Scary Buddies: a mansion packed with suspects, and nobody around to suspect

The group murder hunt inside a virtual reality headset wins players over on a single playthrough — the real hurdle is rounding up enough of them to fill the table.

3 to 15 friends, and one of them is not who they claim to be

Scary Buddies drops 3 to 15 people into a mansion stuffed with family secrets, on what is supposed to be a quiet weekend away with friends. One of the guests has decided the friendship was worth less than you thought — and it could be anyone, you included.

The rules split everyone into roles: murderers, cops and innocents. Innocents and cops comb the house for clues that will get them a weapon or expose the killer; the murderers work the other way round, picking off the rest and hoping nobody pins them down first. Whoever hosts the session can tweak the match rules, and the house hides secret passages to explore while suspicion builds.

Hexware Studio released the game on July 8, 2022, built for virtual reality: it runs on SteamVR and Oculus, with no version outside the headset.

One round is enough to sell it — if you can find anyone to play with

Scary Buddies is a small game that rarely gets played, and the people who visit the mansion tend to come out recommending it. A log of barely one hour of playtime, dated November 17, 2025, sums up what the blend of comedy and scares pulls off even with cartoonish visuals: jump scares in the right places, sound effects that build tension, frightening characters who somehow still come across as likeable — the one caveat is that some of the puzzles around the house ask for more patience than they should.

The praise keeps coming back, always with the same reservation attached. One player who tried the mansion across several different VR systems, on July 23, 2022, describes everything working — visuals right, audio right, controls right — and boils the real problem down to a single line: there is nobody around to play it with you. A group that got together a little later for a session of nearly an hour and a half confirms the rest: a dropped connection cut the round short for everyone at once, more than once, but they were back fast enough that the party survived.

A player who pulled in five friends to try the mode, that same month, calls the idea of bringing this style of murder party into VR a good one — just unfinished: the weapon is hard to pick up even on the third attempt, the available map has intriguing secret passages but also a corner where you can simply hide and wait the round out, and not one of the five managed to open the settings menu. Even so, they recommend the experience for the hour of fun it delivers.

An autopsy after four hours of play: a game that cannot get a room together

The most common complaint is also the simplest: the game freezes at the exact moment you have finally got everybody together. A session on July 28, 2022 locked up both for the player and for their friends, badly enough that it had to be killed from the system's task manager — with no way even to reach the desktop from inside the VR headset. A few days earlier, another group hit the same wall trying to launch the game, and complains that after the frozen session, other VR games that had run fine started throwing the same errors.

An account from September 4, 2022 describes a room that never shows the other players inside it — the game looks good, but nobody can see who else is there. In January 2025, another group gathered five VR friends only to find that the match simply would not start: nothing to show for an evening they had planned.

The longest write-up, from someone who put in four hours on April 23, 2025, treats the case as the autopsy of a dead multiplayer game: it lines the pitch up against social deduction games — Werewolf and the like — and describes the mansion set as an assembly of generic art bought off the shelf, with amateurish character models. The conclusion is blunt: without enough people connected at the same time, the game cannot be played the way it was designed, because its whole reason for existing is having somebody on the other side of the screen deciding whether or not to lie.

Among the players who stuck with it despite the frustration, an account from November 23, 2022 could not even keep hold of the weapon in their hand, and sees in the damage the game does to other VR titles installed on the same computer a reason to distrust the studio as long as the problem goes unfixed.

The studio's public notice from that stretch, on July 18, 2022, promised a steadier connection and improved proximity chat. A day later, and on the days that followed as well, the freezes were still the most cited reason for giving up. The autopsy is harsh on the execution, but it points to the same place the praise does: the idea holds up, there just aren't enough people to put it to the test.

For people who arrive with a group — and only for them

Scary Buddies works for people who arrive with a group: a circle of friends with VR headsets, willing to put up with the occasional freeze and to set up the session themselves, because there is no public queue waiting on the other side of the mansion door. If you plan to walk in alone on some random evening, looking for a match already running, the reason for quitting that repeats most across the accounts will knock on your door too: turning up and finding nobody there. The house with its family secrets is still standing, intact, waiting for a group willing to organise its own mystery — because without one, the door doesn't even open.