Phasmophobia’s latest big update launched earlier this week, giving everyone’s favourite jump-scare simulator a major VR overhaul and some much needed quality of life improvements.
In this week’s episode of VR Corner (above), you can watch me put Phasmophobia’s new and improved VR gameplay to the test as I try out a trio of terrifying hunts.
Along with support for all major headsets and various bug fixes, update v0.6.00 also makes playing in VR a much less clumsy experience than it was before. One of the most noticable changes is that the walkie-talkie and ghost hunting journal now have dedicated slots on your belt, which is something that removes a lot of the issues players had in the past when it came to grabbing them from their shoulders.
Other improvements to the VR systems include a dedicated steated mode, a left handed mode, new hand animations and improved throwing physics. Plus you can now align your player character model with your real-life body using Height Calibration, which (sadly) means that VR players will no longer have to crab walk awkwardly around the maps.
There are various other updates and new additions for the game that you can read about in the game’s patch notes, but for this episode of VR Corner, I mainly wanted to see if the changes had improved the notoriously janky VR experience.
And they do! While the update itself leaves the core gameplay feeling more or less identical to how it was before, the VR overhaul felt like a definite improvement. Holding, dropping, placing objects and especially passing then between hands is so much easier after the update. I still fumbled quite a bit with opening doors though as for some reason my hands slipped off the grab points really easily. The player height when in seated mode also felt a bit off and, as you can see in my video, I towered above the ground when I selected it, which made it especially hard for me to cower inside the lockers.
Phasmophobia then is still your typical Early Access game. It’s fun to play, but there’s that signature, rickity, unfinished air that you always tend to get from these works-in-progress. What’s nice about this update though is that it shows that the small development team behind the game hasn’t given up the ghost when it comes to improving the overall experience for both flat and VR players.
