The nine games below are some of the best the launch titles, though the list isn’t meant to be comprehensive. For example, the Touch controllers launched with a lot of multiplayer games, like spell-casting game The Unspoken and Frisbee-esque future-sport Ripcoil , which is currently free if you buy any Rift game. We’ve enjoyed the basic mechanics of these, but how much fun you’ll have depends on the quality and quantity of players online. So here, we’ve focused on a diverse range of options that you can enjoy without caveats, right away (or whenever Touch shows up). They’re also kinetic and good-looking titles that are fun to watch — so even if you don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on VR, it’s worth looking them up on YouTube or Twitch.

If you ordered the Touch controllers for Oculus’ Rift virtual reality headset, you’re probably either eagerly anticipating their arrival, or already pulling them out of the box for some motion-control gaming. But what should you play? Oculus has 53 titles supporting Touch, ranging from $49.99 to totally free. We haven’t tried all of them out yet, but we’ve had our Touch controllers and access to part of the catalog for a couple of weeks, which has given us time to find some clear winners.

I Expect You To Die

$24.99

You’d think that escape room games would be a perfect fit for VR, since they’re exploration-based experiences that take place in small spaces. I’ve found them disappointing in practice, simply because it’s hard to make puzzles that aren’t "find key on shelf" or "Dadaist moon logic conundrum." But I Expect You To Die escapes this trap. It’s what happens when someone who actually understands the genre gets their hands on a VR headset, and it’s glorious.

I Expect You To Die, as its catchy theme song explains, is a retro James Bond spoof that puts players in various impossible situations and asks them to puzzle their way out. In the first mission, for example, you’re a super-spy who needs to drive a villain’s car out of an airplane. You grab a key from the sun visor, but as soon as you start the car, a laser blast tries to kill you, and a ticking bomb pops out of the steering column. Every time you cheat death, another problem crops up, and it’s up to you to find a solution — or die, at which point you’ll be given the opportunity to try again.

Every time you cheat death, another problem crops up

This sounds frustrating, but it’s actually a great form of adventure game feedback, because it stops you from simply picking up everything in sight and hoping something happens. Though there’s room to poke around, the steady barrage of deathtraps gives IEYTD forward momentum. Once you’ve more or less solved every problem, you can run through the scenario in a matter of minutes, taking time to hunt for Easter eggs. In addition to puzzles, the game has a lot of little, Job Simulator-esque opportunities for role-playing and physics mayhem. And its handful of different levels are unique in both theme and gameplay, from a covert window-washing mission to a nerve-wracking submarine escape pod.

IEYTD is one of the rare Touch games that’s meant to be played sitting down, and despite its fast pace, it’s relatively relaxing for a motion-controlled VR experience. Adventure game fans might find it on the simple side, but it’s consistently logical and clever, and its motion controls are so polished that you don’t feel like you’re fighting the interface. Schell Games, the publisher, has left the door open for adding new levels, good news for one of the most mature virtual reality games around.

The Climb

$49.99

The Climb was one of my favorite Oculus Rift titles even without Touch, and it continues to be one of the best examples of a game that simply doesn’t have any analogue outside virtual reality. Made by Crysis studio Crytek, it’s a stunningly vibrant rock-climbing game where you control two disembodied hands on a series of tense journeys across tropical bays, red-rock canyons, and alpine peaks. The initial version used an Xbox gamepad and head tracking, but a free update adds support for actually moving your arms with Oculus Touch, which changes the dynamic significantly. There’s also a new area inspired by Greenland, and some extra customization options.

Rescuties

$9.99

Rescuties is basically a very sophisticated VR adaptation of the 1984 MS-DOS game Bouncing Babies, in which firefighters try to catch babies falling from a burning building. Over a series of different levels, rescue personnel will fling you corgis, kittens, and blocky infants. Using Touch controllers, you’ll have to catch them and throw them into an ambulance or similar vehicle. This would be solid enough as a simple mini-game, but Rescuties rounds the simple formula out with special goals, multiple levels, and unlockable babies, turning it into a novel, polished piece of work. Did I mention it’s adorable? I probably don’t have to.

Superhot VR

$24.99

Porting a non-VR experience to a headset is a tall order. But Superhot VR, a reworking of indie first-person shooter Superhot, feels less like an adaptation than what the game was meant to be all along. The premise, as in the original, is that time doesn’t progress unless you’re moving or using a weapon. With Touch, though, standing still doesn’t mean keeping your fingers off the keyboard. It means physically freezing in place, often contorted into a Matrix-style bullet time pose.

Instead of running through Superhot’s stylized glass-and-ceramic environments — or teleporting, as in many VR games — you proceed through a bunch of individual tableaux. The game asks you to duck, dodge, and reach, but it’s designed so you don’t need to move more than a couple of feet in any given space. After each group of enemies is dispatched, a black pyramid appears, waiting to warp you to the next "level."

Superhot already felt like a series of physical puzzles

Superhot already felt like a series of physical puzzles, and this hyper-segmentation enhances the effect. It also introduces a whole new set of variables. You can’t reach large parts of each area, for example, so the best way to find weapons is to let an enemy get close and grab their gun. The levels are semi-connected, so it’s hypothetically possible to throw things between them. I’ve heard you can get a head start in one area by tossing a gun toward the next, although I’ve never successfully managed it.

Like the original, Superhot VR has a metafictional frame story set in a retro-futuristic ‘80s, mashing up advanced virtual reality tech with floppy discs and CRTs. It’s lighter on the exposition, though, letting you focus almost entirely on the pure joy of kinetics. Superhot VR works best if you start slow. The instinct to jerk out of a bullet’s path, instead of standing perfectly still and surveying the situation, will often end up killing you. But it’s incredibly satisfying to master a level well enough that you’re punching and shooting almost in real time, like learning a dance routine.

Superhot VR was one of those games that I genuinely couldn’t stop playing while I was reviewing the Touch; I would boot up something else, shake my head, and go through the pre-release demo again. Now that it’s out, it’s a must-play for Oculus Rift, especially if you own the non-VR game already — the virtual reality version is a free update.

Quill

Free

I’ll be honest: I can’t use Quill for more than a few minutes. For one thing, I’m a terrible artist, and for another, its method of moving artwork by dragging the world around makes me sick. But I find it utterly fascinating. Quill is halfway between a VR painting app like Tilt Brush, and a video game level editor like Unity or Unreal. It encourages drawing super-complex three-dimensional spaces that you can arrange in groups and enhance with sound, using an extremely complicated control palette on one hand. You can change the world’s scale by pinching and pulling, which lets you zoom in to draw tiny, intricate details. Oculus Story Studio is using Quill internally for its virtual films, and the free beta is a great, rare public look at a professional-grade piece of VR software.

Bullet Train

Free

Gears of War creator Epic Games’ first real VR game is Robo Recall, an arcade shooter that will be released next year. But the demo that it grew from, a short piece called Bullet Train, is available for free right now. One of the first pieces ever showcased on Touch, it’s a less cartoonish and arguably more intense shooter, with a time-stopping mechanic that was adapted loosely into Robo Recall’s bullet time. And it’s the perfect way to play around in a shooter without spending lots of money.

Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope

$39.99

Wave shooters — games that put you up against ever-increasing numbers of enemies — are a dime a dozen on the Rift and Vive. And yet nobody has quite figured out the art of the VR first-person shooter: the big, meaty bullet extravaganza that feels like more than a simple shooting gallery. But Serious Sam VR comes close to hitting the sweet spot for both. An extension of Croatian studio Croteam’s long-running franchise, it’s billed as a simulation of protagonist Sam "Serious" Stone’s victories against alien invaders. These all happen to involve standing in one place and firing a series of increasingly ridiculous guns against increasingly ridiculous enemies, spread across Earth and various alien planets.

The wave shooter format fits the tongue-in-cheek vibe

Serious Sam VR, though, is more deliberately designed than your average VR wave shooter. It’s punishingly difficult with just the default laser guns, but each wave earns credits that you’ll spend in a store between levels. There’s a distinct strategy to buying the right weapons for each section, making sure your health and ammo are topped up, and then deploying your gear in the right order during waves. And the enemies, drawn from previous games, go beyond your average shambling zombies and gun-wielding baddies. Where something like Space Pirate Trainer tests your shooting prowess, Serious Sam VR is more about preparation and mastering patterns.

The format isn’t ultra-sophisticated or realistic, but it’s effective and competent, and it fits the series’ goofy ‘90s vibe — your first series of missions has Sam travel to Egyptian ruins and get lost in a basement, after which you’ll fight a giant mummy shooting barrages of missiles while you frantically wear down its defenses. $40 is admittedly pricey for what you get right now, but Croteam’s past experience, plus the quality of what it’s already built, makes it a surer bet than most Early Access games.

Dexed

$9.99

Dexed is from Heavenly Sword studio Ninja Theory, and it’s an interesting mashup of precision rail shooter and trance-y VR rhythm game. The game gives you two weapons that shoot fireballs and ice chunks, and you drift through dreamy natural landscapes neutralizing demons with them. The catch is that you’ll need to hit each fire or ice demon with its opposite element, or risk getting your score frozen or burned with a ricochet. The premise might sound a bit like Doom, but the musical sound effects create an experience that’s more relaxing than violent.

Fruit Ninja VR

$14.99

Fruit Ninja VR is exactly what it sounds like: an adaptation of the well-known casual reflex game, with two virtual swords plus a never-ending supply of fruit to be slashed and bombs to be avoided. $15 is quite a lot for what amounts to an extended minigame, but I’m including it on this list for two reasons. The first is that I find it bizarrely addictive — I can’t get enough of anything fencing-related in VR, and edging your score ever higher is almost indefinitely entertaining. The second is that it’s my best argument for VR as an exercise tool, because swinging even virtual swords around will give you a decent aerobic workout and potentially some sore muscles the next day. Just get a sweat cover for your headset first.