Help Club (Steam VR)

VR Shop Score – Bronze Award

System: Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: Free
Comfort Rating: Green (No Movement)
Genre: Social Media
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Sitting, Standing, Room-Scale
Multi-Player: Yes
Age Rating: PG

Description: In Help Club, you can attend group-based peer support sessions to learn coping strategies for improving mental wellness. Users have unlimited access to potentially life-changing mental health help with things like depression, anxiety, or whatever else life is throwing at you. These event-based group sessions focus on issues that are important to users. They’re not led by therapists or doctors—anyone can train to become a helper and begin to make an impact in the lives of others.

Review: ‘Help Club’ is essentially VR chat for mental health (only not as much fun). The problem is there is no-one truly qualified to talk about mental health inside the app. Sure, there are some breathing exercises and some basic information that anyone could Google, but there is definitely nothing here I would recommend to someone with mental health issues. It’s like Better Help, only anyone can become a speaker which means it is probably a lawsuit waiting to happen.

It’s important to note that I do like what the developer was going for here and on paper, it sounds like a good idea! But it wants too much data from you and doesn’t give enough in return. Your mental health would improve more if you downloaded a free relaxation app like ‘Shinrin-yoku: Forest Meditation and Relaxation‘ rather than this.