The Mixed Reality Game Quest 3 Needs

A wizard arrives precisely when he means to this week with the early access release of Laser Dance in mixed reality.

The wizard in question is Cubism developer Thomas Van Bouwel and his newest creation gives reason to scan your living room with a Meta Quest 3 or 3S headset for breakthrough mixed reality gameplay in Laser Dance.

Released over two years ago now, Quest 3 was pitched as a “next-gen mixed reality device” with high quality passthrough and the promise of a new class of experience using your physical environment as the backdrop to its gameplay. We’ve seen some interesting work in this space with Starship Home, releasing last year, being one of the first examples of what a game could do with your room as a backdrop.

Laser Dance is more accessible than established hits like Beat Saber, given it works with or without controllers. If you cast the view from Quest in a party setting, watching your friend crawl across the living room to avoid a low laser is likely far more engaging than watching them slice boxes. Even after Laser Dance comes off your head, there’s going to be joy in watching others dodge lasers.

Gameplay consists of getting from one end of your room to the other. The only rule is that your head, arms and spine cannot cross paths with one of the lasers. The game uses Quest’s upper body tracking to figure out where you are and you can learn through progression alone that your legs aren’t tracked. That means your legs can’t collide with the lasers, nor end your run across the room. It’s up to you whether you let that affect your strategies around the lasers or not. You can use it like people who cheat in laser tag by covering their body-worn sensors, or you can just continue to carefully step over lasers near the ground because it’s fun to imagine the system could track that danger too.

Big red buttons on opposing walls mark the start and end points of each level and you set up each playspace yourself by selecting the spots on the walls where the buttons go. As you would expect, difficulty stacks over your successive trips back and forth across the room, with lasers that move or blink in patterns you need to think about for a little bit before making your move.

Over a couple hours of play, only a couple times do I feel like the system unfairly matches my body movements to a laser, forcing me to walk back across my living room half a dozen times in a row to try again. The solution, I found with one particular level, is to crawl across my floor just a little bit further than I thought I should have been required to get past a laser colliding with my back. By the end of my time playing with only hand tracking, I find myself holding my hands up in front of my face to ensure the headset sees them and doesn’t think my elbows are behind me.

Room-scale mixed reality was promised by Meta for Quest 3 when it released in 2023. In 2025, Laser Dance becomes the most accessible way to show why mixed reality is best in a VR headset and hand tracking is the future.

Laser Dance Around Your Furniture

I finished Laser Dance’s included early access levels without controllers in hand, sweating under the headset, after moving in my Quest 3 through spots in my home where I’ve never taken a headset and creating solid memories as I went. I’ve never experienced anything like this in a headset and, even in early access, Laser Dance becomes one of the first experiences you should drop a friend into so they can understand what’s possible in mixed reality with a Quest 3 or 3S.

Laser Dance is one of the easiest games to play ever made. It’s not endlessly replayable, at least not yet, but it belongs in most libraries and should be a go-to party game. Thomas Van Bouwel is introducing us to the idea that dodging your furniture is just part of the fun as mixed reality lasers buzz when you get too close and cut into your carpeting with murderous energy.

UploadVR normally uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines. As an early access release, this review is unscored.