Probably one of the best VR experiences you can currently have.

While the STALKER comparisons are unavoidable, mostly due to the shared inspiration (Roadside Picnic), Into the Radius leans much further into the mood of the book or even the Tarkovsky movie. The gameplay is slow and tense - most of the time it's just you and the warped landscape, which you scout little by little while completing the game's progressive missions. Prolonged expeditions into the radius must be planned in advance: you need to make sure you're bringing enough supplies and that your equipment is up to date.

Fights are very intense, not so much due to enemy difficulty but due to the game's focus on realistic gunplay: you'll find yourself manually chambering rounds, throwing mags to the ground while trying to reload and frantically digging through your backpack in the heat of the moment. Even ammunition you'll loot in the wild must be carefully organized and accounted for, or you're likely to fumble while searching for it when you need to - and that's one of the factors that make it such an immersive and authentic experience. It's hard to go back to any other kind of VR inventory system afterwards.

The stress of navigating the radius is offset by your own personal safehouse, where you can repair, heal, shop and clean up your equipment. But even there you have to carefully consider where to physically store your loot in order to be able to find it later, given the game's 29 different types of magazines and 11 different calibers (each having 3 or 4 variants) - just throwing stuff onto a table will get messy very quickly. These chores end up being an integral part of the game's core gameplay loop, serving as a buffer between lengthy and tense expeditions.

In terms of negatives, while it's been gradually polished over some time now (it still receives frequent updates), its focus on realism ends up betraying it with a considerable amount of jank: your hands repeatedly get stuck in shelves and handling long rifles is very frustrating given they bump into everything. Finding the sweet spot to open drawers, taking out your map or removing tiny attachments from weapons is often close to impossible. Missions are also a bit repetitive, given most of them are randomly generated fetch or kill quests. There's a main story line which offers some more varied missions, but they're far from being enough. Exploring the radius in search of stashes and loot always felt a lot more fun and rewarding to me - and fortunately there are mods which shift the balance towards that sort of gameplay if that's your preference as well.

However, despite all the jank and sometimes lack of interesting objectives, it does win on the deeper level of building out a compelling and immersive universe, reminding me of experiences like the first time I ever walked through the zone in Shadow of Chernobyl, hearing dogs barking in the distance; or the stressful moments looting the airfield in Dayz, making as little noise as possble and unsure if I had enough bullets for a fight. If you are the audience for that kind of stuff, it's likely that Into the Radius is the best VR game you can play right now.
And I really wish its inventory and item management system would become the standard in VR so that I would never have to navigate through a menu anymore.