Trippy arcade shooter Polybius comes to PC with VR support

Jeff Minter's trippy tunnel shooter Polybius has wriggled free of its Sony exclusivity and is now out on Steam. You can play it on a normal monitor but if you have an Oculus Rift S, one of the best VR headsets, you can also play in VR, which Minter says is the best way to play.

You pilot a ship through 50 psychedelic levels set to a trance-y soundtrack, blasting enemies and dodging dangers. You can fly through boost gates to increase your speed—the faster you go, the higher your score multiplier, but the harder it'll be to avoid trouble.

Powerup pills will give you special abilities, such as slowing down time, super-speed or invincibility. You won't come across any bosses and you'll never have to redo sections if you die, the idea being that it'll bring you a "euphoric flow state, and keep you there the whole time you are playing". Who doesn't want that?

It has three modes: normal is the most forgiving, and lets you restart any level you've reached, complete with your best-ever lives and score total. In Pure mode, you start from the beginning of the game and see how far you get, while in Endurance you get a limited number of lives.

It was well-received on PS4, and the Steam reviews are already looking positive. If you want in, it's $18/£14.

And if you're looking for other games for your headset, we just published our list of the best VR games of 2018.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.