Catch Flex adds an experimental VR mode, and your phone still tracks your legs

Catch Flex now plays in VR, and the phone that made the game unusual is still doing half the work. Version 1.3.0, posted to Steam on October 3, adds a mode the developer labels experimental: the headset and controllers carry your head and hands, while a phone standing in front of you keeps tracking your legs.

Two players share one screen in Catch Flex, each side keeping its own streak, score and multiplier. Image: Vilegacy

The game launched on August 29 for people who own no headset at all, with one phone camera standing in for every controller. Vilegacy’s announcement says that camera is what separates the new mode from other VR rhythm games: “So the balls still want your feet, the floor markers still want a stomp, and a slide is still a slide, with nothing strapped to your ankles.”

Getting in is short. “Any OpenXR headset through SteamVR. A Quest connects over Steam Link or Link,” the notes say, so this is PC VR streaming rather than a standalone build. The free companion app, Catch Flex: Controller, “finds the game on your Wi-Fi by itself”, and calibration is a T-pose with both triggers held for a second.

Hands-only play keeps its own leaderboard

Without the phone, the game lifts the floor. Stomps turn into blocks at chest height that you cut downwards, slides rise into the air, and everything else on the ground comes up to waist level.

Vilegacy keeps the two ways of playing apart. VR has two leaderboards, one for full-body play with the phone and one for hands alone, “so nobody competes against a different setup”. Most VR rhythm games read two controllers and nothing else, and the ones that want your feet usually expect hardware strapped to them, which is the part this is trying to route around. Camera-based full-body tracking without a physical tracker has been attempted before, and accuracy has always been the price.

Vilegacy expects the legs to drift

The developer sets that expectation itself. “The legs come from a phone camera, so they can lag a little and drift when you sway,” the announcement says. The mode is picked as “Catch Flex VR (Experimental)” in Steam’s launch dialog, and the free demo carries it too.

What VR gets is the full Vol. 1 track list, the demo’s free song, levels made in the editor, and blades on your fists for slashing blocks. It follows 1.2.1 on October 2, which added level generation from a song you own: “ADD LEVELS now opens a page in your browser that listens to the song and builds a level from it.” Those home-made levels count towards several of the game’s challenges, but Vilegacy draws the same line there as in VR: “S ranks and leaderboards stay with the built-in songs.”

Catch Flex costs $7.99 in the US, down from $9.99, a 20% discount read on Steam’s US store at 21:27 UTC on October 3. Steam’s Autumn Sale runs until October 8 at 10:00 Pacific, and the store lists the game under VR Supported with tracked controller support, which is the tag a flat-screen game with a VR mode gets rather than a VR-native one.

The timing puts it next to a much larger rhythm game going the other way: Beat Saber’s controller-free play is due in spring 2027, tracking hands rather than legs. Catch Flex has shipped its version of the idea first, with the caveats written into the patch notes rather than discovered later.

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