Last night, I was away from home. I had to come to Edinburgh, roughly an hour away from where I live because later today I’ve got an appointment in the city. That meant staying at my mum’s, where I don’t have access to a gaming PC. In fact, the closest thing she has to any gaming hardware is my old TV I gave to her six years ago, and a soundbar she got from my brother for her birthday.
Here’s the issue: I was meant to be playing Big Walk with two of my best friends, and seeing as getting the three of us together can be an absolute nightmare because of conflicting work schedules, I really didn’t want to cancel.
Thankfully, I’m currently testing the Steam Frame, Valve’s new VR headset.
See, a while back, when we still knew it as its codename, “Valve Deckard”, some of the rumours said it’d be more than just a VR headset; it was like a Steam Deck you could wear on your face. That means portability and the convenience of taking your Steam library on the go with you, so my overnight away from home seemed like the perfect opportunity to see if Valve had followed through on all those things.
Around 9pm, I sat down in the living room, a bottle of water on my right, some snacks on my left, and a controller I brought with me on my lap. I put the headset on, went through the ever-torturous process of connecting a VR headset to Wi-Fi, paired the controller via Bluetooth, and met my friends in Big Walk.
As has always been the case in this game, the hours zipped by without me really noticing. For what can be a surprisingly demanding game that even the PS5 stutters over at times, it ran flawlessly on low settings on the Frame. Admittedly, I had to plug in due to battery drainage only an hour into the session, but I’d say it was a perfect way to play the game while I was away from home. The controller I had paired via Bluetooth worked without any issues or latency; I only had to adjust the Steam Frame’s tightness on my head a couple of times throughout the evening, and before I knew it, we were logging off at about 12.30am.
I can’t lie, as much as I adore VR gaming, this is exactly what I was hoping the Steam Frame would be capable of.
Back when I reviewed PSVR 2, one of my favorite features to make use of was its Cinematic mode, where it acts as an OLED display for any and all PS5 games you wanted it to boot directly at your eyeballs. The Steam Frame might not have Micro-OLED panels in it; it might not have the most powerful processor or the best battery life, but it can give you the same “cinematic mode”, playing-your-games-on-a-big-virtual-screen appeal as PSVR 2.
In that light, it has the same home-away-from-home convenience as the Steam Deck, and that handheld never made a market for itself by having top-drawer specs.
I’ve tested a few non-VR games on the Steam Frame now. Granted, they’re the same types of non-demanding indies I’d expect to play on a handheld if I was on the go. The latest AAA, demanding games would probably struggle to run, but games like Towerfall Ascension and Hades run beautifully, and the controllers having a gamepad mode means you don’t even need to take another peripheral with it.
It’s here that I think the Steam Frame’s price starts to feel a bit more justified. Sure, it’s not as affordable as I wanted it to be, and it’s flanked on the shelves by the $599 Meta Quest 3 and even more affordable 3S, two famously accessible alternatives that can use Virtual Desktop, Xbox Cloud Gaming, or Steam Link to do similar things.
But if I were buying the Steam Frame for some on-the-go gaming, I’d compare it to a gaming handheld, not necessarily a rival VR headset. The Steam Frame feels like both devices in one package because it’s running Steam games natively, and when you compare those prices, things start to get a bit more reasonable.
The latest handheld PCs armed with Intel’s new graphics chips, like the Acer Predator Atlas, cost the same as, if not more than, a Steam Frame. I’d be interested to see some benchmark comparisons between the Steam Frame and a $1,300 Predator Atlas, but that’s a deep-dive for another time. My point is that next to the latest range of handheld PCs, the £899 / $1,059 Steam Frame isn’t all that unreasonable, although both are undeniably expensive.
One caveat I’d give to all of this is that while Big Walk ran brilliantly, my gaming night with friends wouldn’t have gone so smoothly if we were playing a game that didn’t have proximity chat. I’ve tried and failed so far to get Discord running on the Steam Frame, and while I’m sure that will be a glaring absence fixed in no time, it’s something to keep in mind for now because desktop mode isn’t exactly the same as it is on a Steam Deck.
I’m still testing the Steam Frame in all of its various use-cases, so I don’t want to completely spoil my review at the moment. But like with PSVR 2’s cinematic mode or the Quest 3’s ability to play Xbox Game Pass games with a controller, the Steam Frame has some excellent secondary uses. In fact, with the number of VR games launching these days being fewer than I’d like, it could end up being the main way some of us use Valve’s new headset.
For more on VR, take a look at the best Meta Quest accessories.