Virtual Vecna: ‘Stranger Things VR’ Now Available on Meta Quest
Get ready to rule the Upside Down in Stranger Things VR, available now on Meta Quest 2, 3, and Pro. Developed by Tender Claws and based on the hit Netflix series, Stranger Things VR lets you play as Vecna and terrorize iconic Stranger Things characters like Eleven, Will, and Billy as you enact your revenge on Hawkins from Vecna’s first-person perspective. You can even bring the Upside Down into your living room with an exclusive mixed reality experience, only on Meta Quest.
With critically acclaimed and fan-favorite titles Virtual Virtual Reality, The Under Presents, and Virtual Virtual Reality 2 to their credit, Tender Claws is no stranger to VR. And while they incorporated as a company about a decade ago, co-founders Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro have been working together as a collaborative for roughly 20 years.
“Samantha had been working in VR in the CAVE at Brown University since 2002,” recalls Cannizzaro. “When this kind of new wave of VR hit, there was a lot of excitement around it and a lot of language about the newness, and that amused us a little bit as people who had been working in the space for a while. So we ended up making Virtual Virtual Reality as a kind of love letter to VR—poking a little bit of fun at the hype cycle around it.”
They hadn’t set out to launch a studio per se, but VVR took on a life of its own, with players falling in love and UploadVR calling it “one of the most essential VR experiences to date.”
“Our practice is a long artistic collaboration doing everything from installation to performance, but we’ve always been really interested in emerging media and the way that projects can be composed specifically for it, rather than adapted from older mediums,” Cannizzaro explains. “We really like to try and find out what a new medium can do best and make things natively for it.”
“And we’re very interested in designing for immersive spaces as well—particularly with some of our previous projects like The Under Presents—we’re interested in designing for social engagement across virtual networked spaces and for both interaction and environmental design in those worlds,” adds Gorman.
Speaking of The Under, Gorman’s work at the CAVE was very much a prelude to the game’s concept.
“I started working with spatial poetry and how to put narrative in space, and I became interested in the CAVE as a stage for performance,” she says. “Working with a dancer in early VR helped us realize that VR can be a theatrical space. This led to our collaboration with Pie Hole, which then eventually became The Under.”
Collaborating on a Major IP
Unlike their earlier projects, Stranger Things VR is the first project where Tender Claws has worked with a major IP (unless you count Tempest, which you definitely should), and that posed an interesting challenge.
“We wanted to keep it really authentic to the series,” explains Gorman. “In the writing process, we took some of the mechanisms for how we’ve done interactive narrative in the past like creating open possibility spaces for players to interact with the world at any point and have characters respond in surprising ways. From a writing perspective, I live in the worlds we create, so it was a really interesting, unique, and fun challenge to sit with a property imagined by someone else and try to absorb it. It’s a different perspective coming in, but Bria Smith, narrative co-lead, and I were really fortunate to have great writing collaborators, including Paul Dichter, who’s one of the series writers, advising on the project. We actually had a lot of creative support from that side of the team.”
“We’ve built each project a little bit off of the lessons learned from our previous projects, whether those are interactions and the way that satisfyingly manipulating an object or giving something weight in the space feels, or even the type of stories we tell,” Cannizzaro adds. “One of the things that really drew us to Stranger Things was that a lot of our past projects and a lot of this project take place in this kind of liminal memory—nightmare spaces—and we find that works really well in VR. Rather than trying to just represent the world as it is, we find that VR can represent these impossible spaces.”
“We very much focus on what types of things an emerging platform does well,” Gorman agrees. “This is one of the reasons we choose to frame the story in immersive and abstract mindscapes of the dreams and memories of characters.”
Nostalgia + Nightmares
The tone of the project was also a bit of a departure for Tender Claws. While their previous work has largely leaned into surrealist humor and darkly absurd spaces, there’s a prevalent element of fear at work in Stranger Things VR.
“It’s fueled by a mix of ’80s nostalgia and nightmares and scariness, and it’s trying to match the sincerity of the show,” says Cannizzaro. “The show lives on these bonds and friendships, and those are slightly new notes for us as a studio, so it’s fun working more in those areas.”
“It’s interesting because you can see there’s elements of VVR that carry over to Stranger Things VR, like the use of an internal world,” Gorman says. “There’s even a chapter where you go through different environments where we’re borrowing some of the learnings from that project, but VVR is mostly lighter—it’s satire and a different comedic style. We wanted to purposely take that, subvert it, and recreate it as darker and grittier for Vecna’s character.”
New Perspectives
As a studio, Tender Claws prides itself on the fact that the team introduces something new with each project, like the incorporation of live actors in The Under. For Stranger Things VR, the goal was to make something that fit into a well-established and beloved universe and truly do it justice.
“We didn’t want to tell a story that was just some side story that had no connection to the main characters and larger world of Stranger Things,” Cannizzaro notes. “We spent a lot of time thinking about how we could explore the emotions of the characters in a way that probably wouldn’t be covered in the main series but still felt very additive to it. I think that was both the biggest challenge and the space where we found the most creative inspiration. Netflix gave us the creative freedom to create a project that isn’t just advertising and promotion in service of the series, but that stands on its own as a creative entry in the franchise and provides meaningful insight into some of the characters in this world.”
“I think that unless we felt there was resonance with us and the IP, we wouldn’t have pitched for it,” Gorman adds. “With Netflix, there was a natural partnership or an intersection of interests. And some of our early ideas for wanting to show the internal world and mindscapes and dreamscapes actually fit perfectly with their ideas for Season 4, so there was a natural synergy.”
The game frequently passes through snapshots in time throughout the first four seasons from the different point of view of Vecna, like when Eleven reaches out to Will for the first time.
“There are definitely moments that fans will recognize where the game intersects with the series,” says Gorman, “and then there’s entirely new stuff, too.”
“You do see some events from the show, but from a different perspective,” agrees Cannizzaro. “There’s a scene where Eleven is bitten by the Mind Flayer in the cabin, and in the show, you see that all from her perspective. In the game, you’re actually playing as the Mind Flayer attacking the cabin. The game takes place across all four seasons, showing you different perspectives and revealing new things, like Vecna’s influence on their events.”
Vocal Talent Spotlight
Adding to the authenticity, the game features the vocal talents of Matthew Modine as Dr. Brenner and Jamie Campbell Bower as Henry Creel and Vecna.
“There’s something really powerful about being with actors who have known and embodied a character that a director can collaborate with, especially a writer,” says Gorman. “How should we rephrase this line? Or how can we really capture this character? Matthew Modine and Jamie Campbell Bower, they’re both asked to play several characters at once. Jamie’s playing Henry as a child. He’s playing Henry as an orderly. He’s playing Vecna, and the change of the dynamics in the air as an actor masterfully goes between those different voices—when you’re hearing those lines for the first time that are going to be in the game, you really feel like the game is becoming real. It’s this really powerful moment. You could really feel the air change in the room as he would move between different characters and literally the voice through your feet, like the vibrations of Vecna’s voice. It was pretty amazing.”
“And then Matthew Modine plays both Dr. Brenner and the manifestation of the alien hive mind when it tries to speak to Henry and takes on the form of Dr. Brenner. It looks through Henry’s memories and decides, ‘Oh! Here’s an interesting kind of paternal figure. I will take on that form.’ And it almost torments Henry by being Dr. Brenner. For those lines, it’s almost as if it’s an alien wearing the suit of Dr. Brenner. It was fun seeing the different choices that Matthew would make when he was trying to play that version of the character vs. just a straightforward Dr. Brenner speaking to you.”
Style + Substance
Fans of Tender Claws will recognize its uniquely stylized aesthetic—albeit with a twist.
“For this title, we really wanted to create a look and feel that was stylized but could capture some of those darker, scarier moments as well as some of the more light-hearted character-to-character interactions,” Cannizzaro explains. “We tried to create an aesthetic that evoked the posters you’d see from the show and an ’80s nostalgia, like the illustrated movie posters that you might find on the wall of Mike’s basement as they’re playing D&D. The whole game kind of has this illustrated look to it. We really leaned into stylization for the way we represented some of the enemies and the smoke monster. It’s a creature that can take on multiple forms. We had this creature that’s in between an enemy and a companion that sometimes chases you as this amorphous smoke glob and then can take on the form of your father, Dr. Brenner, or your sister and speak to you. We had a lot to draw from the show in terms of concept art and the first four seasons, but we also set the game often in these very abstract places. You play inside the minds of demodogs, which isn’t something that’s probably ever going to get shown on the show. It was a really fun artistic challenge to take some of the elements you see from the show and then expand them. It’s both a fun constraint and a source of inspiration that we think led to a bunch of colorful, unique spaces to explore in VR.”
Blurring the Lines Between Realities
Stranger Things VR delivers four to six hours of gameplay spread across nine chapters, plus a bonus MR experience that showcases the power of hand tracking through both Arcade and Narrative modes.
“One of the things that I think Tender Claws does well and really enjoys doing is taking new media and trying to see what they do well,” says Cannizzaro. “We’ve been really interested in using both mixed reality and hand tracking for some time now. Telekinesis and portals became the core tenets of the MR mode, and we think they show off the capabilities of MR and hand tracking really well. You can have portals into all different realities. You’re still in your physical space, but you’re opening up these little rifts into different dimensions. And then telekinesis really lets you enact the fantasy of being one of the characters from the show—doing these broad, big gestures that are satisfying and fun to do.”
“I feel like MR fulfills or hints at this promise of crossing realities, which is really parallel to the show in terms of the Upside Down version of your world,” adds Gorman. “It feels like a natural fit.”
