Among more than 9,000 games on Steam, Valve’s VR title The Lab is heading the platform’s list of top rated games.
Valve’s The Lab is a free VR-only title that offers players eight short room-scale experiences which range from photogrammetry to castle defense with a bow and arrow. For many with the HTC Vive, the game has become a go-to starting point to introduce friends and family to VR thanks to its polish and breadth of experiences.
The Lab has topped Steam’s list of top rated titles, beating out other Valve classics like Portal (2007) and Portal 2 (2011). To date, 99% of the game’s 717 reviews are positive, giving the game a review rating of “Overwhelming Positive”.
The game is currently joined among Steam’s top 10 best rated games by Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, a well regarded title that also supports VR, though not exclusively. Just last week, VR exclusive title Raw Data found itself at the top of the Steam Top Sellers list.
There’s a number of arguments could be made to challenge The Lab’s appearance in the top rated spot on Steam. For one, it has the least reviews of any game in the top 10 and its ratings are likely helped by the fact that it’s free. However, we can see that it’s still managed to beat out the free game Iron Snout, and doesn’t have that many fewer reviews than the next fewest of the top 10 (Bit Blaster XL) which has 933 reviews at the time of writing. In the end, the most simple explanation may be the right one: people like VR.
Valve says they’re continuing to work on their own first-party VR content, but they’re not saying what exactly will come next.
“We are certainly continuing our work to expand Steam VR for developers and aspiring content creators, and working on our VR content. But we have no specific announcements to make today,” Doug Lombardi, Valve’s VP of Marketing, tells Road to VR.
Last month The Lab saw a feature update which added leaderboards and unlimited play to several of the title’s minigames, adding significant replayability for those who like to battle for the top score.
