Nearly a decade after consumer VR took its first real steps—driven by headsets like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR—the medium has outgrown its novelty phase.

Those early platforms reshaped not just how players experienced games, but how studios thought about presence, interaction, and scale. Today’s VR games and experiences walk along that groundwork—and are also judged against it.

With expectations higher than ever, this year’s standout titles aren’t just impressive in isolation. They’re the ones that meaningfully build on what came before—and that’s what this year’s awards aim to recognize.

Without further ado, here’s Road to VR’s 2025 Game of the Year Awards:

Game of the Year

Ghost Town

Developer: Fireproof Games

Available On: PC VR, Quest, PSVR 2

Release Date: April 24, 2025

Fireproof Games is one of the most trusted names in VR puzzle-adventures for a reason: it’s the very same behind The Room series—arguably one of the best puzzle-adventures on any platform, VR or otherwise. And Ghost Town feels like the most impressive to come from the studio, which is saying a lot.

From its inspiring and immersive environments, to its well-animated characters, to its engaging story, Ghost Town seems to nail all of the most important factors in how to transport players to a different world—one that feels alive, carefully considered, and visually cohesive.

Crucially, Ghost Town’s puzzles aren’t the most difficult, although they’re always approachable and satisfying, encouraging observation and light experimentation. They’re sort of temporary safe havens from the dark, moody atmosphere Ghost Town so effortlessly exudes.

While the game looks absolutely stunning on Quest and PSVR 2, Ghost Town doesn’t treat PC VR as a second class citizen, offering up dynamic lighting, reflections, fog, detailed particle effects, and higher resolution textures throughout—easily making it the version you should play over all others.

Marvel’s Dead Pool VR

Developer: Twisted Pixel

Available On: Quest 3 & 3S

Release Date: November 18th, 2025

Deadpool VR isn’t just a highly polished, multi-hour VR experience that features a name brand superhero. Or a game that lets you slice dudes in half, slow-mo kick them and explode their heads. Or a never ending barrage of fourth wall-breaking banter that isn’t afraid to motor-mouth a ton of dick jokes at anyone, alive or dead. It’s more.

Okay, actually, that’s basically all it is, but that’s more than enough!

Jokes aside, Marvel’s Deadpool VR is a milestone for VR production quality. Outside of the fun gameplay, interesting dialogue, and great graphics, Deadpool VR pushes the envelope by serving up some of the best voice acting ever—VR or otherwise.

Neil Patrick Harris is a natural fit as the ‘merc with a mouth’, but you might also be surprised to know the game features John Leguizamo, Dolph Lundgren, Kal Penn, and Tom Cavanagh among many others. All of it makes for a cinema-quality experience, which is such a refreshing change of pace.

Arken Age

Developer: VitruviusVR

Available On: PSVR 2, PC VR, Quest 3 & 3S

Release Date: January 16th 2025

Arken Age is a single player adventure that was clearly designed by people who have closely studied the corpus of VR game design. Developer VitruviusVR smartly built atop the shoulders of giants, learning from the best immersive mechanics of pioneering VR games like Stormland (2019), Lone Echo (2017), and Robo Recall (2017).

But they did more than just copy. They adapted and advanced what came before, while making their own contributions that are worthy of future study. And they put in the work to give Arken Age its own identity with a unique visual design, interesting weapons, and gameplay that’s all its own.

We were particularly impressed with Arken Age’s highly diegetic design. So much of the game feels ‘hands-on’ in a way that many VR games do not.

Combat features a spread of ranged and melee weapons, allowing you to make your own playstyle. And when it comes time to upgrade them, you don’t just click a button in a menu. Instead, the studio designed a full ‘upgrade station’ to make weapon upgrades and modding into an immersive experience.

Healing syringes need to be stabbed into your body, but that’s table stakes in 2025. The clever part is the way you actually craft the syringes. First you need to collect fruit from certain trees. Then when you find a crafting station you use a torch to pop the fruits off the stem and collect them into a little funnel. It’s ultimately arbitrary work, and yet so much more satisfying and fun than using a laser pointer to click a button to craft the syringes.

All of this attention to diegetic design makes Arken Age one of the most embodying and fun VR games of 2025, earning our award for PSVR 2 Game of the Year.

Laser Dance

Developer: Thomas Van Bouwel

Available On: Quest 3 & 3S

Release Date: November 6th, 2025 (early access)

Building games with meaningful gameplay that adapt to arbitrary real-world spaces is an exceptionally difficult design challenge. Laser Dance is one of the few mixed reality games that feels like it actually pulls it off. It’s a genuinely fun little game and a very clever way to approach the problem of adapting gameplay for arbitrary spaces.

Laser Dance asks players to do something simple: move from point A to point B. But between you and those two places is a grid of lasers that you can’t touch without being reset back to point A. The game starts easy with static lasers to get players into the groove. But later levels introduce moving and flashing lasers which significantly increase the challenge.

Laser Dance isn’t just fun, it’s also incredibly easy to play. Even people who have never tried a VR headset can grasp the gameplay in 60 seconds or less. This is aided further by the game’s use of controllerless hand-tracking, which means nobody needs to learn how to use controllers to have fun with the game.

The successful ‘adapt to any room’ design, quick setup, and ease-of-play make Laser Dance a perfect game to share with friends. Just be sure to ‘cast’ the headset’s view to a nearby TV so everyone can enjoy the antics of the person in the headset crawling across the living room floor while dodging invisible lasers. And you might as well play the Mission Impossible theme for the cherry on top.

Reach

Developer: nDreams

Available On: Quest 3 & 3S, PC VR, PSVR 2

Release Date: October 16th, 2025

Reach is built atop a foundation of fun movement that makes the game fast-paced and fun, while also remaining quite comfortable. The game makes a seemingly small tweak to the usual ‘Press A to jump’ formula, and instead asks players to hold down the A button and then do an upward arm swinging motion to initiate a jump. This alone makes jumping feel a lot more embodying, and it complements the game’s movement-centric gameplay which has players running, jumping, and climbing.

Developer nDreams took things a step further still, giving the player interesting and immersive movement tools. The player gets a shield which can be thrown into specific magnetic slots in the game, creating a temporary handhold and platform. Players can also shoot arrows into special surfaces that solidify the arrows into climbable handholds. It’s a neat idea that I wish saw even more interesting use in the game.

To top it all off, players gain access to a grappling hook later in the game which allows them to pull themselves toward special poles, and to carry their momentum while swinging from one pole to another. While Reach is far from the first VR game to have a grappling mechanic, we appreciated that its particular design kept things comfortable while still enabling a sense of daring movement across large gaps, as well as an extra way to move around quickly during combat.

No Man’s Sky

Developer: Hello Games

Available On: PSVR 2, PC VR

Release Date: August 9th, 2016

We could spend the next few sentences glazing Hello Games for not only completing No Man’s Sky’s redemption arc years ago, but continuing to give VR players a front-row seat to one of the best space sims that seems to never stop giving.

We could start a second paragraph, and talk about how studio co-founder and CEO Sean Murray seemingly made it a spiritual mission to make No Man’s Sky the game it should have been when it launched in 2016.

Or even a third, talking about the game’s recent updates, which offer mind-boggling expansion to the universe, including deeper ship and multiplayer systems, franchise-level settlement management, fun exploratory mechanics like fossils, and ongoing fixes that keep improving the base experience.

But we don’t do any of that. Suffice it to say: No Man’s Sky could have received this award multiple times over by now. And at this rate, it just might in the future.

HITMAN World of Assassination

Developer: IO Interactive

Available On: PC VR, PSVR 2

Release Date: March 27th, 2025

We couldn’t recommend anyone earnestly attempt to play Hitman in VR before its big PSVR 2 and PC VR update earlier this year. On the original PSVR, input was abstracted to the point it just didn’t feel immersive. On PC, it was an absolute mess. We’re not even going to talk about the standalone game for Quest.

But then developer IO Interactive got wise, and finally fixed the issue for its big PSVR 2 release of Hitman World of Assassination, finally making it a VR adaptation of the game that actually didn’t feel like a half-hearted attempt.

What’s more, those improvements eventually came to the PC version in September, adding Freelancer mode, Elusive Targets, and a host of more content, putting the PC VR version as the definitive way to experience Hitman in VR, but only by a hair.

Cave Crave

Developer: 3R Games

Available On: Quest, PC VR, PSVR 2

Release Date: June 26th, 2025

Cave Crave is like if The Climb decided that falling from a cliff face wasn’t scary enough. It needed to be more dangerous, more claustrophobic. More real.

And there’s something uniquely immersive about Cave Crave’s enclosed spaces. Although a majority of the game’s cave systems are entire works of fiction, featuring interesting biomes and different climbing challenges to players, in September the studio introduced its first map informed by a real-world cave: the Nutty Putty Cave system.

It’s the very same that was permanently closed up after the death of caver Jon Jones in 2009. Some may construe it as exploitative, but we don’t think it is. The free update to the game is remarkably well-informed and actually treats the tragedy with due reverence.

What’s more, the Nutty Putty update was largely informed by rescuer Brandon Kowallis, who not only gave pointers to the studio on cave design, but also included an audio guide companion that plays as users explore the now-closed cave system. In all, there’s something just a little more gripping here than your run-of-the-mill exploration game. Something that lasts with you well after you take off the headset.

Quantum Void

Developer: Tactical Nounours

Available On: Quest, Steam (coming soon)

Release Date: August 28th, 2025 (early access)

We don’t always reserve our Indie Development award for single-person projects, but when they’re especially impressive, and especially fun, we simply can’t help ourselves.

That’s Quantum Void, a space sim from single dev team Tactical Nounours that we could have sworn was developed by a whole team of seasoned VR veterans.

Yes, the game is still in Early Access, but it’s extremely impressive so far; it includes multiple endings, offering up multiple hours of gameplay so far in a full-realized universe that’s actually worth exploring and scrounging through. As it is today, it’s a very polished and ostensibly finished experience, which makes it even more exciting to follow.

Note: Games eligible for Road to VR‘s Game of the Year Award must be available to the public on or before December 19th, 2025. Games must also natively support the target platform as to ensure full operability.