Arachnophobia (Steam VR)

VR Shop Score – Bronze Award

System: Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: £2.09
Comfort Rating: Green
Genre: Non-Interactive Experience
Input: Keyboard & Mouse
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: 15+

 

Description: Arachnophobia is a VR application within the field of health and psychology, a – not too serious – self-controlled implementation of a virtual reality exposure therapy session, where you gradually expose yourself to spiders. Virtual reality exposure therapy is a psychological approach to learn to deal with irrational fears of a specific object (phobia) by ways of systematic desensitization.

By generating enough phobic stress while immersed in a virtual reality environment, psychological effects can be invoked that will dampen your phobia over time. It is a scientifically proven and therapeutic procedure to help people deal with their phobia.

Review: Unless you really do suffer from severe Arachnophobia you might not find this app of any interest at all. It’s not going to cure anyone Arachnophobia nor will it aggravate it any more than seeing a real spider. But it might offer some fright to someone suffering from it and that is about it. The idea is you stick on the VR headset and place your hands on a table in the same place as the hands in VR, then hold on tight. For me, this simply wasn’t good enough to work nor as educational enough to be interesting. But I suppose someone might like it, but that person isn’t me.