You’re strapped into a theater seat, a bomb ticking under the armrest, and you can’t move. Not your legs — the game won’t let you. But your hands? Your hands are everywhere. You reach across the room, pluck a wrench from a shelf, yank a rope that puffs dust into the light, and palm a gadget you shouldn’t have access to. Two minutes later you’re dead, the curtain’s crushed you, and you’re already grinning because you almost had it. That’s I Expect You To Die 2, and the chair is the whole point.
This is a VR-native spy puzzler from Schell Games — no flat version exists, never did. You play a secret agent (call sign Phoenix) believed dead by the evil Zoraxis organization, working six missions to stop their play for world domination. It launched day one on Quest, Rift, SteamVR, and PSVR, and it’s one of the cleanest “put the headset on and play” experiences on any of those platforms.
What you’re actually doing
Every mission drops you into a single fixed location — a theater seat, a train car, a swanky party — and hands you telekinesis. You don’t walk. You reach. Grab distant objects, rotate them, pull them close, throw them, fumble with panels, and assemble ridiculous gadgets mid-panic. The genius is in the detail: raise a heavy curtain and the ambient room tone shifts as sound reaches your ear differently; shine a flashlight down and shadows stretch across the scene; open a locked drawer a crack and there’s something hidden inside. None of this is a gimmick — it’s what makes the world feel solid instead of paper-thin.
The game is built for sitting, and it’s comfortable the entire time — no artificial movement, no locomotion to fight, no motion sickness to manage. That’s not a weakness. It’s the design. You could hand this to a VR newcomer and they’d be solving crimes in five minutes.
Four ways in, all of them real
The 2021 launch hit every major VR storefront at once, which is rarer than it should be. On Quest it’s zero-config: buy it, download it, play it. Buy on Quest and you also own the Rift version through cross-buy, and vice versa — a nice perk if you’re in the Meta ecosystem. SteamVR supports the broadest hardware (Vive, Index, Windows Mixed Reality, anything SteamVR-compatible) and gives you the sharpest visuals on a decent PC. PSVR needs the PlayStation Camera and two Move controllers, the most gear-heavy of the four, but it runs fine on PS4 hardware. No matter your headset, you’re getting the same complete game.
The loop that will test your patience
Here’s the honest part: this is a trial-and-error game by design. You will die. A lot. Each mission is a clockwork puzzle where the first thirty to sixty minutes is pure experimentation — pulling levers, triggering traps, learning what kills you and what doesn’t. Once you crack it, the whole thing collapses into a four-minute sprint you can replay for speed. That loop is the entire appeal, and it’s a specific kind of satisfaction. When it clicks, it’s the best feeling in VR puzzling. When it doesn’t, when a solution feels arbitrary and the “die until you learn” rhythm grates, it can wear thin. Go in knowing the frustration is the point, and you’ll have a better time.
Why it sticks
The spy fantasy lands harder than it has any right to. Wil Wheaton plays John Juniper, a gloriously vain celebrity villain, and he’s one of the most fully-realized characters I’ve met in VR — every mission spins off his ego. The six missions are self-contained episodes, each with its own tone and set piece, stitched together by a story that actually has arcs and payoff. There’s hidden dialogue to trigger, souvenirs to collect, and speedrun paths to chase, so “solved it once” isn’t “done with it.” And the production values — the mocap, the sound design, the way objects respond — are a cut above the escape-room competition.
The real limitation
Six missions is a compact campaign. Five to six hours gets you through the story and most of the secrets, and once a puzzle is solved the urgency evaporates. The trial-and-error didn’t stop being fun for me, but I know players who bounce off the repetition. There are no comfort complaints to flag and no setup walls to climb — the only friction is the genre itself. You either love methodical, patient puzzling or you don’t, and this game commits to it harder than most.
Bottom line
For VR owners this is an easy yes. It’s comfortable enough to share with a curious friend, detailed enough to satisfy someone who’s played everything, and the spy fantasy is fully realized in your hands rather than described to you. If you played the first I Expect You To Die, the sequel is bigger, richer, and more confident. If you’ve never touched the series, this is the one to start with — it’s the standard other seated VR puzzles are measured against.