Climbey

Climbey
Information
VR/AR	VR
Developer	Brian Lindenhof
Publisher	ShadowBrain Games
Platform	SteamVR
Device	HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Valve Index, Windows Mixed Reality, Steam Frame
Operating System	Windows
Type	Full Game
Genre	Racing, Simulation, VR
Input Device	Tracked motion controllers
Play Area	Standing, Room-Scale
Game Mode	Single Player, Multiplayer, Online Multiplayer, Online Co-Op
Language	English
Review	Very Positive
Release Date	October 25, 2016 (Early Access); January 8, 2022 (full release)
Price	US$7.99 (Steam, October 2026)
App Store	Steam
Infobox Updated	10/09/2026

See also: VR Apps and VR Games

Climbey is a VR-only, physics-based climbing and jumping game for Windows PCs, developed by Brian Lindenhof and published on Steam under his label ShadowBrain Games. Players race through obstacle courses by grabbing walls with tracked motion controllers, swinging their arms to walk and flinging themselves into jumps, with the aim of reaching the finish as fast as possible without falling. The game includes 15 built-in introductory levels, a level editor with Steam Workshop support and online multiplayer for up to 10 players.

Climbey entered Steam Early Access on 25 October 2016 and left Early Access in January 2022; Steam lists 8 January 2022 as its release date. It runs through SteamVR and was updated over the years for Oculus Touch and Valve Index (Knuckles) controllers and, from 2025, Valve's Steam Frame, including native play on the headset and multiplayer eye animation from headsets that pass eye data through SteamVR.

Reviewed 9 October 2026. Steam store data (developer, publisher, release date, price, features, requirements, review totals), every cited Climbey Steam news post, and the MIXED, The VR Grid, VR Fitness Insider, Vivecraft and Metacritic pages were re-read against the claims they support. About review dates.

Gameplay

Climbey is a time-trial obstacle course game played in first person. The Steam store describes its controls as "physics-powered climbing and jumping controls that are easy to grasp but hard to master". Each level is a course of blocks and hazards that the player climbs, walks and jumps across to reach the finish; finishing times are recorded per level, and in multiplayer each player's time is shown after a playlist of levels is completed. In its 2018 review, The VR Grid noted that the built-in levels could be completed in about two hours and that the community was creating challenging levels on the Steam Workshop.

Controls and movement

The player grabs surfaces by pressing the controller triggers and can hang from one hand or both. The default way of walking is arm swinging: the player swings slowly to walk and pumps their arms to run. To jump, players vault themselves into the air with their hands; VR Fitness Insider described this as "as tricky as it sounds". Lindenhof tuned jump physics per controller over the game's life. In January 2017 he gave Oculus Touch users a small velocity boost on jumps, and in January 2021 he limited that boost to the original Oculus Rift CV1 so that other Oculus headsets were treated like the rest. The same January 2021 update made the physics update rate follow the headset's refresh rate during play.

On controllers with thumbsticks, the default SteamVR binding originally put rotation on both sticks and used grip-and-swing for walking. In January 2022 Lindenhof swapped the default to his alternative mapping, with rotation on the left stick and stick walking on the right, because players kept asking for stick locomotion, although he wrote that stick walking was "a lot less comfortable".

Level elements

Courses use a small set of block types. The VR Grid noted that surfaces the player cannot interact with have a checkerboard texture, while grabbable surfaces are pale white. Later levels add moving platforms, low-gravity areas and high-speed sliding surfaces. Hazards and objects were added through frequent early updates, including spikes and slippery slopes in October 2016 and lava and ziplines in December 2016. Players can also grab one another in multiplayer, which can be used to reach places a single player could not.

Multiplayer and game modes

Online multiplayer was available from the first Early Access build. Private rooms can only be joined by Steam friends, and a room closes to new players once a playlist starts. The room limit was four players at launch, rose to six in December 2016, and the default maximum went from 8 to 10 players in the December 2019 winter update. Hosts can skip a level for everyone still playing it.

A Capture the Flag mode was added on 22 June 2017. Players are split into two random teams and the first team to capture the enemy flag three times wins; hitting another player on the head stuns them for three seconds, blurring their vision and making them let go of whatever they were holding. Players carry a backpack that other players can grab, and it shows a badge for the headset each player is using. Seasonal updates have added Halloween lighting and costumes, winter snow with throwable snowballs, and in 2019 a sled that the player spawns by reaching for the backpack.

Level editor and Steam Workshop

Climbey ships with an in-VR level editor, and levels can be shared and downloaded through the Steam Workshop, including in multiplayer rooms. Editor updates added block grouping and saved groups, adjustable grid snapping and up to 20 checkpoints per level in February 2017. Players can also add their own 360-degree panoramas as custom skyboxes.

Comfort and accessibility options

For players prone to motion sickness, the store lists optional comfort settings: floor dots, field-of-view reduction and a spherical cage. A controller-directed walking toggle was added three days after launch. In November 2016 Lindenhof added an option to rotate in 45-degree steps with the touchpad, so the game could be played by people unable to turn their bodies; moving platforms were limited to 90-degree turns until a 2021 rework allowed 45-degree turns on them as well.

VR hardware support

At launch the controls centered on the HTC Vive wand controllers, whose touchpads are used to make hand gestures that other players can see. An update the day after release made hand gestures easier for players using Oculus Touch controllers. Lindenhof wrote in January 2017 that Touch appeared to lose tracking at around 10 to 11 meters per second of hand speed, while medium and high jumps on the Vive took about 13 to 14 meters per second. He added a Kalman filter to smooth the resulting jumps in Touch tracking. In January 2020 he adjusted the Touch bindings for trigger latency over Oculus Link, so that Quest users playing on PC got more reliable jump release timing.

Initial support for Valve's Knuckles prototype controllers was added in July 2017 before Lindenhof had the hardware, along with a configurable trigger release sensitivity. A September 2018 beta moved the game to the SteamVR Input system, which made Knuckles EV2 and EV3 controllers work without extra setup. In April 2019 the game gained a proper "OK hand" pose for controllers with finger tracking, such as the Valve Index controllers. The October 2017 Halloween update added support for Noitom Hi5 gloves through a launch option, along with headset badges for Windows Mixed Reality and Hypereal. In November 2016 Lindenhof also added a mixed reality camera mode that positions the external camera relative to a Lighthouse base station, so creators could record mixed reality footage without a third controller.

Climbey was never released on the standalone Oculus Quest; when Lindenhof added a Quest headset badge in May 2019 he noted the game was "not actually released on Quest". In 2021 he built a standalone version that ran natively on the HTC Vive Focus 3. It fetched custom levels from an external server rather than the Steam Workshop while still working with Workshop levels, and he named the Vive Business App Store as its first planned outlet outside Steam. In February 2023 he said he hoped to release on the HTC Vive XR Elite, adding that the game ran well on the XR2 chipset with full crossplay. He had also looked into a PlayStation VR2 version, but in June 2024 he wrote that the announcement of a PC adapter for PlayStation VR2 left "very little need" for a PlayStation 5 release.

Steam Frame and eye tracking

A December 2025 update added Steam Frame controller bindings and initial eye tracking support. Headsets that pass eye-tracking data over SteamVR Link through OSC, such as the Meta Quest Pro and Play For Dream MR, animate the player's eyes in multiplayer; at the time this worked only when the game was streamed through Steam Link. The same update made the game detect when it runs natively on the Steam Frame and switch to lower settings: minimum shadow resolution, no skybox clouds or snow, no spectator camera, and trigger-based grabbing instead of finger curls. Lindenhof reported that with these settings the game "generally" held 90 frames per second at about 40 to 50 percent render resolution, while still recommending PC streaming for the best experience. Because Climbey uses Unity 2019.4, he said a native OpenXR Android build would need a major engine upgrade, so on-device play relies on FEX.

Further updates in 2026 prepared the game for Steam Frame Verification and added Valve's vrpreferences.json file for a smoother out-of-the-box experience on the headset. On 2 October 2026 Climbey added support for eye-openness data over OSC, which Valve had introduced in SteamVR beta 2.18.2 the previous day. MIXED reported that the patch arrived 22 hours and 51 minutes after Valve's release, and noted that eye-openness data is enough for blinking and squinting animations but not for gaze-based features such as foveated rendering.

Development

Climbey is a one-person project by Brian Lindenhof, who publishes under the name ShadowBrain Games. A free demo went live on Steam on 15 October 2016, ten days before the paid Early Access release. The tutorial robot was silent at launch because its voice lines were not ready; about 20 voice lines explaining the controls were added the next day. Shortly after release Lindenhof wrote that he "had no idea how well this game would sell given the extreme locomotion".

The game is made in Unity. During Early Access it received frequent small updates, which Lindenhof aimed to ship weekly, and moved through several Unity versions, including 5.5.1 in February 2017 and 2019.4 in August 2020. In January 2022 Lindenhof announced that the game would leave Early Access at the end of the Steam Winter Sale, after which updates would mostly be limited to holidays, special events and critical fixes. He also said he had been doing a lot of work on Facepunch's S&box. Updates continued at a slower pace, including an update to Unity 2019.4.41f2 in December 2025 that he described as being for exploit prevention.

Release

Date	Event	Notes
15 October 2016	Demo released on Steam	Free demo
25 October 2016	Early Access release on Steam	Online multiplayer and Steam Workshop levels included
22 June 2017	Capture the Flag mode	First version of the team mode
30 September 2018	SteamVR Input beta	Out-of-the-box Knuckles support
2021	Vive Focus 3 standalone build	Native build with its own level server
8 January 2022	Full release (left Early Access)	Release date as listed on Steam
24 December 2025	Steam Frame update	Controller bindings, native-play settings, eye tracking over OSC
2 October 2026	Eye-openness support	Uses SteamVR beta 2.18.2 OSC data

The VR Grid listed the price as US$9.99 in its June 2018 Early Access review. In October 2026 the Steam store price was US$7.99.

Reception

Climbey has no critic reviews on Metacritic. On Steam, user reviews had an overall rating of "Very Positive" as of October 2026, with about 91 percent positive.

The VR Grid scored the Early Access version 8 out of 10. It called the game "a casual and fun experience that is just as fun to play alone as it is to bring out at a social gathering" and praised its multiplayer, but listed a repetitive single-player campaign, thin audio design and a small online player base as drawbacks. Writing for VR Fitness Insider in 2019, Richard Bashara reviewed Climbey as a workout. He felt it mostly in his arms and shoulders, but the squatting and reaching needed for long jumps made it feel like "a full-body session"; he described the game as suited to both casual play and intense speedrunning.

Influence

The Vivecraft mod, which adds VR support to Minecraft, released a "ClimbeyMotion" update in February 2017. It added a jump and free-climb mechanic that its developer described as "heavily inspired by Climbey", and changed the mod's existing run-in-place movement to steer by the average pointing direction of the two controllers, which the developer compared to Climbey's controller mode. The mod changed some details for Minecraft, requiring an extra button press for wall jumps and favoring faster continuous motion over one-to-one movement.

System requirements

	Minimum	Recommended
Processor	Any Intel Core i5 or AMD Ryzen 5	Any Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 7
Graphics	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070
Storage	500 MB	700 MB
VR support	SteamVR, standing or room-scale	Not listed

Requirements as listed on the Steam store in October 2026; user-created levels need additional disk space.