Our 8 Favorite VR Games for Beginners

Available for Meta VR, Steam VR, PlayStation VR and VR2

If there’s a single reason to buy a VR headset, it’s Beat Saber. There’s almost no learning curve—you simply swing your arms to slice through blocks with virtual lightsabers to the beat of a catalog of addictive dance songs. Oh, and don’t forget to duck down or hop to the side so that the blocks don’t smash you in the face. The ease of the gameplay and the invitation to move your body capture what VR is all about, so this title is always one of the first games we show newcomers to VR. It’s also one of the first games we dive into ourselves, even six years after its release.

As a bonus, Beat Saber is a bona fide way to exercise—the experience is so engrossing that you might not even realize it’s a workout until you wake up the next day with sore arms. Just don’t forget to clean out your sweaty headset padding afterward.

Available for Meta VR, Steam VR, PlayStation VR2

Sometimes it’s nice to play a game where the worst possible consequence is shooting over par instead of zombies eating your brains, you know? Walkabout Mini Golf is a peaceful putt-putt-palooza that pairs the simple physics of swinging a golf club with imaginative VR landscapes. You can stick to the green on the eight included 18-hole courses or wander off to find lost balls or follow little clues called “foxhunts” to earn yourself some new golf gear.

We recommend starting on the island-themed Tourist Trap level (one of our favorite game spots for riding out the coldest, darkest months of winter) before moving on to levels themed to ice cream, a haunted house, and other fun things. You can buy bundles of new levels, too, though for us the magic of Walkabout Mini Golf lies in escape rather than completion.

Available for Meta VR, Steam VR, PlayStation VR

One part escape room, one part Groundhog Day, I Expect You To Die challenges you, a secret agent, to puzzle your way through secret missions. You have levers to pull, messages to decode, and wires to snip. Mess up, and you die, usually in some dramatic fashion, like in an explosion or due to poisoning. Then you have to start the mission again. On challenging levels, you’ll die over and over and over. It’s just enough to cause you to rip the headset off in frustration—before coming back to try again a few hours later.

All of that dying, plus situations where you have to solve puzzles quickly, make I Expect You To Die far from relaxing. But it’s a notably excellent game to play while sitting or standing in one place because you play as a character with telekinesis; it’s designed so that you use your controllers to grab objects across the room instead of walking over to them. If you live in a small place or just want to take a quick break at your desk, I Expect You To Die is a nice option. All three games in the series are worth playing, so the bundle is worth a look.

Available for Meta VR, Steam VR, PlayStation VR and VR2

Studies suggest that Tetris is useful for trauma therapy and to reduce cravings. There’s also evidence that the game tickles the part of the human brain that loves to make sense of putting objects together. So when you play Tetris Effect: Connected for the first time—and then play it more and more and more until you lie down at night and see Tetris pieces falling behind your eyelids—know that there’s some neat sciencey thing happening alongside your new (or renewed) addiction to rotating and stacking blocks.

Tetris Effect: Connected lets you play by yourself or with other people, so it’s a nice option for a game night. It’s also a great stationary game if you don’t have much room. Could you instead play Tetris the old-fashioned way, without a VR headset? Yes. But you can’t understand the straight shot of brain candy that is Tetris Effect: Connected until you try it.

Available for Meta VR, Steam VR, PlayStation VR

We love to introduce people to their first VR headset with Superhot VR because if the action gets too intense, it has a clever little feature built into the gameplay: Stop moving, and the game stops moving with you. It creates a Matrix-like effect where you can move your body as slowly as possible to dodge sprays of bullets or speed things up while you land a punch on your enemy’s head action-hero style. The game feels stylish, too, with the bad guys rendered as faceted, faceless red bodies that shatter like glass when you defeat them. It’s the rare action game that’s approachable for just about anyone.

Available for Meta VR

If you’re eager to spend dozens of hours fighting and exploring in a vast VR landscape, the action-RPG Asgard’s Wrath 2 is a strong choice. (The fact that it’s free if you buy a Meta Quest 3 doesn’t hurt, either.) Gods and monsters take you on an Egyptian adventure as you continue your search for Loki, in a story that picks up where the previous games in the series left off.

If you grabbed a VR headset because you wanted to swing a sword by moving your arms instead of mashing buttons on a controller, Asgard’s Wrath 2 is one of the finest examples of how natural fighting can feel in VR. The game is even more impressive when you consider that it’s built for standalone Meta Quest headsets; there’s no PC or console required to play through its detailed world. But that also means it feels a few generations behind what a modern Xbox or PlayStation can do.

Available for Meta VR (with PC), Steam VR

If you’re willing to plug your VR headset into a PC, you’ll find a whole new array of graphically demanding games opened up to you. Half-Life: Alyx still reigns as our favorite among these thanks to its intricately detailed visuals. Although the game is particular about the route you take through the action—no open world here—it’s filled with exciting views of the futuristic City 17 and interesting ways to interact with your surroundings. It nails scale; even after a decade of playing VR games, I’ve found that no game world has made me feel so small and awestruck as I’ve felt in City 17 underneath the enormous floating Vault structure.

Half-Life: Alyx fills in a bit of the story between 1998’s revolutionary Half-Life and 2004’s Half-Life 2. You play as Alyx Vance, who goes up against an oppressive alien empire and its soldiers as she fights to find her father, track down a superweapon, and free Earth. But it’s the setting, more than the story, that is likely to draw you into the gameplay.

Available for Meta VR, Steam VR, PlayStation VR

As someone who grew up playing titles in action-adventure game franchises such as Spyro and The Legend of Zelda, diving into Moss and Moss: Book II (the two are sold as a set or individually) feels a bit like coming home. Both games invite you to go on a grand adventure as a humble mouse named Quill, who finds herself mixed up with magic while solving puzzles, fighting enemies, and exploring ruins, icy landscapes, and the lush forest floor.

Moss: Book II’s gameplay and graphics benefit from the strides that VR has made in the past few years, and it has a few additions such as the ability to climb, but its story begins right where the original Moss ends. Both are worth playing through if you’re ready to make Quill your next best friend through delightful puzzles and stunning imagery.

This article was edited by Arthur Gies and Jason Chen.