Xperiment VR – Virtual Reality Lounge Review May 18, 2025

I’ve become a Virtual Reality gamer over the past few years and have expanded my personal gaming tastes to include VR platforms such as the Meta Quest 3 and Vision Pro. However, I admit not everyone is as lucky as I am to have access to the newest and best gaming tech on the market, and even I admit there are some new games and applications I would like the chance to try out in person before deciding if I wanted to purchase it. Imagine my surprise to discover a new VR Lounge opened in my area called Xperiment VR and as you’d expect I was pretty interested in checking it out.

TECHNOLOGY, GAMES AND PRICES

The venue charged $49 US per person per hour. During your hour, you could use the equipment to play whichever VR games you wanted they had to offer. The HTC Vive headsets used by the store were connected to gaming PCs and clearly had access to Steam VR’s catalog. Because of that, if we wanted to, we could play many popular PCVR games including Creed. This is actually a nice addition, as I admit not a lot of gamers have made the plunge into VR just yet, and twenty years ago, it was not uncommon to preview and demo a LAN Center.

The venue also had a snack bar which sold t-shirts on top of various candies and sodas. I was disappointed their fridge just happened to be missing my definitive gaming soda, Bawls!

GAMEPLAY

Players who are not playing a driving simulator are assigned their own squared off space on the gaming floor. Xperiment VR has access to exclusive games that aren’t sold on existing VR platforms, and since I already had many of the games they offered on my personal Quest 3, we decided to play one of their exclusive Virtual Escape Rooms. For our first ever game, my wife and I chose to play a game simply known as Cyberpunk, and just like with traditional escape rooms, there was a one hour time limit for players to complete it that could not be extended.

Due to each player being assigned a predesignated square, we were not able to interact with each other, and our headsets did a pretty good job warning us if we were at risk of leaving our space or tangling ourselves up in any wires. Before we began, my wife and I were notified that the game would have a HARD difficulty, and that the venue host had seen teams made up of the maximum six players fail to complete it. Our game was set up similar to a network multiplayer game, where we spawned into a shared game space and moved our players around with just our controllers. The VR games we played had a point-to-point movement, in that you moved by choosing a space on the ground and teleporting to it. I will not spoil any aspects of the game in this review, but I can confirm the difficulty of the escape room matched the expectations impressed upon me by the technician. Regardless, my wife and I were able to successfully complete the game with nine minutes to spare.

We later attempted a second game, with a third friend. This time, we chose to play an escape game based upon Alice in Wonderland, titled Alice.

Both my wife and our friend were enormous fans of the original book, and leaped at the chance to enter Wonderland, even if it was just a virtual experience. We were notified the game was a bit easier than Cyberpunk, but still carried a high difficulty marker. Our friend had no VR experience, but she was VERY impressed by the game’s visuals, and enjoyed just chilling out in Wonderland while my wife and I worked our way through each setpiece. We were able to win this game as well, my wife was instrumental at solving one of the puzzles in the middle of the game, and I was able to defeat the final boss in just under the time limit.

Honestly, if these games were available on Quest or SteamVR I would probably buy them in a second, but since they were cooperative multiplayer focused, it made a lot of sense to host them at a venue like Xperiment VR, as you would need to set up multiple VR headsets, multiple gaming PCs, and have enough open space in your home to handle all the players moving around safely without colliding with each other. In the case of both games, my peers and I left the venue with our heads held high and tons of stories and tips we wanted to share about our experience!

CONCLUSION

Today’s VR lounges remind me more of the LAN Gaming Cafes I frequented in the mid 2000s, and that’s a really good thing. In both instances, the experiences are relatively close. It’s also a SOCIAL location, where VR gamers can hang out with their friends and meet other people interested in the hobby. You buy time on a machine, in this case, an hour per person, and in that hour you’re able to try out software or hardware that you wouldn’t normally have access to. All of that can be applied to Xperiment VR, Personally, I think the price per hour is just a little steep to make a trip to play more frequently than a special occasions. They do currently offer a date nite discount for two people on Fridays and Saturdays, but if they lowered their individual player price per hour, I would check it out more frequently. For now I consider it as a once in a while treat, and there is nothing wrong with that. In any case, Xperiment VR is a business I’m happy to have in my area!