Trickster VR: Co-op Dungeon Crawler

Introduction

Trickster VR sends one or more players into procedurally generated floating-island dungeons armed with swords, bows and magic to fight off orc hordes. Developed and published by Superstatic, it spent years in Early Access before reaching a full 1.0 release on Steam on 15 January 2019 at NZ$15.99. Seven years later, its 381 English-language reviews sit at 86% positive, Very Positive. This review read all 54 negative reviews in that sample alongside a range of the positive side.

A real fanbase, when the mechanics cooperate

Despite everything detailed below, this review found genuine, sustained enthusiasm in parts of the sample. "I play this game almost everyday. It's a challenge, fun, and I get to move around," reads one review from a player with 188 hours logged. Another calls it "a hidden little GEM," praising a "wisely tuned combat system" and online co-op specifically as "just a BLAST." Melee weapon feel draws real, specific praise too — one reviewer contrasts it favourably with games where "they seem to phase through on hit, like in Skyrim" — a notable claim given how often the opposite complaint appears elsewhere in this same sample.

Locomotion complaints, unchanged across seven years

The single most dominant, consistent theme across this negative-review sample is VR movement and control-scheme design. "What in gods name are these options for movement??? completely terrible," reads one. Another, more specifically: "why allow us to move with the left thumbstick and turn with the right thumbstick? Why let us move and turn the same way we've been doing for 22 years since Goldeneye?" Several reviewers report the scheme actively causing motion sickness — "the worst motion sickness I've experienced ever... refunded," reads one. What makes this pattern notable rather than simply a subjective taste issue is how identically it recurs across reviews written years apart, including one explicitly labelled "Review for U29" — the game's final recorded update — reporting no improvement since an earlier version.

Hit detection and specific hardware gaps

Nearly as widespread is a cluster of hit-detection complaints: "arrows hitting walls as the hit boxes are so wide," "your weapons and attacks can just phase through walls and enemies," "enemies walk right through you, stand inside of you." A separate, specific and important complaint concerns controller support: multiple reviewers report Valve Index (Knuckles) controllers are effectively broken, with touchpad input conflicting with stick input in ways that make basic movement unreliable, and a separate reviewer reports Windows Mixed Reality controllers, including the Reverb G2, aren't supported at all. A documented memory leak compounds these problems for several reviewers, who report needing to restart the game roughly every 20 minutes to keep playing.

Checking whether any of this was ever addressed

This review checked Superstatic's own public update history given how consistently these complaints recur. The record shows a steady stream of updates through the game's development — U22 through U29 — but the last of them, "U29: A New Home," was posted 17 May 2019, four months after the game's full release. Nothing has followed since. That timeline matters directly for the controller complaints above: Valve Index shipped in mid-2019 and the HP Reverb G2 in 2020 — both after Trickster VR's last update — meaning the specific compatibility gaps reviewers report for that hardware have had no opportunity to ever be patched. A live concurrent-player check for this review returned zero.

Verdict

Trickster VR has real, dedicated fans who find genuine, sustained enjoyment in its co-op combat, and this review found their enthusiasm to be sincere rather than incidental. But this review's full read of its negative-review sample confirms a specific, severe, and — critically — unaddressed set of locomotion and hit-detection problems that recur in near-identical form across seven years of reviews, compounded by controller-support gaps for hardware the game was never updated to support. Worth a steep-discount look for VR co-op fans with period-appropriate controllers; a poor bet at full price for anyone with modern hardware.