There’s a moment about ten minutes into Castlevania: Simon’s Destiny where you’re holding the Vampire Killer in one hand, cracking it across a skeleton’s ribs in first person, and the side-scroller you remember is gone. You’re standing in Castle Dracula’s entrance hall, and the whip is actually in your hand. That’s the pitch: a free, fan-made, first-person rebuild of the 1986 NES Castlevania, and it plays in VR.
On paper it shouldn’t work. Castlevania is a game about timing and spacing — a fixed jump arc, a whip with a committed wind-up, enemies that punish you for moving a half-step too early. Flatten that into first person and the maths of the original should fall apart. What Batandy built instead is one of the better fan translations in VR: a total conversion that keeps the castle, the enemies and the deliberate rhythm of the original, and then stands you inside it.
What Castlevania: Simon’s Destiny actually is
Castlevania: Simon’s Destiny is a fan-made total conversion for the Doom engine — specifically GZDoom — that rebuilds the first Castlevania in first person. It is not a Konami release and it never pretended to be. It’s the work of a single developer, released free through itch.io, and that origin story explains both what’s impressive about it and what’s rough around it.
The Doom-engine part matters more than it sounds. Because the game runs on a source port, it inherits an entire ecosystem of community work — and that ecosystem is the only reason a 1986 side-scroller can be played in a headset at all. There is no official VR mode here and no studio patch coming. The VR comes from the port, not the game.
Two ways to play Castlevania in VR: GZDoom VR and QuestZDoom
This is the part that makes the page worth writing rather than just linking a download. You have two real routes into the castle, and they land in different places.
On PC, you run the game’s files through a GZDoom build with OpenVR support — the Fishbiter weapon-pack lineage — which gives you stereo rendering and a tracked controller in your dominant hand. On Quest, Team Beef’s QuestZDoom launcher pulls the mod down and runs it standalone, adding two-handed grip and haptic feedback.
Both deliver full 6DOF head tracking, stereo depth, and motion-controlled weapons. The Quest build trims normal and specular maps and drops a few props to keep the framerate honest on standalone hardware, which sounds like a bigger compromise on paper than it is in practice — mid-whip, you will not be counting texture layers.
Playing it: the whip, the castle, the combat
The whip is the whole game, and it translates better than you’d expect. In first person you get reach, a wind-up you have to commit to, and a crack that lands where you aimed it — which turns Castlevania’s most distinctive mechanic into something physical rather than something you time against a sprite sheet.
The castle holds up too. The series’ gothic vocabulary — torchlit halls, stairwells that spiral out of sight, the sense that the building itself is hostile — reads differently when the ceiling is above you instead of behind a HUD. Fan projects often get the geometry right and the mood wrong; this one understands that Castlevania’s atmosphere was always doing half the work.
What you lose is precision. A fixed jump arc is legible in two dimensions and considerably less so when you’re judging distance in stereo, and some of the platforming that felt automatic in 1986 asks for a beat more care here. It isn’t broken. It’s a translation, and translations have accents.
Controls, comfort and how it runs
Input is fully motion-controlled — the whip lives in your dominant hand, and the Quest build’s two-handed grip and haptics are the physical layer that sells it. There are no motion-controller workarounds to speak of, because there’s nothing to work around: this was built as a controller-in-hand experience, not adapted into one.
Comfort is genuinely good. You’re moving and turning smoothly through corridors rather than being yanked through artificial locomotion, and the result sits in comfortable territory rather than demanding your sea legs.
Performance is the pleasant surprise. The Doom engine is decades old and runs on almost anything, which makes this one of the lightest VR titles on the site. The Quest build’s asset trimming exists to protect that headroom rather than to rescue it, and the PC route has room to spare on mid-range hardware.
Is Castlevania: Simon’s Destiny VR worth playing?
It’s free, it’s faithful, and it does something the official library never did: it puts you inside the first Castlevania rather than beside it. That alone earns the space it takes up.
The caveats are structural rather than accidental. It’s short. It’s built by one person, and single-developer scope shows in the enemy variety, the animation, and the edges of the castle. And the installation is a genuine barrier that will stop anyone who wants a store page and an install button — the whole route runs through Doom engine tooling before you see a single torch.
If you grew up on Castlevania and you already run a Doom port on your headset, this is an easy afternoon and a small delight. If you want a polished, native, officially supported Castlevania in VR, this is not that and was never going to be. Recommended with caveats, and worth the whip.