You could spend hundreds of hours playing through the best Meta Quest 2 games without looking for new ones, but you shouldn't sleep on the best App Lab games, and best sideloaded titles for the Quest 2. They often provide unique experiences from indie developers, many of which are free or dirt cheap. In contrast, others are mods of classic PC games that'll likely never make the Oculus Store officially. Oculus App Lab opened up a whole new world of experiences for Quest owners, but these games often cost money to play. We gathered a ton of free titles to check out with that in mind, so you can always keep something new on deck without making a monetary commitment.
Gorilla Tag
In Gorilla Tag, there's no crazy locomotion method for you to adjust to; just use your hands to grab the ground and fling your monkey body around an arena where the only purpose is not to get caught. Several different game modes, arenas, skins, and moves will keep the action fresh, and you'll quickly remember why playing tag as a kid was so much darn fun! Gorilla Tag for Quest has crossplay with the PC VR version, and you can either play in public or private rooms for the best experience. What are you waiting for? Reject humanity. Become gorilla.
To The Top
Climb, skate, fly, and fall as a robotic cheetah with jets in your paws in this beautiful, geometric sandbox full of obstacles, challenging puzzles, and hidden treasures. There are 35 maps, with Mirror's Edge-esque time trials encouraging you to improve your movement mechanics and find new, faster paths through levels. To The Top is so popular that it's finally found its way to the App Lab, so you can wait to buy it if you don't want to deal with sideloading and it's absolutely worth the price.
H.A.X.
H.A.X. is a unique first-person shooter where your clip is more than just something you shove into the bottom end of a gun. Sure, it provides bullets as you'd expect, but it also doubles as a katana, a hatchet that you can throw, and so much more. It's like Smith & Wesson made a Swiss army knife. The full game is still in development and there's only a demo version available on the Oculus App Lab and SideQuest and it's only in single player mode. However, there's a lot of pulse-pounding action packed in such a small demo.
Hibow
Archery in the real and the virtual world can be a lot of fun but what if shooting arrows wasn't just for hitting things? What if the arrows pulled you through the air enabling you to move in ways that feel supernatural? That's the aim of Hibow, an archery battle royale title that puts players in an arena and promises to keep you looking everywhere and never stop moving.
Operation Serpens
Arcade enthusiasts rejoice! Operation Serpens joins Crisis VRigade as a seminal example of how classic arcade shooters made the leap to VR. Each level in Operation Serpens is a slightly different style and sometimes even a different theme altogether. You'll take the role of an elite agent tasked with destroying the evil Snakes Organization, but beware: it's not just bad guys with guns you'll have to worry about. Part Time Crisis, part House of the Dead, and all fun, this wave shooter will have you coming back to beat your high score over and over again.
Rhythm N' Bullets
Take a classic shoot-em-up (shmup) from the golden days of the arcade, combine it with a rhythm shooter, and you'll get Rhythm N' Bullets. Take your ship in hand (literally) and whip it around to shoot the enemies in wave after wave of arcade action. Just remember to keep to the beat. Otherwise, you'll find the levels are nigh impossible to beat.
Crisis VRigade 2
The first Crisis VRigade used a cartoonish graphics engine, but the developers upped the visual quality in the sequel while keeping the same physical SWAT-shooter gameplay. New difficulty modes, bosses, weapons, and customization options make this game a complete experience. Duck and dodge your way through levels and save the day!
QuestZDoom
This truly awesome mod lets you play Doom and Doom II in VR (assuming you've bought them on Steam), plus other games running on the same engine, including Wolfenstein, Heretic, Hexen, Strife, Duke Nukem 3D and a bunch of various fan-made mods that are free and included. It's time to get violent and shoot 8-bit baddies, only with 6DoF motion tracking added.
Lambda1VR
Half-Life: Alyx will never come to the Quest 2 (officially), so enjoy the next best thing and dive into Gordon Freeman's HEV Suit in this VR mod of Half-Life 1. Purchase the original game and install the mod via SideQuest, and you'll be crowbarring headcrabs, shooting enemies, and dodging attacks using 6DoF support. Fair warning: running around in old VR worlds can cause serious nausea if you don't have strong VR legs.
Tea For God
Using Oculus's Guardian system for mapping your living room, this prototype game procedurally generates a never-ending maze for you to explore. The non-Euclidian (physically impossible) maze goes on forever until you fail to shoot your robotic enemies. Few titles incorporate room-scale VR so well, which makes Tea for God one of the best sideloaded games for Quest 2. It incorporates hand-tracking tech to shoot finger-guns at enemies and interact with your environment.
Deisim
Guide the human race towards prosperity and destroy heretics supporting other gods in this early-access Steam title. You place tiles of land and cast spells to shape the growth of society indirectly. Still, it would help if you occasionally used your omnipotent power to deal with troublemakers and keep humans on the right path with miracles. The one-person dev team added intriguing new features in recent updates, including modern and futuristic societies, warring kingdoms, and even UFO invasions.
Pavlov: Shack
The stripped-down port of this acclaimed Counter-Strike clone offers some of the best shooting mechanics you can find on the Quest. It offers multiple modes that let you team up with friends to capture objectives and kill zombies or kill friends and strangers alike in Deathmatch. It's the most popular SideQuest app, so you'll never wait long to dive into some violent PvP, and it's somehow free. The devs are working on an App Lab version if you want it in your official library.
Ancient Dungeon Beta
This extremely popular beta lets you dive into a Minecraft Dungeons-esque world with a sword, throwing knives, and arrows, facing random enemies and bosses in physics-based combat while rescuing NPCs and discovering secrets. You'll dodge or deflect attacks, take different paths with varied environments, buy items with the loot you find, and generally find ways to survive. There's so much content to enjoy considering it's free.
Swordsman
If you're one of those weekend warriors who goes to renaissance fairs and engages in "combat" with a foam sword covered in duct tape and a wooden shield, we've got something just for you. This fighting game puts you on the armor of a powerful sword swinger from a variety of time periods and uses real time physics to mimic the look and feel of a real sword fight. You can slice and dice as a samurai, a knight, a Viking, and a member of the Mongol horde using a variety of different swords and shields. The enemies are just as varied and challenging ranging from simple sword swingers to the mighty Kraken.
Frenzy VR
This always happens during a game of Grand Theft Auto. You've run a few missions for the boss or completed a couple of side hustles in Vice City or San Andreas. Then you start to get bored, so you just start driving your car recklessly or get into a firefight with the NPCs. Frenzy VR is a virtual version of that moment except every goal is about creating destruction. The game puts you in a series of environments where everything can be broken and anything can be used as a weapon. You can break windows, fight friends and enemies with weapons or your bare hands and even step into the Octagon with an MMA fighter and take him out with whatever you can find. The options are limitless. Reducing things to rubble has never been this fun or legal.
(Side)load up on indie VR games
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App Lab games don't appear officially in the Quest Store unless you have a direct link or type the exact name in the search bar, making them hard to find. This App Lab games list helps you find the full list, but there are hundreds to sort through, so we recommend you start without favorites!
As for sideloaded games like QuestZDoom that'll never get an official Quest 2 release for legal reasons, you'll have to follow our guide on how to sideload content on the Quest to enable unofficial titles in your official library. That makes playing App Lab games much easier; but for adventurous gamers, the extra effort will be worth it. Regardless, App Lab games and sideloaded games are just as much worth playing as the best games that Oculus offers on its official store.
In general, these indie games spend fewer resources on graphical fidelity and more time on fun gameplay, creating worlds that you'll be able to spend more than a few hours in. Procedural titles like Ancient Dungeon Beta or multiplayer titles like Pavlov Shack will let you sink dozens of hours into them, well beyond the few hours that official, expensive VR games will offer. Even if they don't "immerse" you in the same way as official Quest Store games, the best App Lab titles and the best-sideloaded games for the Oculus Quest 2 have plenty of unique fun to offer.
