree of fun found in this demo for repeat matches and new stages, this could become a new party game of choice for having a good time with friends in VR.
Ninja Warrior VR is out today on the Meta Quest platform.
