VR horror RPG Left-Hand Path screams out of Early Access

The idea of a VR horror game terrifies me—I have enough trouble making it through a horror game in a well-lit room with my own music blaring. But as an example of the genre, Left-Hand Path seems a decent one, and has been getting good user reviews on Steam. It blends VR horror with RPG elements inspired by the Dark Souls series into a 15-hour story in which you cast spells by drawing runes in the air with your hands.

It's been bubbling away in Early Access for the past year and a half but now it's properly arrived, and its full release packs a bunch of new features including a 'Low Terror' mode for people that "don't love being scared out of their wits". That sounds more my speed. Leaving Early Access also means a reduced-difficulty story mode, a tutorial and overhauled graphics.

The game is only for people with a full room-scale VR setup because it requires gesture input. "You'll gesture to cast spells, squat to avoid an axe larger than your whole body, dodge to let arrows whizz past you, duck to look into secret passages, hook hidden items into view, and more," developer Strange Company explains.

That might put it out of reach for a lot of people, but I think it's still worth knowing about. It's pretty rare to get a fully fleshed-out VR game of this length. The variety of spells sounds impressive, from raining down lightning strikes and meteor showers to summoning an army of screaming skulls.

If you've got the hardware then it might be worth considering. It's £23.79/$29.99 on Steam.

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.