Cult VR Hit Thrasher Is Ditching The Helmet For An Upcoming PC Release

Whatever you think of VR games, there’s at least one genre they do better than any traditional flat screen could — super trippy games all about overwhelming your brain with surreal visuals and music. It’s why Tetris Effect hits so much harder in VR, and what makes Beat Saber a mainstay even years after its release. But one of the trippiest music games of all is about to see whether it can retain its brain-melting magic when it makes the leap to Steam (and Steam Deck) without VR.

Developer Puddle’s Thrasher seems like an especially difficult game to bring down from three dimensions into two. Created by a team including the creators of the VR cult classic Thumper and Rock Band VR, Thrasher takes full advantage of the uniquely transportive powers of virtual reality. Thrasher puts players in the wriggly role of a shimmering amorphous serpent that grows from something resembling a metallic worm to “a magnificent space eel,” as Puddle puts it, by completing levels. It resembles Thrasher or even Rez, where players navigate surreal spaces in tune with thumping music, but it’s a much different experience in practice.

Thrasher is designed from the ground up to take advantage of VR. Each level is a single screen full of mesmerizing visuals, and players control its space eel by simply waving their VR controller through the air to guide its movements. Rather than following your movements directly, the eel has a sense of drag and inertia, making your arm-waving inputs feel less like taking direct control and more like guiding its path. Combined with the all-encompassing feeling of being strapped into a helmet and surrounded with the game’s sights and sounds, learning how to work with Thrasher’s undulating protagonist is a psychedelic delight. It’s a sensation that’s hard to imagine translating into any non-VR platform, even if the single-screen setup of its levels could lend itself well to flat screen formats.

Puddle says the PC version will enable control of the space eel with either a joystick or a mouse, and one place where the new version could be a genuine improvement is in a graphical update taking advantage of the more powerful hardware and larger screens of gaming PCs compared to VR headsets.

That makes it all the more interesting to imagine how the new port will pull it off. Thrasher’s arrival on PC includes a version that’s still playable in VR (previously it was only available through dedicated VR headset storefronts), as well as the brand-new 2D release. The PC port was announced at Day of the Devs: San Francisco edition, as part of the Game Developers Conference, but as of yet it doesn’t have a release date.

While the new 2D version of Thrasher has only been announced for PC so far, it doesn’t seem out of the question that it could come to other platforms as well. The PlayStation 5 has its own VR accessory, after all, and Thrasher could be a natural fit for PSVR if that launches alongside a 2D version for consoles. Then there’s of course the elephant in the room when it comes to so many upcoming releases — the Switch 2. Again, there’s no confirmation that Thrasher will ever make its way from PC to consoles to begin with, but Nintendo’s brand-new handheld being revealed very soon, it’s entirely possible that the reason Thrasher’s 2D version doesn’t have a release date yet could be that it’s waiting for Nintendo to announce the Switch 2 launch date first.

Regardless of whether Thrasher makes the leap to consoles, it will be interesting to see how its new PC version pans out. It’s a game that takes full advantage of the absorbing nature of VR, which will inevitably have to change for the 2D release. Whenever it’s released, if that transition is pulled off well, it could make for an enthralling music game for a whole new group of players.