The first time a Behemoth’s shadow swallows you whole, you understand exactly what Skydance Interactive set out to build. This is not a game about fighting monsters. It’s a game about surviving them — climbing them, clinging to them, and finding the one weak point that brings something the size of a building crashing down.
Skydance made its name with Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, one of VR’s most tactile and grounded action series. Behemoth is a sharp turn away from zombies and toward something closer to Shadow of the Colossus, reimagined entirely through a headset’s lens. The pitch is simple: massive, ancient creatures roam a broken world, and you’re one of the last people small enough — and desperate enough — to bring them down.
Setup and Premise
You play as a nameless survivor recovering fragments of a shattered world where enormous beasts, the Behemoths, have reshaped the landscape simply by existing. There’s a framing narrative about a cataclysm and a search for a way to reverse it, delivered through environmental storytelling and sparse voiced narration rather than lengthy cutscenes. It’s minimalist by design, and it works — the game trusts its scale and its physicality to do the emotional heavy lifting instead of dialogue.
Climbing: The Heart of the Experience
Behemoth’s climbing systems are the best we’ve tested in any VR title to date. Using two-handed, physically simulated grabs, you scale cliffsides, ruined towers, and eventually the creatures themselves, and the sense of weight in every handhold is remarkable. Reach for a ledge a half-second too early and you’ll feel your character’s arm strain and slip. Reach too late and momentum works against you. It’s demanding in a way that rewards patience over button-mashing.
What elevates this beyond a typical VR climbing mechanic is how it’s woven directly into combat. There is no separate “climb mode” and “fight mode” — when you finally reach a Behemoth, the climbing systems and the combat systems are the same system. You’re not pressing an attack button while standing on stable ground; you’re hanging off a shifting, breathing creature’s flank while trying to drive a blade into a glowing weak point, all while its muscles ripple beneath your grip and threaten to throw you off.
Encounter Design
- Each Behemoth is a puzzle. Weak points are hidden, sometimes on the underside of a creature’s jaw, sometimes buried beneath armor plating you have to pry off first.
- Scale is communicated physically, not just visually. You crane your neck to look up mid-climb, and the game uses genuine verticality rather than just rendering something large on a screen.
- Momentum matters. A Behemoth mid-stride will fling you around if you’re not braced, and timing your movements between its footsteps becomes its own skill to master.
Pacing and Comfort
Skydance clearly designed Behemoth with real player fatigue in mind. Movement is deliberately slower and more grounded than a typical action title, which both reinforces the sense of scale and keeps the physical demands manageable across a session. Encounters are spaced with quieter exploration segments in between — picking through ruins, solving light environmental puzzles, scavenging supplies — that give your arms and your inner ear a chance to recover before the next giant appears on the horizon.
This pacing decision might frustrate players expecting nonstop spectacle, but it’s the right call. A game built entirely around climbing writhing fifty-foot creatures would be exhausting, both physically and mentally, without these breathing points. Average session length lands comfortably around 30 to 60 minutes, with a full campaign clocking in at 8 to 12 hours.
Visuals and Sound Design
The Behemoths themselves are the star of the show visually — genuinely unsettling, biomechanical silhouettes that move with a weight and naturalism that sells their size. Skin textures shift and stretch believably as they shift their footing, and the sound design leans hard into low-frequency rumble that you feel as much as hear when a creature takes a full stride. The broken-world environments surrounding them are comparatively sparse, clearly built to keep performance headroom for the creatures themselves, but they never feel empty so much as appropriately desolate.
“Behemoth doesn’t ask if you’re afraid of heights. It puts you thirty feet up a creature’s spine, has it inhale, and lets you feel the answer for yourself.”
Progression and Equipment
Between encounters, Behemoth offers a light but satisfying progression loop. Scavenged materials from fallen creatures and ruined structures can be used to upgrade climbing gear — better grip strength, more durable rope, sharper blades for finding purchase on tougher hides — and each upgrade is felt immediately in how confidently your character can scale a surface that previously required careful, deliberate movement. It’s a smart way to communicate growth without resorting to abstract stat sheets or menus that would pull you out of the game’s otherwise minimalist presentation. A small crafting station tucked into your home base lets you review these upgrades at your own pace, and the game never forces you to engage with systems beyond what you’re comfortable managing.
Multiplayer and Replayability
Behemoth is a single-player experience through and through, with no multiplayer modes to speak of, and that focus works in its favor. Every encounter is hand-tuned around a solo player’s pacing, and the tension of facing a creature alone — with no one to share the weight of a mistimed grab — is central to what makes each fight memorable. Replayability comes primarily from a New Game Plus-style mode that remixes weak-point locations and adds tougher variant Behemoths for players who’ve mastered the base campaign, along with a handful of optional challenge encounters that strip away the exploration segments entirely in favor of back-to-back climbing gauntlets for players chasing a purer physical test.
How It Compares to Shadow of the Colossus
Comparisons to Shadow of the Colossus are inevitable and, for the most part, earned — both games build their entire structure around scaling impossibly large creatures and finding the one vulnerable point that brings them down. Where Behemoth distinguishes itself is in translating that concept through genuine physical input rather than a controller stick and a grip button. Where Colossus asked you to imagine the effort of holding onto a moving giant, Behemoth makes you actually perform an approximation of that effort with your own arms, and the resulting fatigue by the end of a long climb is a deliberate, effective design choice rather than an oversight.
Headset and Platform Considerations
Behemoth is currently available on PC VR via SteamVR, supporting Valve Index, HTC Vive, and Meta Quest headsets connected through Link cable or wireless streaming, as well as Pico headsets running in PC VR mode. Performance scales reasonably well across this hardware range, though the most demanding creature encounters — particularly ones involving multiple moving parts and dense particle effects from crumbling debris — benefit noticeably from a higher-end GPU. Index owners in particular will appreciate how well the game’s grip-sensitive climbing mechanics map onto that headset’s finger-tracking controllers, though standard Touch-style controllers handle the core interactions competently as well.
Final Thoughts on Immersion
What lingers longest after finishing Behemoth isn’t any single set piece, impressive as several of them are, but the cumulative sense of scale the game builds across its runtime. Few VR experiences manage to make you feel physically small in a way that isn’t just a visual trick — Behemoth achieves it through mechanics, forcing you to actually reckon with distance, grip strength, and timing against something that dwarfs you at every turn. That’s a difficult effect to manufacture, and Skydance Interactive deserves real credit for building an entire game around sustaining it convincingly from the first climb to the last. Even weeks after finishing the campaign, the memory of hanging off a creature’s flank mid-stride, arms burning, searching for the next handhold before it noticed you, is the kind of thing that sticks with you far longer than most VR experiences manage.
Where the Cracks Show
- Grip detection, while generally excellent, occasionally fails to register a handhold cleanly during frantic moments, leading to a handful of unearned falls.
- The narrative framing is thin enough that some players will bounce off it entirely and simply play for the climbing and combat.
- Later Behemoth encounters reuse weak-point patterns from earlier fights more than the escalating spectacle suggests they should.
- Exploration segments, while a smart pacing tool, can feel like padding on repeat playthroughs.
Score Breakdown
| Category | Score |
|---|---|
| Physicality & Climbing | 9.5 / 10 |
| Encounter Design | 9.0 / 10 |
| Comfort & Pacing | 8.5 / 10 |
| Visuals | 8.5 / 10 |
| Narrative | 6.5 / 10 |
Final Verdict
Foremy Score: 8.7 / 10
Behemoth is proof that VR’s most powerful trick isn’t graphical fidelity — it’s scale, felt through your own body. Climbing a living creature the size of an apartment building, feeling it shift beneath your hands as you search for the one soft spot that ends the fight, is a sensation no flat-screen game has ever replicated with this much conviction. The story is an afterthought and the world outside the giants themselves is comparatively bare, but none of that matters once you’re clinging to a Behemoth’s flank with your heart in your throat. This is essential VR.