Dark Trip is out. The gothic horror escape room by iWorlds launched on October 29, right in the middle of Steam Scream, Steam's Halloween horror festival. On Steam you can play the whole game on a monitor or in VR, and the Meta Quest version, which has been growing in Early Access since February 2025, launched alongside it.
I joined the iWorlds team in February to work on the Steam version, so this release is a big one for me too.
What is Dark Trip?
You play an investigator hired by a retired businessman whose only daughter has vanished in a small German town. The trail leads to a seemingly abandoned laboratory full of grotesque biomechanical machinery, occult devices and disturbing art, and room by room you uncover what the experiments there were really about.
The twist is the pills. Some clues simply don't exist while you're sober. Take a pill and the room changes: hidden objects, messages and mechanisms appear, and you have to decide when to trust what you see and when to break your own perception on purpose. In the words of Andrey Klenin, the game's creative director, the hallucinations are "not decoration — they are a gameplay mechanic".
It's a game for adults. Drugs are part of the gameplay and the themes get dark, so check the content notes on the store page before you jump in. It also won the Game Roast at DevGAMM Gdańsk 2025.
My part: Dark Trip without a headset
Dark Trip was built for VR. My job on the Steam version was to make it playable without a headset too, while keeping the VR version on PC. On Steam, the same game now plays in all of these ways:
- PC VR, through SteamVR or Meta Horizon Link.
- Mouse and keyboard, as a classic first-person game on your monitor.
- Gamepads: Xbox and PlayStation controllers both work.
- Steam Deck, so you can take the laboratory to the sofa.
The part I'm happiest about is the controller support, because once a game plays well with a gamepad, it can go places you wouldn't expect. I've been playing Dark Trip on Android, on my AYN Odin 3 handheld, through GameNative and other apps that let you play your Steam library on Android. Those are community tools, not an officially supported platform, and how well they run depends on your device. But it works. If you try it on a handheld or an emulator, I'd love to hear how it runs for you.
Where to play
Dark Trip is on Steam for PC, flat or in VR, and on the Meta Horizon Store for Quest 2, 3, 3S and Pro. On Quest it's also part of the Trinity of Escape Rooms bundle, together with Exit Condition One and my own Oldest Golden Treasure: three very different escape rooms in one bundle.
A big thank you to Alexander, Andrey and everyone at iWorlds for having me on board, and to everyone who played the Early Access and the Steam playtest. If you play it, tell me which way you played: VR, keyboard, controller or handheld.