Beat Games has released Beat Saber Origins for free to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the game. Beat Saber is a wildly popular virtual reality game that has players controlling a pair of laser swords to destroy incoming blocks in time with music. Essentially, this game is a mash-up between every kid’s fantasy of being a Jedi and Guitar Hero. Now, players can get their hands on one of the game’s earliest prototypes, and it won’t cost them a penny.
One important note to start with is that Beat Saber Origins isn’t a free demo of Beat Saber or anything like that; this is an early prototype of the game. Consequently, it’s missing a lot of features that players would expect to see in a finished product. There may very well be bugs in the game and it’s unlikely that they’ll be fixed as this is just something that Beat Games is releasing for fun. There’s also no user interface whatsoever. Finally, Beat Saber Origins only works on SteamVR.
The musical selection for Beat Saber Origins is just as lackluster as the feature set. This prototype only includes a single temporary song for players to enjoy. In the developer’s defense, this version of the game only has about a month of development behind it, so Beat Games would have been more concerned with making sure things work rather than adding some cool tracks. On the upside, some innovative hacker types could probably get other songs to work in this prototype if they felt like it.
You can download Beat Saber Origins for free over at itch.io. If you’d like to get the full version of the game, you can pick up Beat Saber on Steam for the PC at a price of $19.99 or your regional equivalent and on the PlayStation Store for the PlayStation 4 at a price of $29.99.