Our XR News Roundup is back once more, featuring more recent news stories across VR.
With VR gaming this week, we demoed Stellar Cafe from former Owlchemy co-founder Devin Reimer. The VR Games Showcase had reveals for Glassbreakers, Street Gods, Tracked, Forefront, Ready or Not, and more. Elysian is the first WebXR game on the Horizon Store, and BeamXR Live now lets you livestream Quest games without a PC. Finally, Penguin Festival will no longer launch on the Horizon Store following a Reuters report on Meta AI.
For hardware and app development, David Heaney shared his impressions of two prototype Meta headsets codenamed Boba 3 and Tiramisu. Meta’s new Quest Runtime Optimizer for Unity helps developers identify performance bottlenecks. Adobe Substance 3D Reviewer launched on Quest, while Niantic’s Spatial SDK v3.15 now supports Quest 3 and 3S.
If you’re wondering where this weekend format has been recently, I can only apologize for its absence. Even with summer typically being a quieter time for VR, that hasn’t stopped there from being plenty of news to cover this last month. We likely won’t be doing another edition for the next few weeks, since I’ll be attending Gamescom and Venice Immersive.
As a reminder, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter to keep up to date with what’s happening, and our latest articles page has more. For now, here are a few further stories that recently caught our eye.
New Exoshock Trailer Confirms Fall 2025 Launch
Inspired by Halo and Gears of War, Exoshock is a grimdark co-operative sci-fi shooter for up to four players. While we previously knew it was targeting a 2025 launch, a new gameplay trailer from developer Polarity One and publisher VRAL Games confirms it’s now targeting this fall on Quest and PC VR. A flatscreen mode and PS VR2 port are also planned.
Sandbox Sim Slime Lab Launches in January on Quest & Steam
Slime Lab is an upcoming VR sandbox from two-person studio Retrocell. As the name implies, you’re given a lab where you can experiment with slimes by mixing, stretching, adding different colors, and combining them. You can see this in action above, and it’s launching on January 28, 2026, for Quest and Steam.
nDreams Showcased More Reach and Grit & Valor – 1949
During the VR Games Showcase, nDreams released new trailers for two of its upcoming games, Reach and Grit & Valor – 1949. Though the latter’s trailer was considerably more brief before it launches next week, Reach offered a closer gameplay overview highlighting what to expect before its launch later this year.
Narrative Shooter The Phoenix Gene Added bHaptics Support & Difficulty Modes
Launched this June on Quest, The Phoenix Gene is a third-person narrative on-rails shooter inspired by Star Fox and Ikaruga. Its latest major update recently went live, which introduced native bHaptics support, three difficulty modes, 11 subtitle languages, and more.
Multiplayer Platformer GRAB Gets Sound Blocks in Latest Update
Following last month’s major social 2.0 update, multiplayer platforming game GRAB released its new Sounds update last week. This now includes sound blocks with audio sliders to create different effects, alongside the new ability to unlist saved levels so they don’t appear on your profile.
Other Updates
After even more news? Here’s everything else we’ve seen.
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