Twelve Free Horror Worlds Are on Show in VRChat Until Monday, and One Has 1.09 Million Visits

Twelve horror games from a four-week player jam are sitting in a row inside VRChat right now, free to enter, and that row comes down at 2pm Pacific on Monday, November 2. They are the world winners of Spookality 2026, VRChat's yearly Halloween contest. You do not need a headset for this. The jam post said "Worlds MUST be cross-platform (PC, Android & iOS!)", so a phone will get you in.

The theme was Camp Whispering Screams, a tribute to 80s horror. Every world needed a Safe Zone, somewhere you can run to and catch your breath. You will spot the rule at work below in OVERDUE's lantern and the campfire in AFTER THE FIRE.

One world took most of the visits

VRChat's public API reports a visit count for each world. A visit is a trip in, not a unique person, so a group that replays a round adds to it. On October 31 the twelve winners had about 1.79 million visits between them. DEADLIGHT had 1,089,843 of those.

That is 61 percent of the whole list, and ten times the next world down, Zombies of VRC at 106,756. The smallest winner, EEK! Shadow Creatures!, has 14,291.

Favorites run the other way. They are Hunting You has 2,209 favorites on 21,589 visits, about one for every ten trips. DEADLIGHT gets one for every 32.

VRChat showed its top three worlds on a Twitch stream on October 24, and we could not find that order in writing. Its forum post lists the twelve alphabetically. Its own Spookality winners page puts DEADLIGHT, OVERDUE and MOSSMOUTH first, without calling that a ranking.

Pick by the night you have

These notes come from each world's own listing, not from our own play time, so read them as what the makers promise.

A few friends and under an hour.

• OVERDUE by randomlight1. Camp Hollow Pines, 1983, and the library stays open late. Your lantern only burns outside the Reading Room. You hunt requested books, spot the fakes, and stand still when the Counselor starts counting. Two to six players, 30 to 45 minutes, no HUD.
• Lunar Falls: BlackMoon by Salena and Popstep. A town, an old legend and one instruction: stay in the light. About 30 to 40 minutes, with a cap of six.
• AFTER THE FIRE by Pasyl. It is 1987 and five campers have vanished. You find their photos in the forest and carry them back to the fire, alive. Korean, Japanese and English.

A long haul.

• MOSSMOUTH by flipbits. You are a search and rescue diver looking for a missing boy, and you run into things "that were never meant to be found." One to two hours, inspired by SOMA. It is flipbits' first adventure map, "pieced together from the corpses of previous adventure map attempts," which is the best sentence in the whole jam.
• They are Hunting You by Bella Strange~. A rhythm roguelite for up to 16, pitched as fear of dolls, Crypt of the NecroDancer and Weeping Angels in "a big, strange blender." A full run is 21 rounds and about an hour, and you can save mid-run. Strobe lights and insects can be switched off in the menu.

A crowd.

• DEADLIGHT by team BombaeVRC. Co-op survival horror for up to 12, in six languages.
• Zombies of VRC by SilentLurkers. Endless waves, guns, doors, and reviving downed friends, with room for 35.
• Sanguisthesia by Superfriend. A fiend that only sees movement lives in the wells. Seal them with rituals, or play the fiend and drag your friends down. Room for 32, and the listing names 29 languages, including TOK, the code for Toki Pona.

Something stranger.

• 八字 by Pache1bel. Four players at most. It is built on the Eight Characters, the Chinese birth-date system, and the bone-weighing method named for Yuan Tiangang.
• Spider Veins: PROJECT AUGUST by rollthered. An Antarctic research facility where management has gone missing. Its tags read John Carpenter and PS1, and you can guess the movie.
• TERRAMINE by DeMünu. You are a technician sent to fix mining robots, and you are told not to be late. Eight players, with handmade models and textures by _Kokos_.
• EEK! Shadow Creatures! by honsler. A flashlight, a dark facility and a maze. Its listing says no generative AI was used.

How to get in

What you need: a free VRChat account and a Quest, a PICO headset, a PC with or without VR, or an Android or iOS phone.

1. Install VRChat. It is free on Steam, the Meta Horizon Store, PICO, Google Play and the App Store.
2. Open the winners list. VRChat's winners page has an Open in VRChat button on every world, which brings it up in your game menu. The same twelve sit in a world row inside the app until Monday.
3. Start an instance. An instance is one live copy of a world. Join a public one to play with strangers, or make your own and invite friends.

If a world refuses to appear, check your filters. Four of the twelve carry VRChat's content labels. 八字, Spider Veins, AFTER THE FIRE and TERRAMINE are all labeled for horror, the first two for gore as well, and Spider Veins for adult themes too. Content Gating, under Comfort & Safety in Settings, hides anything you have filtered from menus and search.

Entry is free, but three winners are flagged as monetized worlds and can sell in-world items: DEADLIGHT, Sanguisthesia and Zombies of VRC, the last with 49 products listed.

If you are reading this on Halloween

VRChat's event schedule has a DJ night tonight at 5pm PT at Camp Whispering Screams, the Spookality hub world, with four DJs "and maybe a special guest." Visiting the camp today also earns a camp-themed hat. It is the last of four hat days, so go even if you are skipping the music.

The twelve winning avatars have their own row too. Retail Zombie by Octuplex and Pedro the Cat by HTDuy are both on it, and I am not going to tell you what to do with that information.

Monday only takes down the rows. VRChat says nothing about removing the worlds, and all twelve are published as public, so a world you miss this weekend should still be there later. For anything you would rather buy, our VR horror guide sorts the paid games by headset, and the Halloween calendar has the rest of this week's dates.