Until You Fall [VR]

Until You Fall is a physically active hack-and-slash roguelite built exclusively for VR, developed by Schell Games. The core loop is deceptively simple: you pick up two weapons, wade into waves of magic-infused creatures across a series of escalating arenas, collect upgrade currency when you inevitably die, and push a little further on the next attempt. What keeps that loop breathing is the physicality of it. Blocking is not a button press. You move your actual arms to parry incoming strikes, dodge telegraphed attacks by shifting your body, and land hits with the kind of committed swing momentum that makes your shoulders know they did something. After thirty minutes your arms feel honest. The aesthetic does real work here. Schell Games committed to a synthwave fantasy world with full sincerity, which is rarer than it sounds. Hot pink runes glow against obsidian architecture, the enemy designs read as genuinely strange rather than generic dark-fantasy filler, and the soundtrack pulses with the kind of relentless electronic energy that makes you want to move. It is the sort of sound design I usually only hear in games from one developer who clearly loves a specific era of music and refuses to apologize for it. The world coheres because every visual and audio choice points the same direction. The weapon variety is where the build curiosity lives. You can mix and match from swords, axes, claws, rapiers, and staffs across your two hands, and each weapon class carries different attack rhythms and special abilities that charge through combat. Pairing a heavy cleaver with a fast off-hand rapier produces a genuinely different physical experience than running twin axes. Upgrade nodes between runs let you specialize into particular weapon synergies, critical hit windows, or ability cooldowns, which means repeated deaths feel like research rather than punishment. The criticisms worth knowing: the game's progression can plateau in the mid-tier difficulty brackets, where runs start feeling repetitive before your upgrades open enough variety to refresh things. The arena environments, while beautiful, are relatively few in number, and if you are someone who needs constant visual novelty to stay engaged, you will feel that ceiling. The run length is also quite short by roguelite standards, which is actually a feature in VR context since physical fatigue is real, but players expecting a sprawling 45-minute gauntlet will find it compact. What the game does is surgically well-fitted to its format rather than sprawling and hoping something sticks. For VR, Until You Fall is one of the clearest examples I know of a studio actually designing around the medium instead of porting an idea into it. The parry system would not work with a controller. The physical feedback of committing your whole arm to a heavy swing would not survive translation to a thumbstick. This is a game that exists precisely because VR exists, and it earns that distinction. If you have a headset and even a passing interest in action games, this sits comfortably at the top of its category.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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