Good Virtual Reality
Where to go first in a virtual reality headset like Quest or Vision Pro.
Good virtual reality is discovered.
Destinations are found like eggs hidden on Easter. The locations are available to anyone with a keen eye for a bit of color shining in the landscape. It is difficult to drag someone else back to a discovery in VR, expecting them to learn the interactions, to look in the same direction and to see the same thing at the same moment. We find in those moments that VR is more like a dream, a place that doesn’t make sense to anyone nearby now that we’re awake.
Many of the best places in virtual reality rise from the blueprints of games we played as children. They are forged in spaces where gravity and ground are choices every second. A pond and a sunset can be just a nice view to relax alone, or the start of an adventure down a rabbit hole nearby. VR can be an escape to find something new, or a focusing tool to leave distraction behind.
Virtual reality can be a room of requirement with costumes and mirrors inside to see oneself from a new vantage. It can be a place to see what you want without the people physically around you seeing too. It can be a museum with galleries to display any photo, video, sculpture and painting ever made. It can be a place to make memories with people we could never meet anywhere else, where time and space are scalable.
“It's dangerous to go alone! Take this”
In the spirit of a guide warning you, here is where I recommend starting off in 2026 if you are just discovering Virtual Reality for the first time:
Begin with Walkabout Mini Golf and Golf+ to see imaginative artists creating stories with places at one end of virtual reality and faithful recreations of major golf courses at the other end. You can putt at the Labyrinth or Elvis mini golf course for $4 each or drive your ball down the Pebble Beach Golf Links for $15. There is no better grounding for understanding the future of virtual reality than to learn the interactions as you see for yourself theme parks made in VR for VR right alongside simulations of places in the world that cost extraordinary amounts of money to enjoy physically.
Next, find a fishing hole in Real VR Fishing and make sure you use the in-game controls to pull up media while you’re out there on the water, looking at places like majestic Mount Fuji in the $8 Japan Pack 1.
Then find your rhythm in Synth Riders and add the best Lady Gaga tracks for $2 each, or go get Pistol Whip for $30 all in and enjoy endless cinematic action you can modify to your heart’s delight right alongside great campaigns.
BigscreenVR is free to find some TV and movies in a virtual theater. There’s always something to watch there and you can find a chill room with nobody talking pretty easily anytime. If you’ve followed my guide so far, you’ll start noticing over a long stay in Bigscreen the biggest limitation facing VR at present — the weight of the headset. Bigscreen itself is trying to solve this with the Beyond line of headsets, as other manufacturers take note.
Dimensional Double Shift is like Job Simulator, but free, and in it you can work with your friends and family to be ridiculous together. It’s one of the first games to rely fully on hand tracking, and if you experience it you’ll be looking at the kinds of design decisions that will inform Google’s work in VR for the next decade.
If you’ve followed my recipe for Good VR here and I’ve led you in the right direction, now check out spatial toys Cubism, Hand Physics Lab, Puzzling Places, and Airspace Defender, assuming you are running in standalone VR on Quest. (If you’re in Vision Pro and want a great experience in a virtual environment, just go to Amalthea around Jupiter with the operating system, set the time of day and speed of time to your liking, and pull up all the apps, windows, 3D models or spatial toys you might want in the space around you.)
I can only recommend a deep dive into VR from here if you’ve got a high-powered rendering engine inside of your PC. You’ll want to seriously consider Virtual Desktop and its passionate creator to handle your link to that PC, and then there’s real value to be found in the exploration of VRChat or No Man’s Sky, as well as in the mini games and shooting ranges of Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades. You could spend a lifetime in any of these places and some people are well on their way.
Gorilla Tag and Rec Room remain intriguing and impactful places in VR too, but you can see in their communities the strain of attempting to appeal to very large audiences. Gorilla Tag is $20 on Steam but free on Quest, for example, as its developers face an ongoing reality that the openness of a PC invites players to ruin the online experience for others with hacks and cheating. That’s why I’m so intrigued by the work coming from Creature-associated studio Neat Corporation in Crossings. They’re taking a brilliant bit of VR design proved by the game Half+Half and applying it to the idea of chance cooperative encounters in a virtual forest without voice chat.
There are so many good places opening in virtual reality all the time and very few people with both headsets and free minutes to go out and see them. I don’t know when I’ll get there, but you can tell me about cool places by emailing ianontherecord@gmail.com.