The Steam Frame’s First Halloween: 189 Certified Games, and None of Our Ten Scariest

Not there. Worse than not there.

Phasmophobia has a Steam Frame rating in its app record, and the rating is Unsupported. One test, dated July 22. One result line: UnsupportedGraphicsPerformance, the same token Valve hung on its own showcase, The Lab, a week later. On the Steam Deck the same game is rated Playable.

That sent me back to my ranking of the ten scariest VR games with the same lookup open in another tab. None of the ten is certified.

Where the ten actually stand

Two were never eligible. Resident Evil 7’s VR mode only ever shipped on PlayStation VR, and Resident Evil 4 VR is a Quest game. Neither exists on Steam in a headset.

That leaves eight. Phasmophobia is the only one Valve has rated at all. The other seven are MADiSON VR, Alien: Rogue Incursion, Half-Life: Alyx, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Secret of the Mimic, Into the Radius 2 and Metro Awakening, and none of them carries a Steam Frame compatibility record in its app data. No rating of any kind.

A blank is not a failing grade. It means Valve has not published a verdict, and plenty of unrated games will run. It also only describes what plays on the headset itself. Anything streamed from a gaming PC over the Frame’s wireless adapter sits outside the program entirely, so if you own that PC, all eight of these behave the way they do on any other PC VR headset and you can close this tab.

The people this matters to are the ones buying a Frame as their only machine. For them the badge is the shopping list. And the shopping list has a hole where the horror aisle should be.

One exception is hiding in the box. Half-Life: Alyx runs on the Frame with no PC in the room, a copy comes with every headset, and it still is not on the certified list. Which means the Jeff chapter, number four on my ranking and the reason I once tiptoed across my own living room, is on every Frame Valve ships. The scariest hour a PC-less owner gets on day one lives in a game Valve has not rated.

What is certified and will still get you

Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is the real one. Its certification test is dated August 18, its app record points at Lepton, Valve’s Android runtime, and it lists at $29.99, marked down to $19.49 when I looked this morning. In April I wrote that I would play it with the lights on. I did. They stayed on.

Then there is Ravenholm. Half-Life 2: VR Modcleared certification in August, it costs nothing, and the town you were told in 2004 not to go to is in it. I have played that chapter in the mod. It works as horror for a reason nobody designing it twenty-two years ago could have planned: the gravity gun is the main weapon, so every kill begins with you pointing your own arm at a saw blade lying on the ground while something shuffles closer. Episode One is certified too. Episode Two is not on the list.

Getting it is the easy part. It installs from its Steam page like any other game. The catch is ownership: the mod is free, but it needs Half-Life 2 in your own Steam library, and a family-shared copy does not count. The team keeps setup notes on its own site.