I spent the better part of a year waiting for Silksong like everyone else, then a few more weeks inside it on a monitor before I ever put a headset on. I thought I knew Pharloom. I didn’t. The first time I loaded SadMonsterParty’s 2D-to-VR mod and watched Hornet drag herself up that bone-pale ridge in the opening, I sat back in my chair. It was a stage — a hand-painted diorama with actual volume, and I was leaning over it like a kid at a museum display case.
This is a dedicated mod, not a framework profile, and that distinction matters. Silksong runs on Unity, so UEVR was never on the table — there’s no Unreal engine to hook. Someone had to build the stereoscopic 3D pipeline by hand, and SadMonsterParty did: per-eye rendering, head-position tracking, the whole conversion. Getting it running takes four moves. Install BepInEx first — the base mod loader — then copy the OpenVR DLL out of your SteamVR install into the game’s root folder, drop the mod’s own DLL into BepInEx’s plugins folder, and launch SteamVR before the game. None of it is black magic, but it’s not a one-click install either; budget yourself twenty minutes and a second monitor for the file copying. There’s no Quest build and no PSVR2 build — this is PCVR through SteamVR, full stop, tested on an Index. That’s the entire reach, and it’s enough.
The first surprise is how much the depth changes the read. Pharloom is built as a side-view world, so the mod doesn’t drop you behind Hornet’s eyes — it parks you in front of the scene and lets your head move through it. Lean left and the foreground cobwebs separate from the painted stone behind them; lean in and the layers of a bell-tower interior fan out into real space. The actual play stays on the gamepad — every dash, pogo, and silk-thread yank is the same muscle memory from the flat version — but the camera is yours now in a way no monitor ever allowed. The creator speedran the entire game under five hours from inside the mod, so don’t let anyone tell you this is a tech demo you can’t finish.
What’s genuinely good here is the art paying off in a way flat screens never delivered. Team Cherry hand-paints everything, and Silksong’s backgrounds are dense — vines, bone architecture, dust, distant lit windows in a far cavern. On a monitor that’s a beautiful flat picture. In the headset it’s a layered world you can almost reach into, and the scale finally reads. A tall chamber that looked like a wall of texture on my laptop became a genuine drop I had to crane my neck at. The animation — Hornet’s needle-work, the way enemies coil and snap — lands with the same weight, just now surrounded by space instead of pressed against glass.
The mod is also shockingly stable for a one-person conversion. I cleared hours across multiple biomes without a crash, and the head tracking never fought me. Independent VR channels have been just as taken: Stereo3DPlays called it “shockingly great in VR,” Paradise Decay opened his look with “I would not have believed it either.” NotAGameAddict’s install walkthrough frames it as straightforward and beautiful, and AboveTuna’s “I turned Silksong into a 3D game” is the whole pitch in one title. A handful of separate creators, none affiliated with the mod author, landed on the same word: beautiful.
The comfort story is the quiet win. This is a third-person, static-camera diorama. Your head moves; the world doesn’t lurch under you. There are no artificial locomotion mismatches, no vection tricks, no sickening swings — I played long sessions without a single queasy moment, and the community comfort listing rates it casual. If you’ve ever bounced off a VR game because the movement made you ill, this is the rare one where that simply isn’t the enemy.
Where it stumbles
The honest caveat is embodiment. The mod gives you a head-tracked camera and real depth, but it does not give you Hornet’s hands. Combat and platforming are still pure gamepad — and Silksong’s platforming is precise enough that you would not want it any other way, because motion-control swinging through a needle-thread dash would be a disaster of input lag. So what you gain is presence at the viewing level, not control. You’re not Hornet. You’re the director leaning over the set. For some people that’s exactly the charm; for someone hunting full-body VR Metroidvania embodiment, it’s the line they won’t cross.
This is a free mod on top of a paid game, maintained by one person, not a studio. It means the version you grab matters. There are a couple of build numbers floating around in the listings, so pull the current one from the Nexus page or the Flat2VR Discord before you install rather than trusting a stale link. A dedicated mod like this lives or dies on its latest build; the early ones were rough, and the one that lets someone speedrun the whole game is the one you want.
The bottom line
Silksong was already one of the best games of its kind, and this mod doesn’t try to reinvent it — it just opens the world up. You’re still playing the same brilliant, punishing, gorgeous Metroidvania on a gamepad. But you’re playing it in a space that has depth now, where the art you admired on a screen becomes a place you’re standing in front of. That’s a real thing. It’s not embodiment, and I won’t pretend it is; if you need Hornet’s hands to be your hands, wait for the day someone builds that, and it may never come for a 2D title like this.
For the VR owner who already loves Hollow Knight, or who wants to experience Pharloom at its most present without buying a second copy on another platform, this is an easy recommendation with one clause attached: you’re getting a beautiful window into the world, not a body inside it. Grab the mod, set aside twenty minutes for the DLL shuffle, and lean in. The painted stone is waiting.