The Steam Frame's First Halloween: 189 Certified Games, and None of Our Ten Scariest

I went looking for Phasmophobia first. October started this morning, my Steam Frame reservation is still sitting in Valve's queue with no purchase email attached to it, and the one useful thing I can do while I wait is plan what goes on the headset when it shows up. So I opened Valve's Great on Frame list, 189 certified games as of today, and searched for the one I would want on Halloween night with three friends and a bad idea.

Not there. Worse than not there.

Phasmophobia has a Steam Frame rating in its app record, and the rating is Unsupported. One test, dated July 22. One result line: UnsupportedGraphicsPerformance, the same token Valve hung on its own showcase, The Lab, a week later. On the Steam Deck the same game is rated Playable.

That sent me back to my ranking of the ten scariest VR games with the same lookup open in another tab. None of the ten is certified.

Where the ten actually stand

Two were never eligible. Resident Evil 7's VR mode only ever shipped on PlayStation VR, and Resident Evil 4 VR is a Quest game. Neither exists on Steam in a headset.

That leaves eight. Phasmophobia is the only one Valve has rated at all. The other seven are MADiSON VR, Alien: Rogue Incursion, Half-Life: Alyx, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, Five Nights at Freddy's: Secret of the Mimic, Into the Radius 2 and Metro Awakening, and none of them carries a Steam Frame compatibility record in its app data. No rating of any kind.

A blank is not a failing grade. It means Valve has not published a verdict, and plenty of unrated games will run. It also only describes what plays on the headset itself. Anything streamed from a gaming PC over the Frame's wireless adapter sits outside the program entirely, so if you own that PC, all eight of these behave the way they do on any other PC VR headset and you can close this tab.

The people this matters to are the ones buying a Frame as their only machine. For them the badge is the shopping list. And the shopping list has a hole where the horror aisle should be.

One exception is hiding in the box. Half-Life: Alyx runs on the Frame with no PC in the room, a copy comes with every headset, and it still is not on the certified list. Which means the Jeff chapter, number four on my ranking and the reason I once tiptoed across my own living room, is on every Frame Valve ships. The scariest hour a PC-less owner gets on day one lives in a game Valve has not rated.

What is certified and will still get you

Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is the real one. Its certification test is dated August 18, its app record points at Lepton, Valve's Android runtime, and it lists at $29.99, marked down to $19.49 when I looked this morning. In April I wrote that I would play it with the lights on. I did. They stayed on.

Then there is Ravenholm. Half-Life 2: VR Mod cleared certification in August, it costs nothing, and the town you were told in 2004 not to go to is in it. I have played that chapter in the mod. It works as horror for a reason nobody designing it twenty-two years ago could have planned: the gravity gun is the main weapon, so every kill begins with you pointing your own arm at a saw blade lying on the ground while something shuffles closer. Episode One is certified too. Episode Two is not on the list.

Getting it is the easy part. It installs from its Steam page like any other game. The catch is ownership: the mod is free, but it needs Half-Life 2 in your own Steam library, and a family-shared copy does not count. The team keeps setup notes on its own site.

Deadly Delivery is the multiplayer pick more or less by default. I have not played it, so this is the store page talking: up to six delivery goblins hauling parcels into haunted mines, online co-op, $9.99 at list, 90 percent positive. Horror is its second Steam tag, right behind VR, and Comedy is its third, so expect something closer to a scream-and-laugh than a scare. With Phasmophobia off the table it is the certified answer to what four of us play on the 31st.

Zombies are covered. Arizona Sunshine 2 and the Arizona Sunshine Remake are both certified, if shooting the undead in broad desert daylight counts as Halloween in your house.

The flatscreen half of the shelf, which is now 102 of the 189, arguably does better than the VR half. DREDGE is a fishing game that turns Lovecraftian once the sun goes down. INSIDE is Playdead being Playdead. Both are certified, and both play on a virtual screen inside the headset, which is not what anybody bought a VR headset for and is still a perfectly good way to spend a night in late October.

Steam's tags will not help you sort any of this. Horror is the third tag on Job Simulator. Psychological Horror is the second tag on Gorilla Tag. Both certified. Draw your own conclusions about who is doing the tagging.

My favorite find sits one tier down. eversion, a 2010 platformer that opens looking like a children's game and does not stay that way, got a Steam Frame test dated September 29 and landed in Playable, held back by controller glyphs. It has a result. Alien: Rogue Incursion does not.

The Phasmophobia rating is older than the game it describes

Here is the detail that keeps me from writing Phasmophobia off. Valve's test is attached to build 24297525. The build on Steam this morning is 25327237. In between, on August 25, Kinetic shipped v0.19 and replaced the entire VR character rig. The Unsupported rating describes a version of the game nobody can install anymore.

That does not mean a retest passes. The failure was graphics performance, and a new skeleton does not make a Snapdragon render faster. Valve's bar for VR titles is 72 frames per second at 1728 by 1728 per eye, on a phone-class chip, in a game that can put four players, a ghost and a house full of physics props on screen at once. I have played it in a headset. The moment the lights die and your own voice becomes the thing giving you away is still the best multiplayer scare in VR. I would not want to meet it at half the frame rate.

Nothing arriving this month changes the picture yet. Shil reaches Quest on October 8 with its Steam date still unannounced, and Dark Trip lands on Steam on October 29 with VR support and no Frame rating so far.

So this is the plan, whenever the email comes. Ravenholm first, because it is free and certified and I already know it works. Then Jeff, because he is in the box. Then Little Nightmares with the lights on again, and Deadly Delivery if I can talk three people into buying a headset, which I cannot. It is a better Halloween than the shelf suggests and a thinner one than a $1,059 headset ought to have. I would still like one green checkmark next to Phasmophobia before the 31st.