Many excellent experiences are not listed here; this page is reserved for the best of the best – The VR Critic’s coveted “Top Picks.”
THE BEST OF THE BEST
This charming puzzle game is built around a very particular central gimmick—like the first-person shooter Superhot and its “bullet time” mechanic. The essence of the latter can be broadly explained by referencing…
Batman: Arkham Shadow swells with the atmospheric and environmental elements we’ve come to expect from depictions of Gotham City: dark lane ways, long shadows, musty corridors, neon lights. This dank and brooding…
I love the energy and exuberance of this experience; I love its pluck and sass. The developers of Battlescar: Punk Was Invented By Girls embraced an “everything and the kitchen sink” approach,…
Some VR enthusiasts have argued that 360 videos, with their non-navigable environments and limited degrees of freedom, do not qualify as “real” virtual reality. I won’t get into that debate right now,…
To describe the appeal of virtual reality, it’s sometimes said that you get to go inside the picture. The long-held prominence of the frame—first dominating paintings, then film and television—has accustomed us…
In another reality, Half-Life: Alyx was the blockbuster AAA title that catapulted VR into the gaming mainstream. That didn’t happen, of course, for various reasons that don’t need to be extrapolated here.…
A virtual reality experience predicated on simulating workplace environments such as office cubicles and a car garage doesn’t sound like a hoot. But the delightful Job Simulator isn’t interested in lifelike recreations,…
I’m a big fan of both Lone Echo games. They’re well crafted and grandiose space adventures, with engaging mechanics and satisfying narratives that scale up, up and away—to the edges of the…
Notes on Blindness was conceived as an immersive companion piece to the 2016 film of the same name, which explores the process of going blind from the very personal perspective of theology…
The narrative spine of Paper Birds is formed by the testimony of a young boy who recounts a speculator tale: of parallel alternate worlds, beautiful and haunting; of his missing sister, who…
I have a big soft spot for Pearl: director Patrick Osborne’s five-and-a-half minute 360 video set entirely inside a car, with us riding shotgun. It might sound cheesy to say that this…
Music is a weapon that can be used to fight monstrous robots in Federico Moreno Breser’s short, sweet, very stylish and energetic narrative-driven production, which injects traditional motion picture language with a…
This highly ambitious production from Tender Claws—a studio with a history in delivering innovative VR works—is the equivalent of a television anthology series, in the sense it’s divided into 11 distinct but…
Much has been made—and rightfully so—about the collapse of the two dimensional viewing experience in virtual reality. One of the medium’s amazing features is this revolution in screen space, placing us “inside”…
Randall Okita’s tenderly crafted production unfolds like an experiential family photo album or embodied history lesson, exploring the story of his grandfather Yonezo Okita, who migrated to America from Japan in the…
I love the central setting in The Under Presents: a nightclub on the edge of existence, situated on desert sands in a bizarro alternate universe combining apocalyptic aesthetics with vaudevillian vibes. The…
I enjoyed the first Vertigo—a zany space adventure in which we play a young woman trying to find her way home, navigating a vast and treacherous alien universe. But the sequel is…
When it comes to explaining the appeal of golf, nobody has said it better than George Costanza: “it’s just nice to be outside in a well landscaped area.” That quote from Seinfeld…
One of the most rudimentary ways to direct attention in VR, where users can turn and face in any direction, is to blacken out space around an intended focus point. It’s pretty…
