Face Your Fears (2016) is a collection of horrifying experiences ripped straight from your nightmares; creepy clowns, monsters in the closet, dangerous heights, and now the world of Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things.

In a new update, the Gear VR app promises a peek into the show’s sleepy town of Hawkins, Indiana, the idyllic small town that plays host to a rip in reality, opening up a passageway to what the show’s protagonists dub ‘The Upside Down’ – “a dimension that is a dark reflection, or echo, of our world. It is a place of decay and death, a plane out of phase, a place of monsters.”

While only about 8 minutes long, the experience is surprisingly well-done for a TV show tie-in, showing Turtle Rock Studio’s clear capability hone in on the level of ‘creep factor’ they’ve cultivated since the launch of the most well-known game Left 4 Dead (2008).

SEE ALSO
New Update Adds 'Lying Down Mode' to Quest 2 & Quest Pro, 'Quest Cash' Parental Payments

Taking you through a unique mini-narrative, you travel to the Upside Down, come face-to-face with a Demogorgan and sit helplessly as the world decays around you. It’s more than just jump scares and screaming monsters though. Like with all Face Your Fears experiences, it dials in the growing disquieting feeling with a great use of music and positional audio to keep you guessing.

‘Face Your Fears: Stranger Things’ for Gear VR

Locomotion through the real-time rendered experience is on-rails, meaning you go wherever the experience wants to take you. There are some misgivings with this, as the experience makes a brief use of forced rotation and camera bobbing, two ‘VR no no’s in Oculus’ Best Practice Guide. These are brief though and only slightly distract from the mounting terror of the Upside Down as it throws everything it has at you.

Face Your Fears is also available on Rift, but unfortunately doesn’t include many of the Gear VR app’s horrifying scenes like the Stranger Things experience, making this a Gear VR exclusive unless Turtle Rock deems it otherwise.

Newsletter graphic

This article may contain affiliate links. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product we may receive a small commission which helps support the publication. More information.


Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • gothicvillas

    why only Gear? Am i missing something?

    • I keep running into this, where something is released that is available for mobile VR only. Those of us who have invested in the hardware that will provide a rich, high-quality experience miss out on a lot of new content because of it.

      It’s probably a business decision, right? My personal feelings about it are that yeah, there are a lot more mobile than desktop users, and maybe that’s why the producers choose this route, but those using mobile VR are likely more casual users and aren’t going to actually care about new content as much.