This Unreal Engine Mod Brings the Internet’s Hottest Pokémon-style Game to VR

Jan 22, 2024

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.”