I have been sitting with that for a few hours and I cannot decide which part bothers me more
What leaked
Per a report from MP1st, picked up by Road to VR, the project was codenamed Project U and lived at Vertigo Games’ Amsterdam satellite studio. Development ran from at least November 2024 until the plug was pulled in January 2026, a casualty of what is described as a structural reorganization. The leaked archive includes character models, environment work, concept art, and early gameplay footage
The same leak points to a second cancelled Vertigo project, codenamed Project P, reportedly a game set in the Halo universe. I want to be careful here, because that one is thinner on detail and I am not going to treat a codename as a confirmed Halo VR game. But if you had told me in 2024 that Vertigo was quietly building both Tomb Raider and Halo for VR, I would have said the category was in the best shape of its life
We are not linking the archive. Leaked assets from a cancelled project are somebody’s unfinished work, taken without consent, and the developers who made it did not choose this as the way it would be seen
Vertigo was exactly the right studio
This is the part that stings. Vertigo Games is not a random contractor who got handed a license. They made Arizona Sunshine, which is the game I used to hand people when they asked what VR was for. They made Metro Awakening, which understood that a VR adaptation is not a port with motion controls bolted on, and which handled a beloved franchise with actual reverence
And Tomb Raider is, on paper, the most obvious VR game that has never been made. The entire series is a person climbing, jumping, grabbing ledges, drawing a bow, and solving physical puzzles in three-dimensional rooms. Every one of those verbs is better with your hands. I have played a dozen VR climbing games that were reaching for something Lara Croft has been doing since 1996
Put that IP with that studio and you do not get a licensed cash-in. You get the thing that convinces somebody’s skeptical friend to put the headset on
The vertical slice is the detail that hurts
Cancellations happen. Most of them happen early, when a prototype fails to prove out and everyone quietly agrees it is not working. That is a healthy process and I have no complaint about it
This one reportedly cleared its vertical slice milestone with praise. A vertical slice is where you find out whether the game is fun, because it is a real, playable, polished chunk of the actual thing. Passing it is the milestone that is supposed to mean the game is happening. Project U passed it, and then a reorganization happened somewhere above the project and it did not matter
What this says about VR right now
Here is my honest read, and it is not the doom take you might expect
The fact that a fifty-person Tomb Raider VR game got greenlit at all, and made it to a well-received vertical slice, means the money and the ambition were both there as recently as last year. That is not a dying medium. That is a medium where a major publisher looked at the install base and decided a tentpole license was worth the bet
What killed it, by every account available, was not VR. It was a reorganization. Studios get restructured, satellite offices get closed, portfolios get rationalized, and good projects die in the spreadsheet rather than in playtest. That happens across all of gaming. VR is just small enough that when it happens here, we lose something we can count. Fifty developers is a meaningful fraction of the people on Earth making big-budget VR right now
So I am not mourning the state of the industry. I am mourning one specific game that I am now certain I would have loved, and that I will only ever see as somebody’s stolen concept art. Someone at Vertigo built a Lara Croft you could reach out and climb with. They cleared the bar. It went in a drawer anyway
Somebody make this game. The pitch is proven, the audience is right here, and there is apparently a vertical slice sitting on a hard drive in Amsterdam that already worked
