Werewolves Within

Werewolves Within
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Information
VR/AR	Virtual Reality
Developer	Red Storm Entertainment, with Ubisoft Barcelona
Publisher	Ubisoft
Platform	Oculus Rift (Platform), SteamVR, PlayStation VR
Device	Oculus Rift CV1, HTC Vive, PlayStation VR
Operating System	Windows, PlayStation 4
Type	Game
Genre	Social VR, Casual, RPG, Simulation, Strategy
Input Device	Gamepad, Oculus Touch, SteamVR Controllers, PlayStation Move
Play Area	Seated, Standing
Game Mode	Multiplayer
Release Date	December 6, 2016
Price	US$29.99 at launch; US$19.99 on Steam and the Meta Horizon Store (October 2026)
App Store	Steam, Oculus Store (now Meta Horizon Store), PlayStation Store

See also: VR Apps and VR Games

Werewolves Within (listed on Steam as Werewolves Within™) is an online multiplayer social deduction game for virtual reality headsets, developed by Red Storm Entertainment, a North Carolina-based Ubisoft studio, and published by Ubisoft. Based on the party game Mafia, also known as Werewolf, it puts five to eight players around a campfire in the medieval village of Gallowston, where they argue over voice chat and vote on which of them is a werewolf in disguise.

The game was released on 6 December 2016 for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, with cross-platform play between the three headsets. Avatars are animated from each player's tracked head movement and from an analysis of the player's voice, and players lean toward a neighbor to whisper or stand up to command attention. The PlayStation 4 version holds a Metascore of 76 on Metacritic, and the game was later adapted into a 2021 live-action film of the same name.

Reviewed 12 October 2026. Fact-checked the merged page against the Steam, Meta Horizon Store and PlayStation listings, Ubisoft news posts, the Road to VR, Polygon, PC Gamer, WellPlayed, Nerdist and Game Chronicles previews and press releases, the Road to VR, UploadVR, IGN and Destructoid reviews, Metacritic, OpenCritic, UploadVR's film report and the Tribeca listing. About review dates.

Gameplay

Each match seats five to eight players around a campfire. Roles are dealt at random at the start of every round, so a player can be a villager in one match and a werewolf in the next. The villagers try to work out who the werewolves are, while the werewolves lie to survive the final vote. The game is a Social VR title built around talking to strangers or friends: players can be grouped into a Quick Match with other players or set up a Private Match with friends.

Each player has a guidebook that lists the roles in play, explains abilities and is used to mark suspects, use powers and cast the final vote. In the preview build, marking a player as suspicious placed an exclamation point over that player's head that everyone except the marked player could see. The discussion phase is timed. Polygon's preview described a five-minute round, while IGN's review of the release version reported seven minutes for discussion and voting, and noted that each game is a single round rather than the two rounds of the original party game.

Roles

Road to VR counted 11 roles in the release version. The roles described in previews and reviews include:

Role	Side	Ability or win condition
Villager	Village	Can join with other villagers to elect a Ring Leader, whose vote counts double
Tracker	Village	Leans left or right and hears a growl if a werewolf sits on that side
Watcher	Village	Learns two possible roles for another player, one true and one false
Gossip	Village	Learns one possible role for one of two players
Drifter	Village	Identifies two roles that are not present in the match
Saint	Village	Learns who the werewolves are; the werewolves win if the Saint is eliminated
Deviant	Village	Wins only by drawing the most votes, so the player has to act suspiciously enough to be voted out
Werewolf	Werewolves	Knows the other werewolves and can sense other players' roles
Turncloak	Werewolves	A human who wins if the werewolves win; knows who the werewolves are, but they do not know the Turncloak

Destructoid's review described four win conditions: the Deviant wins by tricking the group into voting for them, the werewolves win if the Saint is eliminated, and otherwise the village or the werewolves win depending on whom the vote picks. The preview build at the 2016 Game Developers Conference had four roles, with nine planned at the time, and allowed up to two werewolves per round.

Social mechanics

Leaning toward the player on either side opens a private whisper that nobody else hears. Standing up starts a speech mode that mutes everyone else; in the preview build, Polygon reported that this lasted 10 seconds. Ubisoft's announcement said the game combined voice detection, Red Storm's positional tracking technology and animations based on voice inflection analysis to reflect players' body language on their avatars. According to Polygon, the avatar's mouth moves as the player speaks and the tone of voice drives facial and body animation; players can also trigger canned gestures such as pointing or crossing their arms.

Hand input is limited to these emotes. Road to VR reported that PlayStation Move, the Vive controllers and Oculus Touch could only trigger automatic emotes, and UploadVR described the game as playable on all three headsets "without motion controls". Players cannot choose their avatar, and the game has no artificial locomotion: players sit throughout and stand only briefly to speak.

Setting

Gallowston is a cartoon Central European village with timber-framed houses that Road to VR compared to classic monster films such as Frankenstein (1931) and The Wolf Man (1941). Players sit around a campfire. Road to VR's preview described a number of locales and villager avatars that include traveling minstrels and Romani characters, and its review mentioned a Romani camp and the village's pubs, stores and churches as background set pieces that players cannot explore.

Development

According to Polygon, social party games in which a group tries to identify a hidden killer have been popular since the 1980s: Mafia began in Russia as a kind of psychological experiment, spread among college students there and abroad, and by the 1990s had been commercialized in new forms, including Werewolf. Red Storm Entertainment developed the game in collaboration with Ubisoft Barcelona. According to Polygon, David Votypka, creative director for virtual reality at Red Storm, said the team began experimenting with VR game ideas a few years before the reveal, and that Ubisoft chief creative officer Serge Hascoët proposed the Mafia party game formula and asked whether its social play could work in VR. Votypka said the team had "spent about a year and half" on the game by March 2016. He told Polygon that networking players' head positions, body movement and voices in a shared space made them feel as if they were in the same place. In PC Gamer's coverage of the reveal, lead designer Justin Achilli described the voice and body cues players have to learn as "physical presence elements".

Ubisoft revealed the game in March 2016. In the announcement, Votypka said: "VR is proving to be an amazing platform for social interaction, moving toward truly feeling like you are there with other people." Journalists played the first demo at GDC 2016 on Oculus Rift headsets with Xbox One gamepads, and Votypka said hand controller support could be added later. At the time, Votypka described the build as an alpha and said the game was "targeting all major" VR headsets without naming them.

Release

At Gamescom in August 2016, Ubisoft announced release dates for three VR titles, Eagle Flight, Werewolves Within and Red Storm's Star Trek: Bridge Crew, and dated Werewolves Within for 6 December 2016 on all major VR platforms. It launched on that date on Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR and HTC Vive, with cross-platform play between the three. The launch price was US$29.99.

Platform	Store	Release date	Notes
Oculus Rift	Oculus Store (now Meta Horizon Store)	6 December 2016	Listed as a PC VR title at US$19.99 as of October 2026; Uplay account and Uplay PC application required
HTC Vive (SteamVR)	Steam	6 December 2016	US$19.99 as of October 2026; gamepad listed as required; Uplay account and Uplay PC application required
PlayStation VR (PlayStation 4)	PlayStation Store	6 December 2016	Requires PS VR and PlayStation Camera; DualShock 4 supported; one PlayStation Move controller supported (optional); PlayStation Plus required for online play

The PlayStation listing notes that the game can be played on a PlayStation 5 with a PlayStation Camera adaptor, and recommends a DualShock 4 controller in that case. The Steam version supports English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese, each with full audio. Metacritic lists the game as rated E for Everyone. As of October 2026, the PlayStation Store listing offers the game as part of the PlayStation Plus Extra Game Catalog.

System requirements

Minimum PC requirements on the Steam store page:

Component	Minimum
Operating system	Windows 10 or Windows 11, 64-bit (originally released for Windows 7)
Processor	Intel i5-4590 or AMD FX 8350 equivalent or better
Memory	4 GB RAM
Graphics	NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD R9 290 equivalent or better
Storage	5 GB available space
Other	SteamVR and a gamepad

Reception

On Metacritic, the PlayStation 4 version has a Metascore of 76 ("generally favorable") from 17 critic reviews, while the PC version has three critic reviews and no Metascore. OpenCritic lists a top critic average of 77, with 45 percent of critics recommending the game.

Publication	Platform reviewed	Score
Metacritic (aggregate)	PlayStation 4	76/100 (17 reviews)
OpenCritic (aggregate)	All	77 top critic average
Road to VR	HTC Vive	8.5/10 (Gameplay 8.5, Immersion 7, Comfort 10)
IGN	PlayStation VR	6/10
GameSpot	PC	7/10
Destructoid	Oculus Rift	7/10
TheSixthAxis	PlayStation VR	9/10
PlayStation LifeStyle	PlayStation VR	8/10

Scott Hayden of Road to VR called the game "a clever and well-balanced VR adaptation of the popular party game 'Mafia'" and "one of the most comfortable VR games to play", but wrote that it "makes poor use of natural input controllers". David Jagneaux of UploadVR called it "a creative and comical social VR experience", while noting a "high learning curve and high barrier to entry", complex roles, and the risk that the required group size could suffer from a small player base. In IGN's review, Alanah Pearce praised the avatars' reactions to tone of voice and the leaning whisper, but criticized microphone bugs on PlayStation VR, a guidebook that could disappear when several players stood at once, and rounds that felt rushed; she concluded that the game is "inexcusably hard to play" when audio or connection problems occur, "and that's unfortunately very often". Chris Carter of Destructoid found matchmaking slow a few days after launch despite cross-platform play, reported that his Uplay account had been hacked shortly after he redeemed his code, and summed the game up as "a cool experiment wrapped into an above-average game". GameSpot called it "an exciting demo of VR's social capabilities, even if the final product is somewhat bare bones."

On Steam, user reviews were rated Mixed as of October 2026, with 65 percent of 135 reviews positive. The Meta Horizon Store listing showed an average rating of 3.9 from 45 ratings.

Film adaptation

In November 2018, UploadVR reported that Ubisoft had announced a live-action horror-comedy film adaptation written by Mishna Wolff, developed through Ubisoft's Women's Film and Television Fellowship. The film, directed by Josh Ruben and starring Sam Richardson and Milana Vayntrub, moves the story to a small town called Beaverfield, where a snowstorm traps residents in a local inn. It was produced by Ubisoft Film & Television with Vanishing Angle and Richardson, and IFC Films acquired the North American rights in February 2021 for a theatrical release on 25 June 2021 and a digital release on 2 July. The film had its world premiere at the 2021 Tribeca Festival.