Exploding Kittens VR review

Exploding Kittens VR brings the popular card & mobile game to virtual reality, complete with a neat social hub aspect

Created by The Oatmeal, which was peak 2010 internet humor webcomics, Exploding Kittens was initially a tabletop card game that eventually made its way to mobile platforms. The game basically revolves around a kitten having a bomb, with players choosing cards to skip or try to diffuse that bomb. There are a million different ways to handle it, it’s a bit Russian roulette, and that’s what makes it an easy game to get into.

So when I got the code for the VR version I thought, “I don’t know, I guess a VR card game sounds boring. I don’t know, man. It’s a card game.”

How do you translate that into a fresh experience? The adaptation of the game into VR is actually kind of neat because all of the function of the cards is present, but everything’s sort of redesigned as a prop.

We see pictures of the cards when we play certain things, but that’s not really what we’re doing. In fact there’s some gacha mechanics built in. We push the button on top of some box-like contraption in front of us and it spits out a capsule. The capsule will get us cards, tools, and even collectibles that if we collect enough of one we can use it to force our opponent to do something.

It still functions exactly the same as the card game, but just having these props changes up the experience to be more interactive and video game-like. We can get snippers and have to snip the bomb to defuse it, or we can get a sticky hand that lets us grab a random card out of our opponent’s hand. It’s online, so you’re just sitting at a table with a bunch of people (or the AI) playing these games.

And it all takes place in a sort of interactive hub themed like a game room. We can go around the hub and shoot basketball or play darts or just goof off, and then if we go through the lobby door we can pick a table to sit at and start playing. Players get to select an avatar that is visible to everyone else, so sitting at a table and playing with others is a lot more like doing it in real life. It has different security settings, so we can mute others or prevent other players from hearing us.

Exploding Kittens works in VR because the developers understood how to shift a card game to a prop-based experience and how to make it social and quick. It’s an easy game to recommend.

This review is based on a Meta Quest code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on the October 20, 2024 episode of The SideQuest. Images and video courtesy the publisher.