SUPERHOT VR

2025-11-26
Few things made me feel more like an asshole in 2019 than putting together the full Valve Index setup. Measuring out the appropriate space, setting up those camera stands with the IR sensors six feet up, running some long ass cable to the headset. It was all so fiddly and time consuming.

And yet when it was all set up and you finish your first level of SuperHot VR, dodging knives and bullets, snatching guns out of thin air, and blasting your red, crystalline nemeses into nothingness, it was all worth it. Especially worth it when I would bring the setup into work and get to see people who had never touched a VR-anything juke and dodge in the middle of our office kitchen.

To this day, even as VR feels like it petered out and never really came back, SuperHot is still one of the most memorable experiences. Part of that is because the core design of "everything's slow-mo till you move" is genius and turns encounters into puzzles. You have several seconds to take in everything and plan out the exact set of moves you need to take to kill everyone one in the room and not die yourself. And the other part is VR: now you really have to get your John Wick on and execute each of those moves with some degree of physical precision in the real world.

There's few games you play that immediately sell you on hardware you were initially on the fence about. SuperHot VR is one of those games.

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You have to play this game in VR. It is one of the coolest things ever. You actually feel like you're in the matrix.

Super tight game. Basically time is super slow unless you're moving. So it's a shooter game but each level is almost like a puzzle. But there's creativity to it. It reminds of replaying the intro level to Max Payne 2 over and over and over in the demo just to try different ways to slow mo flying through the air and taking out baddies.

And it's got a very cool aesthetic to boot.

Wonderful game.