For years it feels like we've done the same thing. At tech and gaming trade shows across the country, we journalists have engaged with impressive technical demos that demonstrate the capabilities of this long-promised, soon-to-come wave of new virtual reality hardware. But as the first of those PC-compatible headsets get closer to launch (the HTC Vive is still planned for this year, Oculus Rift in early 2016), such tech demos are quickly giving way to time with actual games that real developers are planning to release alongside the hardware.

Experimenting on near-final hardware, rather than through downloads on a home development kit, has gone a long way to calming fears of nauseating and/or hard-to-use VR headsets in this first generation. And while these titles are genuinely still in development—meaning they're hard to gauge fully in demos that can last only 10 or 15 minutes—they have given us our best idea yet of the actual promises and pitfalls of the first wave of virtual reality games.

We looked at a few promising early titles for Sony's Project Morpheus back in June at E3, but, at PAX Prime two weeks ago, the breadth and depth of VR offerings blew that experience away. While this is only a small sampling of the titles in development, and more will be shown at the Oculus Connect conference in Hollywood later this month, what we've seen so far has already gotten us excited about finally playing some real virtual reality games in our homes in the near future.

Here's a guided tour of some of the titles that will serve as many early adopters' first impressions of a new world of home PC-based virtual reality.

(Note: While these games were all demonstrated on either the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift, most developers we talked to were open to the idea of porting the title from one platform to the other should time and market demand allow. Exceptions to this include Oculus' VR Sports Challenge and Edge of Nowhere, both of which are currently being developed exclusively for Oculus).

The Gallery: A new way to get around

Demonstrated on: HTC Vive

With its room-scale tracking technology, SteamVR and the HTC Vive have finally achieved the dream of letting players walk around a virtual space as if they were really there. Unfortunately, that dream only lasts as far as the dimensions of your room's walls or the length of wire tethering you to the gaming PC powering the experience. Unless you're playing a game that's confined to a single virtual room space, this is a problem. How do you let a player walk around an entire world in VR without crashing into real walls?

The team at Cloudhead Games thinks they've found the perfect solution to this problem for The Gallery, an episodic adventure game that is set to see its first chapter, "Call of the Starseed," launch alongside the HTC Vive later this year. After toying around with that solution during a 15 minute demo of the game recently, we hope it will catch on and become a standard in the space.

Cloudhead calls its VR navigation solution the Blink system. Basically, when you reach the limits of your real world play space (shown as a blue wireframe box in the VR world when you approach), you simply hold down a button on the controller and look at where you want to go. A small green outline appears in the center of your gaze, showing the new bounding area that you'll "blink" to. Let go of the button, and the scene fades to black before quickly fading in on your new position where you can walk around the new surroundings immediately. You can even twist the controller before the "blink" to change the angle of your new virtual playspace before you warp there.

Teleporting around the world like this isn't as "realistic" as simply walking along the entire length of a secluded beach, for instance. Still, it's an incredibly convenient way to get to anywhere you can see in the virtual environment without any of the nausea or disorientation that comes with other methods of virtual locomotion (such as pushing a joystick to move your viewpoint forward). It's also incredibly efficient, saving a lot of ponderous walking time between points of interest.

It's a solution that seems perfectly tailored for The Gallery's gameplay as well. The game reimagines the PC point-and-click adventure as more of a virtual reality walk-and-poke adventure. Puzzles seem to rely on everyday object interactions more than overly clever item combinations. At one point, I had to throw a heavy weight at an overhanging shelf in the corner to knock down a chest. At another, I had to aim down the sights of a flare gun to ring a far off bell that was sitting behind a rocky outcropping.

The most joyful moments in the short demo, though, were spent just tinkering with the environment rather than actively working toward a goal. You can pick up a roman candle, put it over the fire, and watch as fireworks explode in the air wherever you point. Or pick up a stereo blaring from a table and hold it up to each ear, hearing the music move around your head as you do. Even lying down and looking at the stars as the sounds of the ocean washes through took on a new fascination.

The Gallery is also full of little design touches that update common game design interfaces for a new virtual reality world. To get to items stored in your inventory, for instance, you simply reach behind your back, click a button, and pull a backpack in front of your face. After flicking through the contents and picking out what you need, simply pick the backpack up and load it back behind you. We hope we see more of this kind of intuitive interface design, built off of real-world skills, as VR games come into their own.

While we have only the barest hints of the story and gameplay that will drive The Gallery forward so far, Cloudhead has already created the kind of virtual reality world that had us wanting to just hang out for a lot longer than a short demo would allow.

-Kyle Orland