To many, Palworld is the Pokémon game Nintendo should have made but didn’t, as it launches you into an open-world environment where you can battle and hang with some very pocket monster-inspired creatures. Thanks to a free mod though, you can already jump in head-first with your PC VR headset or Quest with Link.

There are a number of concerns when playing Palworld through Praydog’s UEVR mod for PC (link below), which lets you play Unreal Engine 4 or 5 game in VR.

Flatscreen games like Palworld, which notably weren’t made for VR from the ground-up, typically need some level of attention to adapt it into playing how you’d expect. You can spend some time in the UEVR settings to get things just right, like deleting your avatar’s head to have the perfect first-person POV, or you can download a community-sourced player profile, which includes all of the necessary settings for Palworld out of the box.

That said, it’s not exactly a native VR gameplay experience, as it’s not tuned at all the sort of constant object interaction you’d expect to do in VR (item holsters, inventory, manipulating stuff, etc). Still, the Internet’s hottest not-Pokémon game shows some pretty compelling results when paired with UEVR. Check out this gameplay video from YouTuber ‘LunchAndVR’ to see it in action:

UEVR has a ton of features, bringing what we’d consider to be more than basic playability to non-VR UE4/UE5 games. Among its many baked-in capabilities is support for 6DOF head movement, full stereoscopic 3D, frontend GUI for easy process injection, support for both OpenVR and OpenXR runtimes, and optional 3DOF motion controls, which the mod’s creator Praydog says essentially emulates a “semi-native VR experience.”

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If you’re already sold and you’re ready to hunt some Pals, make sure to have a PC copy of Palworld, download Praydog’s UEVR mod from GitHub, and join the Flat2VR Discord channel (invite link) for that player profile I mentioned above.

Remember, you’ll need a PC capable of playing VR games. Find out if your PC is capable of playing VR games here.

What’s your favorite UEVR-modded game? Let us know in the comments below!

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • MackRogers

    Palworld is awful

  • Xron

    Quite interesting, just hope people wont get motion sickness in this game…

  • VR5

    What’s your favorite UEVR-modded game? Let us know in the comments below!

    I haven’t played that many yet since I’m not trying them for the novelty but want to actually play them. I bought Stray during a sale in ’22 and High On Life during a sale last fall, both with the intent to play them with the mod. Regarding Stray I was way too early, HoL just right.

    HoL I was interested in because I liked all of Squanchgames’ VR titles and VR is actually my favorite medium for Roiland’s humor. HoL being first person there is no way I would play it without VR. Turning on a screen and aiming with a mouse, or worse, a stick, I can’t imagine myself doing. Unfortunately I could only clear a few missions before getting stuck again due to crashes. Already got my money worth though. Still hoping I can clear it some day.

    I was in the process of playing Wrath II when the mod released so I waited until I beat the first hero’s saga and wanted to fit in HoL before continuing. Which I did but I didn’t get to clear it before resuming Wrath II.

    So after I cleared all of Wrath II next I started Stray. 3rd person games don’t absolutely require VR for me but of course they’re better that way. Performance is good on my 3060/12GB, no need to reduce resolution. Some weird lighting/reflections only in one eye at the beginning but that stopped after being separated from the other cats.

    Need for frequent stick turning is making me slightly queasy and so far I have only played shorter sessions of up to an hour. HoL was more comfortable turning naturally in first person, even with worse performance.

    I like both but Stray has nicer graphics and gets points for only crashing when I close the game so that isn’t annoying and doesn’t get me stuck.

    • Brian Elliott Tate

      For Stray (and other 3rd person games if you have an issue with motion sickness), make sure you turn on snap turning and also turned on decoupled pitch. Both those should make it much more comfortable to play.

      • VR5

        Yeah I set decoupled pitch (forward/backward then zoom the distance to the cat instead, which is also somewhat nauseating). There being a snap turning option is very useful also.

        Smooth turning was really one of the worst sickness triggers when I started out, and I was very surprised that it seemingly didn’t have an effect anymore when some games I played years later only had smooth turning and I found that it didn’t even trigger a slight response.

        The pitch manipulation did really get me though and nausea from smooth turning can still build up. But on my third session it wasn’t a problem anymore and I fortunately don’t need the snap turning.

        My advice to newbies that struggle with motion sickness is, keep trying games that trigger you once in a while but also find games that are just comfortable and which you can play without worrying. And although it is likely you’ll build a tolerance, there’s no guarantee so don’t rush out and buy games for the mod, instead start with ones you already own.

  • david vincent

    Yay, RoadToVR finally talks about UEVR, only 3 weeks after its launch.

  • david vincent

    From what I saw from Palworld, the combat is chaotic (not what you would expect from a Pokemon game) and the building part is lacking. But a least it looks less grindy than Ark.