Phasmophobia Replaced Its Whole VR Character Rig, and Half the VR Fixes Are Doors

The character rig is the part of a VR game you stop noticing when it works. It is the skeleton the game hangs on your headset and controllers. It decides where your elbow goes when your hand is here, how far your arm reaches before it stops, and what everyone else in the lobby sees when you crouch behind a sofa. In Phasmophobia v0.19.0.0, which Kinetic Games shipped on August 25, that skeleton is new.

Phasmophobia key art for the Quality of Life Update Part 2, with ghost hunting equipment hung across a dark pegboard wall — Image: Phasmophobia / Kinetic Games (Steam)

Kinetic said so two weeks ahead of release. From the preview post on August 11: "With this Quality of Life update, we're completely replacing the VR character rig across all platforms. This means more responsive movement in-line with your own body's, improved accuracy on the character model to match player's arm length as well as an overall improvement to visuals of the character model when playing with VR users."

The release notes give all of that one line under Changes: "Improvements have been made to the VR character rig, allowing for more accurate and responsive movement." Read alone, that sounds like tuning. The August post is where the word replacing appears.

Arm length is the one that matters

Your headset and two controllers give the game three real positions. The rest of your body is inverse kinematics, the engine solving backwards from your hands to a pose that could have produced them. Elbows, shoulders, spine, all of it is a guess. When the model's arms are a fixed length and yours are not, the guess is off in a way you feel before you see it. You reach for a door handle. Your hand arrives near the handle instead of on it.

Matching the model to your own arm length is the correction for that. Kinetic also lists a visual pass on the character model, and that one is for the people watching you rather than for you.

Five of the ten VR fixes are doors

The VR Fixes section runs to ten entries. Half of them are doors.

Opening doors was harder than intended. The reticle, the marker telling you what you are about to grab, displayed wrong when you reached for one. Hand animations broke on tent doors. Doors shoved open with a camera-mounted tripod triggered culling in multiplayer, the rendering shortcut where the engine skips drawing what it thinks you cannot see. A ghost opening a door would push you out of its way.

A dim hallway in Phasmophobia with two doors standing open over patterned carpet and a glass-paned door at the far end — Image: Phasmophobia / Kinetic Games (Steam)

The other five are the rig showing through. Tripods lagged for other players while you carried them. The Parabolic Microphone's headphones blocked your view. Hands drifted while you walked holding an item. Bodies jittered while crouched in multiplayer. Teleport locomotion refused to work while you held a walkie talkie.

One more sits outside the VR section. Under Player Fixes: hands were moving more slowly than the camera, producing visual lag and stutter. It is filed as a general fix. Hand lag is worse in a headset than on a monitor.

What is still open

Three entries in the Known Issues list carry a VR label. Head gear can fall off if another player closes a door on you, which makes six. Character profile pictures come up blank when someone joins a lobby. And if Immersive Animations is on when you die, your ragdoll appears distorted and contorted.

A dark living room in Phasmophobia with a sectional sofa, floral armchair, floor lamp and a glass coffee table holding two mugs — Image: Phasmophobia / Kinetic Games (Steam)

The list does not say when any of the three started, and the third is the one to watch. Immersive Animations drives the character model. The character model is what just got replaced. A distorted ragdoll on death is the shape of thing a new rig introduces. Kinetic has not said either way.

Playing it in VR

There is no separate VR edition. The Steam listing is tagged VR Supported rather than VR Only, so $13.99 buys one game you can run flat or in a headset, tracked controllers either way. On console the VR route is PSVR2 on PS5, patched alongside everything else. Version 0.18.0.0 in July adjusted the PSVR2 player list popup.

Report bugs to the studio rather than the forums. The preview post sends VR players to Kinetic's Help Centre. That reaches the people who rebuilt the rig. A Steam thread does not.

Phasmophobia is number five on our ranking of VR horror games. It is also one of the few flat PC games that ship VR support in the box instead of through a mod, which is why it sits in the built-in section of PCVR Central's catalog.

A rig replacement never shows up in a trailer. It shows up the fifth time you reach for a light switch and your hand lands on it.