Why Does In Death's Free Wave Mode Now Cost $11.99 on Its Own? Superbright Says Nobody Could Find It.

In Death: Siege of Heaven went up on the Horizon Store today at $11.99, and nearly everything in it has been free since December 2020. It is a wave defense game. You stand in one place with a bow and stop everything that walks toward you. Superbright has rebuilt the mode as its own app, separate from In Death: Unchained, the 2020 Quest release it still lives inside. The store page lists Quest 3 and Quest 3S.

First-person view over a drawn bow inside a ruined gothic cathedral in Siege of Heaven, with figures climbing the steps toward a lit stained glass window — Watch: In Death: Unchained - Siege of Heaven: Desolation Update - Quest 2 Gameplay on YouTube →

The loop is short enough to explain in one paragraph. You shoot a church bell to start a wave, then hold a line against whatever the map sends at you. One headshot kills anything, which sounds generous right up until the flyers arrive and the summoners start duplicating everything you missed. Long shots and shots threaded through gaps score higher, and fast kills chain into combos, all of it laid out in UploadVR's 2022 hands-on. Let too many through and the run is over. Eight maps, an Easy and a Normal difficulty, global leaderboards.

What the paid version actually adds

This is not a straight copy of the DLC. Superbright says it rebuilt the mode on Mobile HDR, a rendering path that carries a wider range of brightness values through the pipeline before the final image is mapped to the display, and that it now runs at 90Hz, according to the release notes Road to VR published this morning. There is a new 3D lobby, a tutorial the first time you open the shop, and music that shifts with the waves. Leaderboards restart at Season 1, which puts a player who has been grinding the DLC since 2021 level with someone who installed the game this afternoon.

None of that costs you anything to ignore. If you own In Death: Unchained, the mode stays in it, stays free, and loses nothing. What you are being offered for $11.99 is a better-looking, separately listed version of something you have had for years, plus a leaderboard that starts even. For a lot of existing owners that is a bad deal, and the studio has not pretended otherwise.

Four arrows in flight across a sunlit gothic courtyard toward a cloaked enemy in In Death — Image: In Death (2018) on Steam / Sólfar Studios

The reason is the store, not the game

Superbright CEO Wojtek Podgorski explained the move in a Discord post last week, which UploadVR reported on November 4. The problem, he wrote, is that "outside of our community, almost nobody on Quest knows Siege of Heaven exists." A mode that lives inside another app has no store page of its own. No listing, no screenshots, no review score, no search result, nothing to wishlist. A standalone app has every one of those. "Releasing Siege of Heaven as a standalone title is a realistic way for us to reach new players," he wrote. Players had asked for a paid DLC instead, but for a smaller team, building one from scratch is "a huge undertaking," and "we just don't have the manpower to do it." To owners who would rather keep playing the mode inside Unchained, he was plain about it: "you don't need to buy a thing."

Discoverability has been eating small VR studios all year. Mighty Coconut said in September it would lose ten more people and named the thinning flow of new Walkabout Mini Golf players as the cause. Pricing keeps getting pulled apart along the same seam: Meta dropped Beat Saber to $19.99 in August and left its 270 paid add-ons at full price, and CharacterBank launched Knights of Fiona free-to-start with an $18.99 Story Pass, four years after selling RUINSMAGUS for $34.99 up front. Each studio found a different lever. A listing on the store does work that a menu item inside an older app simply cannot do.

A pale, bald enemy swinging a glowing spear in blinding light beneath a white stone arch in In Death — Image: In Death (2018) on Steam / Sólfar Studios

In Death started on Steam in October 2018, a PC VR roguelite from Sólfar Studios that still lists at $29.99. Superbright built the Quest version, In Death: Unchained, in 2020. Siege of Heaven arrived there as free DLC that December. Nearly six years on, the free part is the product.

Buy it if you do not already own Unchained and want fifteen minutes of archery without committing to a roguelike run. Skip it if you do own Unchained and do not care where your name sits on a leaderboard. One more thing to know before you pay: the store lists Quest 3 and 3S only, while Unchained, still $29.99, also runs on Quest 2 and Quest Pro.