Metal Gear Solid Boneworks Mod (Meta Quest 2, 2022)

It’s early morning and I’m settling in for a long day of writing. But first I’ll just see what’s going on on Twitter. Some cool pics of retro games, J.K. Rowling ‘said something dumb, a Metal Gear Solid VR mod, some silly capybara meme, a…

Hold up a sec.

Metal Gear Solid? In VR? Within the next ten minutes I’d bought Boneworks on Steam, was charging my VR headset, and praying that the summer sun wouldn’t turn a VR experience into a sweaty mess.

There were a couple more hurdles to clear. I’ve never played Boneworks so didn’t know what the controls were or how anything worked, installing mods on it wasn’t exactly straightforward, and then I’ve got to remember how to set up the PC to Quest link.

But, after much fiddling (and some muttered swearing), I finally stepped onto Shadow Moses Island. Wowsers. Millions of words have already been written about the difference in perception between being in a virtual environment on a screen versus VR, but I’ve never felt that difference quite so keenly as this.

I’ve spent hours upon hours in Shadow Moses over the last 25 years, but I’ve never so tangibly ‘been’ here before. This mod uses the exact textures used in the PlayStation one game in all their pixelated glory, yet somehow even with those and the primitive geometry, it feels like a real place.

The mod features the Docks, the Helipad, Tank Hangar floors 1, 2, and 3, and the Commander’s room (which functions as a menu). While it’s more of an experience than a game there’s something impossibly cool about wielding Snake’s chunky-as-hell low-poly silenced SOCOM and carefully lining up a shot on an unaware Genome soldier.

I spent a good hour poking through these maps, grumbling to myself in my best David Hayter impression. After all, what kind of Metal Gear fan would I be if I didn’t let out a gravelly “A surveillance camera?!” when infiltrating the Helipad?

There’s a lot of granular detail here, which adds up to make Shadow Moses a broadly plausible location – a neat feat for a 1998 PlayStation game and a testament to the skills of Kojima’s team. Maybe more designers should build their environments in LEGO before rendering them?

The cherry on top is the ‘Museum’ containing every character model and prop in the game, together with the colossal Metal Gear Rex model. Clambering up and over this beast impresses on you what a monster it is – and I couldn’t resist sliding on the Cyborg Ninja skin and swishing my HF blade at its Radome. It was around that point that I was thankful I had the house to myself for the day so my girlfriend couldn’t see me making a tit of myself in the living room.

I hope that creators Holydh and Vapor Cephalopod continue adding maps to this, as exploring the Nuclear Warhead Storage Building and beyond would be a real treat. Whether this will ever get closer to a game than an experience is anyone’s guess, though even if the project stopped here it’d still be a huge success.

Kudos to anyone involved in this for realizing a dream I didn’t even know I had.