I spent a night drifting a flying delivery car through a rain-slicked voxel megacity, and for the first time Cloudpunk stopped feeling like a puzzle box on a monitor and started feeling like a place I was parked inside of.
There’s no official VR version of Cloudpunk and there never was. The way in is a free community mod by Astienth that bolts proper 6DOF head tracking onto the whole game — the base campaign and the City of Ghosts expansion both. I’ll say that again, because it matters: this is a mod, not a port, and it’s the only reason this game is in a headset at all. VorpX could fake a stereoscopic window onto it a while back, but the dedicated mod supersedes that entirely. If you remember Cloudpunk as a VorpX curiosity, forget it. The new mod is the real article.
Getting it running is about as painless as mods get. Two zip files from the releases page — one for the base game, one for the expansion — dropped into the game folder beside the executable, then launch normally through Steam. It’s BepInEx under the hood, but you’ll never touch a config file unless you want to. No dependencies to chase, no loader to babysit. I had it running in the time it took to read the readme.
The camera is yours to move, and that changes everything. Cloudpunk was built as an over-the-shoulder courier sim, and the mod keeps that framing available — but nothing forces you to stay behind the character’s shoulder. You can bring the view in tight, into their eyes, and in a headset that reads less like toggling a setting and more like leaning forward. The option matters. For a game this obsessed with its skyline, the distance between you and the city is the experience, and here you get to set it yourself. Default it where you like, then forget it’s a mod at all.
The magic is in the space.
The part I kept coming back for is the HOVA — the flying car. Cloudpunk splits its runtime between piloting that thing through layered highway traffic and getting out to walk Nivalis on foot, and the two halves land completely differently in VR. Behind the controls of the HOVA, the city finally earns its reputation. You’re parked in the cockpit, the windscreen frames a wall of neon and rain, and the buildings don’t recede into a flat backdrop anymore — they’re arranged around you in actual depth. Banking through a gap in the traffic with your head turned to track a billboard you’ll never read feels like something the flat version was always approximating and never delivered. The flying is the reason this mod exists.
Down on the street, you notice what’s missing
The on-foot half is where you notice what isn’t there. Walking Rania through back alleys and rooftop bars, the world is still gorgeous in depth and turning your head to take in a cramped noodle stall or a rain-streaked window is genuinely better than flat — but you’re leaning around inside the scene rather than handling it. There are no hands. You can’t reach for a drink, prop open a door, or rest your elbows on the counter of a bar you’re standing in. A story this talky wants you present for its conversations, and the headset puts you there, but the conversations still happen to you rather than with you. That’s the ceiling of a mod that rebuilt the camera without rebuilding the input layer, and it’s the honest reason the flying half sits a step above the walking half.
The honest catch is your GPU
Performance is the one place you might have to touch a config file, and it’s far less punishing than the mod’s own README makes it sound. The author is blunt — they tell you outright that Cloudpunk is heavy in VR — but that warning is written for the densest possible city, and in practice this lands as a moderate ask rather than a brutal one, especially for a full-game VR mod. The pressure point is density: traffic and crowds are the killer, which is awkward, because the city’s whole personality is its density. The good news is that the two provided knobs actually solve it, and both are one-line edits in the BepInEx config rather than an evening of tinkering. A divider thins the vehicle and pedestrian count — put a 2 in it and you halve the city — and a boolean kills the rain falling in front of you. Both cost atmosphere, but the difference between a smooth cruise and a slideshow is a single digit. I ran the rain and thinned the traffic, and that was the sweet spot.
Comfort is a non-issue here — it’s seated, gamepad-driven play with a manual recenter button (the Menu action, which is the gamepad Start button or Escape on keyboard), so you can snap the view back whenever the camera drifts. No motion-control surprises, no sudden locomotion shocks. The mod author is explicit about that: no motion controller support, gamepad or keyboard and mouse only, and gamepad is the path they actually recommend because the mouse cursor doesn’t even show up under keyboard control.
What works and what doesn’t
What works: the flying, obviously. The sense of scale when you crest a highway ramp and the whole tiered city drops away below you is the single best thing Cloudpunk has ever done, and VR is the first time it’s landed. The free price tag and the one-folder install mean there’s no reason not to try it if you own the game. The City of Ghosts expansion runs through the same mod with the second zip, so the whole package gets the treatment.
What doesn’t work: you never get hands. There’s no motion-control presence here, no reaching for the HOVA’s controls, no leaning into a conversation. You look, you steer with a stick, and the game plays itself in front of you. That’s the ceiling of a mod that rebuilt the camera without rebuilding the input layer from scratch — and nobody has, because the author drew that line on purpose. If you came to Cloudpunk for the driving and the world-watching, you’ll be thrilled. If you came for presence and agency, you’ll feel the gap.
The VorpX path is a historical curiosity at this point. It rendered a stereoscopic window onto the flat game years ago and a few people filmed it looking “spectacular,” but it had none of the integration the dedicated mod brings, and it’s been superseded. Don’t bother.
Who this is actually for
If you already own Cloudpunk and you’ve ever thought the city deserved better than a monitor, install this tonight. It’s free, it takes two minutes, and the flying alone rewires how the game reads. If you already own Cloudpunk and you’ve ever thought the city deserved better than a monitor, install this tonight. It’s free, it takes two minutes, and the flying alone rewires how the game reads. If you’ve never played Cloudpunk, the VR mod is a good reason to finally do it — buy it knowing the best half is the part where you’re in the car, and that the walking is beautiful to stand inside but light on interaction. This is a world worth putting a headset on for.