Seventeen Free VR Halloween Games Came Out of a Jam Themed 'Graveyard Shift'

Storefront charts tell you which VR games sold. They say very little about what the people at the bottom of the ecosystem, the hobbyists and first-time developers, are actually building with, and a free three-week jam on itch.io is one of the few places where that shows up in public, build files and all. The VR IS DEAD Halloween Jam 2026, hosted by the YouTuber behind Fist Full of Shrimp, closed submissions at 11:59 PM Pacific on October 22 with 17 entries, every one of them free to download. VR.org's Halloween calendar listed the jam on October 9, when 57 people had signed up.

The jam page never states its theme in text. It sits in an image under the Theme heading, a dripping green and white card that reads Graveyard Shift beside a gas station sign, and the entrants took those two words in both directions at once.

Some went to the cemetery. Kick the Bucket VR seats you in the cab of a rusty mustard-yellow backhoe as the night-time grave digger at a cemetery in the early 1990s, with five graves to finish before the sun comes up at 6:00 AM, a supervisor named Earl on the CB radio and a box of mixtapes somebody left behind, while The Catacombs makes you the watchman on All Hallows Eve, feeding resin into lamps that a ghost keeps blowing out. More of them took the shift. Deliverboo is an e-bike delivery run from 8 PM to 2 AM on Halloween night, Candlelight: The Melting Shift hires you as a security guard at a run-down wax museum, Koko Cane follows an underpaid clown who beats spectres back off a ghost train with a cane, and No Smoking at the Gas Station is a night shift spent putting out fires. The Spook Store staffs a shop across the road from a graveyard. Weekend Rush locks you inside an office when the building seals itself after Friday overtime, and Haunted Cleanup VR, a sweep-and-scrub job in a haunted house, relabels the itch.io launch button on its page to read Run job.

That is nine of the seventeen putting the player on the clock in some form. Kick the Bucket commits hardest, with a start menu headed A Graveyard Shift whose first option is Clock In, a shift-length line reading Full Shift: 12.5 Min, and a vignette toggle, the standard comfort fix for moving a seated player through a world, sitting one line below it.

What the builds say about the toolchain

Five entries name Godot on their pages, in itch.io's Made with field, in their tags or in their descriptions, and three of them (Deliverboo, Candlelight and Haunted Cleanup) credit Godot XR Tools, the community library of ready-made VR scenes that sits on top of the engine's OpenXR support so a jam team is not writing locomotion and object pickup from nothing. One names Unity: Princess Sakura's Eternal Battle, which is also the only entry built for Google Cardboard, and whose page points out that the APK will run on an Android phone as a split screen, just without the stereo, if you have no viewer. The other eleven do not say. For anyone who watched small developers price out the runtime fee Unity announced in September 2023, five to one is not a surprising ratio, even with that many abstentions.

The platform split follows the host's FAQ, which told entrants to aim for as many headsets as possible and to consider both a PC build and an Android build. itch.io's filter on the jam counts twelve Android builds and eleven Windows builds, and eight entries ship both. The host's own entry, Kawaii Zombie Makeover, in which you apply makeup to a zombie because you procrastinated your way out of a better internship, is an untagged APK that only works with hand tracking, and it was submitted thirteen minutes and thirty-one seconds before the host's own deadline.

Two entries went past what the FAQ asked for. Deliverboo, its developer's first finished game, uploads an Arm64 build next to its x86_64 Linux, Windows and Android builds, and tags its page steam-frame. Beak & Bone, a two-player co-op puzzle game about plague doctors who can cooperate only through their masks, heavily inspired by the We Were Here series by its developer's own account, ships Linux ARM and Windows ARM builds alongside the usual pair. Valve's Steam Frame runs an ARM build of SteamOS and leans on FEX to translate x86 code when a game has no ARM version, so an Arm64 export is the one that skips that layer. Neither page says the build was tested on a Frame. Haunted Cleanup is the one entry that needs no install at all: next to a Quest APK and a Windows build its developer labels untested, it ships a WebXR build that runs in the browser.

itch.io's AI disclosure field makes one more thing countable. Ten of the seventeen pages mark themselves AI assisted, all ten for code, four of them for graphics and three for sound as well. Four state that no generative AI was used, and three leave the field empty.

Candlelight is one of the four that disclaim generative AI, and its credits name the friends and family who voiced its characters, with music and effects drawn from OpenGameArt.org and Freesound. ChrisLHall, who made Haunted Cleanup, wrote on Candlelight's rating page that "the sounds and voice acting are outstanding" and that "the wax figures are really scary, especially when you encounter them behind you or around a corner," before adding that the story was a little too big for a short game.

The pages are candid in a way store listings rarely are. The Spook Store's developer asks players to leave a comment if it does not work, "as i was unable to test it due to hardware incompatibility." Haunted Cleanup warns that the game freezes a few times as shaders compile on first look around a level, and that its developer has not finished the Manor level and is not certain it can be completed. Duneadaim, who made Trick or Yeet! VR, an eleven-wave tower defense game in which you are the front-yard decoration scaring off trick-or-treaters, replied to a player on its rating page that "tuning a tower defense game is way harder than I thought it would be," which anyone who has balanced an economy curve against a deadline will recognize.

Koko Cane paints its whole control scheme on the front of the ride (walk the yard, board the car, pull the trigger, one lap, ride again), describes itself as a dark ride with no gore, and has its developer's control notes posted in the comments, including pressing both thumbsticks to reset your view. The rest of the field is Cursed Vessels, a Windows game about finding the dangerous dolls in a house and burning them in the fireplace; The Last Ritual, a short one about placing a clock, a key and a candle in a coffin in that order; Agent of C.H.A.R.M., a Godot shooter demo set during orientation at a mysterious organization; and graveyard Shift, an APK whose page carries no description at all.

The jam is not the end of the road for at least two of them. Agent of C.H.A.R.M.'s developer plans to keep working on it after the rating period, and Beak & Bone's enjoyed making it enough to start building toward a full game.

How to play them

What you need: nothing to buy, and no itch.io account to download. For the headset builds, a Quest in developer mode, which Meta requires a developer team and a one-time account verification to switch on, plus a USB-C data cable and a computer running the free SideQuest app. For the PC builds, a PC VR setup running SteamVR.

1. Pick an entry from the jam's submissions page. The full list is here, and every link goes to the developer's own itch.io page. On the pay-what-you-want entries, the button reading No thanks, just take me to the downloads gets you the files for nothing.
2. Unzip anything zipped. Koko Cane, Kick the Bucket and Deliverboo upload their Android builds as .zip files, so pull the .apk out first.
3. Turn on developer mode. Per Meta's device setup page, create or join a developer team and verify your account, then open the Meta Horizon phone app, tap the headset icon and your headset, choose Headset Settings and switch Developer Mode on.
4. Connect the headset. Plug it into the computer with the USB-C data cable, put it on, and choose Always allow from this computer when it asks about USB debugging.
5. Install with SideQuest. Get the desktop app from SideQuest's setup page and drag the .apk onto its window.
6. Launch it from Unknown Sources. Sideloaded apps sit under Unknown Sources in the headset's library, not with your store games.

• No sideloading: open Haunted Cleanup's page in the headset's browser and press the button that reads Run job.
• PC VR: extract the Windows build, start SteamVR (or Link, if you are using a Quest as a PC headset), then run the game's .exe.
• Two players: Beak & Bone has no single-player mode, and hosting a lobby needs both players signed in to Steam unless you share a network. It also plays flat on a monitor.
• Phone: Princess Sakura's Eternal Battle installs on an Android phone, with or without a Cardboard viewer.

These are three-week builds from hobbyists, and several say so up front, so download only from each entry's own itch.io page and expect rough edges. The jam rules require anything potentially sensitive to be flagged in the game's description; Haunted Cleanup, for one, lists "a little bit of blood" among its features. Meta's setup page also notes that developer mode is "intended for development tasks such as running, debugging and testing applications," which is a fair description of what playing a jam entry and leaving its developer a bug report amounts to. If you would rather have finished horror from a store, our best VR horror games guide is organized by headset.

Only entrants can rate, per the notice on every submission, but anyone with an itch.io account can comment, and on the morning of October 24 no entry had more than two ratings. Voting closes at noon Pacific on October 29. The FAQ says ratings are based on the files submitted during the jam itself, so if a developer posts a fixed build this week, the one being judged is still the original.