I didn’t expect a speedrunning shooter about collecting the souls of demons in Heaven to be a VR natural. Neon White is built around two-second-to-two-minute levels, a gun that’s also a jump, and a leaderboard that dares you to shave milliseconds. On a monitor it’s a precision puzzle box. In the headset, through Raicuparta’s HeavenVR mod, it becomes something closer to physically living inside a speedrun — and I’ve lost track of whole afternoons to it.
A community conversion, done right
HeavenVR is a community mod, not an official mode. Angel Matrix never shipped VR support, and there’s no engine-injection path that would make sense here: Neon White runs on Unity, and a generic injector couldn’t supply the motion-controller aiming this genre demands. What Raicuparta built instead is a proper full-motion-control VR conversion. The README is blunt about it — full motion control support, a 6DOF stereo camera, smooth and snap turning, handedness options. There’s even a small touch that tells you how seriously this was taken: the mod adds weapon models to a game that shipped without them, and it maintains separate VR-specific leaderboards on Steam so headset runs don’t pollute the flat leaderboard.
Install runs through the RaiManager installer on itch.io and is guided rather than fiddly, but it’s still a community project: you pick your OpenXR runtime, you confirm your game version, and you accept you’re riding on someone’s spare time. The mod is actively built and maintained — support is routed through the Flat2VR Discord, which is also where you go if a profile or version issue shows up. It runs through OpenXR on PCVR — Oculus, SteamVR, or Windows Mixed Reality — and streams cleanly to a Quest over Link, Virtual Desktop, or ALVR, so Quest owners with a PC are covered.
A speedrun you can physically feel
The core loop is the entire point, and it lands harder in VR than I expected. You hold a card in each hand. In Neon White your weapons are demon souls you discard to fire, then throw away to dash. In the headset, flicking a card to shoot and snapping it away to dash feels like the game was built for it. Aiming is real: you point, the gun tracks your controller, and the precision the flat game demands becomes something your hands understand without a reticle doing the work. The parkour — wall-runs, slides, vertical climbs — reads as physical motion, and your body leans into lines you’d otherwise just be watching.
The levels are short by design: thirty seconds of perfection, reset, “one more.” That structure is exactly why this works in VR when longer games wear you out. You’re not committing to an hour; you’re committing to a run, and the headset sells the speed in a way a monitor can’t. Comfort-wise, the high-speed locomotion is intense on the stomach, so the built-in snap turning is your friend if smooth movement gets to you.
The leaderboard proves it’s real
The transformation is real. This isn’t a flat game wearing a headset — the motion controls change how you play it. Speedrunners have already taken it seriously; there’s WR-level play happening inside the mod, which is the clearest signal that the controls aren’t a novelty gimmick but a genuine competitive surface. When a mod generates its own high-level leaderboard culture, the implementation earned it.
It’s also a near-perfect marriage of form and medium. Neon White’s look — clean anime-styled kills, bright Heaven sets, snarky visual-novel framing between runs — reads genuinely good in stereo, and the short-burst structure means the intensity never overstays. You can put the headset on for one level and surface two hours later, which is the exact trap the flat game sets and the headset makes worse in the best way.
The honest catches
It’s a mod, and that carries the usual asterisks. Setup is moderate, not beginner-proof, and you’re depending on a community project for updates and compatibility. One concrete limitation: on the Game Pass / Microsoft Store version, leaderboards are disabled entirely. Steam is the version that gets the full feature set, so buy there if VR leaderboard chasing matters to you. And the game’s own thinness doesn’t disappear in VR — the story beats are skippable fluff for most players, and the depth lives in the leaderboard, not a campaign. That’s fine; the game knows what it is. Just don’t show up expecting a narrative to carry you.
If you like arcade shooters, speedrunning, or the feeling of a tight mechanic you can feel in your hands, HeavenVR is one of the better full-motion-control mods you can grab right now — a perfect “just one more go” VR game, provided your stomach signs off on the speed. Get it on Steam, install through RaiManager, and point your controllers at Heaven.