Action! Explore Genre-Bending Movie Worlds in ‘Deep Cuts,’ Launching Today on Meta Quest

With Deep Cuts, developer Scythe Studios is cutting a new path for itself—something it does a lot.

Scythe is known mostly for horror games, creating intense, oppressive, and even strange experiences, but even its games that share a genre often go in different directions. Its Northbury Grove series puts you inside slasher movies, while Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is a cooking and management game that has you working a haunted fast food restaurant, contending with sinister corporate forces, and fighting giant mutated mascots. Even within the same series, Scythe’s games vary from channeling the ’80s aesthetic of CRT and VHS tapes, to using the immersiveness of VR to drop you into the lair of a slasher villain.

Deep Cuts goes in another new direction, embracing virtual reality to create a highly interactive experience. It sucks you into the silver screen to explore a world of movie genres, where you play as Elise Weber, a filmmaker setting off to rescue their best friend and creative partner—who is lost in the pair’s film catalog. You’ll travel through different genres of movies, grabbing all sorts of objects to help you fight battles and solve puzzles, while also utilizing the skills of a film editor to manipulate the reality around you.

Like the Northbury games and Happy’s Humble Burger Farm, Deep Cuts is part of a wider Scythe Saga Universe that links Scythe’s creative work together. Working to piece together Deep Cuts’ story—and maybe its larger connection to the Scythe Saga Universe—is part of the experience as you explore its strange, movie-inspired locales. And while Deep Cuts is a movie-inspired action game that relies heavily on physics and the immersion of VR, it’s also described as a horror title. That combination of elements seems like it’ll make it something pretty different from Scythe Studios’ previous games.

We sat down with Scythe Studios Director, Principle Technical Engineer, and Founder Kaleb Alfadda, Creative Director and Writer Aniello DeAngelis, Co-Founder and Principle 3D Artist Blake Reible and Co-Founder, Principle Audio Engineer, and Scythe Saga Universe Creator Jon Reilly to talk about what Deep Cuts explores about movies, the freedom its gameplay offers, and its place in Scythe Studios’ catalog of games.

Aniello DeAngelis: Deep Cuts is a genre-bending blend of messy physics and action, the size of a full-length PC game but brought to Quest. It's a purely physics-driven adventure built from the ground up, where we encourage players to experiment, have fun, and play with all the things VR does right.

Kaleb Alfadda: One of the most important aspects for us was ensuring that every environment has interactive elements and that this consistency is maintained throughout the game. There are more than 400 unique dynamic props, and every enemy is physically driven so that things behave and react as one would expect. This, in turn, creates fun emergent situations in every playthrough, where players are rewarded for experimenting and trying fun and weird combinations.

KA:The abilities are so much fun, and they completely change the way the game can be played. With the player entering films and the protagonist being an Editor, it made sense for these abilities to match what an editor does to a film. We don't want to spoil them entirely, but you'll be slowing things down, rearranging things forcefully, accessing high places, and even stopping things abruptly—all at the player’s discretion.

Jon Reilly: The Scythe Saga Universe is an interconnected set of stories that we tell through our games and albums. It mirrors our reality, albeit with technology advancing in different ways and with unique names for locations. This allows us to tell a story at our own pace and within our own time periods while maintaining continuity. It's always rewarding to experience a game in a certain locale and then hear about that same locale in passing conversation in a completely different experience.

AD: Deep Cuts invokes a liminal feeling—you’re exploring film sets and locations that once had life and were bustling, only to be reduced to robotic and AI-driven counterparts. It’s very Westworld in a sense.

KA: We never like to stick to one genre. We learn so much from exploring ideas and concepts that are foreign to us—the further from our wheelhouse, the better. We like weird, quirky, off-the-wall stuff, and we want to reflect that in the titles we make while still challenging ourselves. Deep Cuts is an extremely unique game in that we had to adhere to hardware limitations to achieve the scale we wanted on a standalone headset. This required us to methodically plan every step, even down to the exact polycount on screen. We're naturally more "by the seat of our pants" developers, so not being able to iterate on the fly was a new challenge for us.

Blake Reible: At least half of the development team are VR nerds, with 10% of the team spending a concerning amount of time in VR. So it was an easy decision for us to make. We're big fans of the medium, so when we had an opportunity to pitch the concept to Meta, we were extremely excited. That being said, VR development is not for the weak. It's still in its infancy, so a lot of the tools developers have grown to rely on simply aren't available (or are very difficult to use) because you simply can't see them with a headset on!

KA: For the game's overarching influence, it was less about specific films and more about film movements—French New Wave, Dogme 95, Third Cinema—that embody the spirit of Outlaw Cinema. We wanted to explore the metanarrative of a director's film catalogue and the greater story told across the experiences, as well as imagining underrepresented film pioneers Oscar Micheaux and Lois Weber in the "modern" era. As for scenes we wanted to recreate or pay homage to—HAL's shutdown in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the opening credits to Funny Games, and the pig vat trap from Saw III.

KA: Yes, the game expands upon and doubles down on Scythe's weird, surreal, and outlandish style. In terms of creative exploration, we wanted to play with the eccentricities of multiple genres which led to featuring six different films each with their signature aesthetic: B&W film noir, spaghetti western, etc. In addition, the film's central story is a study of the beauties and frustrations of creative collaboration, and the hardships that come with saying goodbye to ideas.

Immerse yourself in the movies and get lost in the Scythe Saga Universe today in Deep Cuts, now available on the Meta Horizon Store for $29.99 USD.