Paramus, New Jersey · 24 October 2025
Sandbox VR × Netflix
Sandbox VR Squid Game Review: Is Squid Game Virtuals worth it?
On a Friday night last October, my childhood friend Schatze, her husband Mikael and I strapped into haptic vests at Sandbox VR in Paramus and spent forty minutes inside Squid Game. Mikael won. I came second by twenty-two points. And because every one of those minutes was motion-captured, we walked out with something you almost never get from a night out: a one-minute-forty film of the whole thing, title cards, scoreboards, closing credits and all.
Team Survivors, minutes after the last game.
Getting there
A strip mall on Route 17, and then a door
Sandbox VR Crossroads sits at 305 Route 17 South in Paramus, in the kind of retail stretch you drive past a thousand times without registering. Inside, it stops looking like Route 17 almost immediately: low light, a purple wash on the walls, and a slab of white bench under a mural of three people in headsets that reads In Here, It’s Possible.
You book a room and a time, not a ticket. Up to six people go in together, which is the whole design — Sandbox VR calls Squid Game Virtuals its most social experience yet, and it means it. There is no single-player version of this. You bring your people, or you get grouped with strangers and beat them.
Here is the part worth filing away if you move around a lot: Sandbox VR runs 57-plus locations across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, and Squid Game Virtuals is in all of them. It is the rare “experience” that does not require you to be in one specific city on one specific weekend. Land somewhere new, check the map, book a room.
The last normal thing you see.
- Where
- Paramus, NJ
- What it costs
- From $55
- Party size
- Up to 6
- How long
- About 40 min
Sandbox VR Crossroads, 305 Route 17 South. Open to midnight on Fridays and Saturdays.
Weekday from $55 a head, weekend from $70, per Sandbox VR’s own booking page in September 2026.
We went as three. The games scale, and the scoreboard is per player.
My first photo of the gear going on is timestamped 7:27 p.m.; I was back in the lobby by 8:07.
Strapping in
Your body is the controller
No handset, no joystick, nothing to drop. A staff member kneels down and straps sensors to both of your ankles, clips two more to your wrists, drops a weighted vest over your shoulders with a backpack computer on it, and puts a headset on your face. Six tracked points. Sandbox VR’s own description is patented motion-tracking technology, which captures the movements of a player’s entire body, and the practical upshot is that everyone else in the room becomes an avatar you can see, walk around and shove a bomb at.
Four of the six points, waiting on the bench.
Foot up. Ankle first.
- 01The headsetA modified HTC Vive Focus 3, standalone, no cable running to a PC.
- 02The vestHaptics across the chest and back, with the computer riding in a small backpack.
- 03 · 04Both wristsOptical sensors, so your hands exist in the world without holding anything.
- 05 · 06Both anklesThe reason the avatars walk, crouch and lean like people instead of floating torsos.
- RoomOverhead trackingSensors on a truss above an otherwise empty black-floored room.
Wearing it feels cool, in the straightforward sense — like being suited up for battle. And the gear itself is fine, not uncomfortable: once it is on and adjusted, you sort of forget you are wearing so many tracking attachments and a VR headset at all. Which is the whole trick. You are dressed for something before you have seen anything.
The part I did not expect
They filmed all of it. Properly.
Because the room is already tracking six points per person and rendering the world, Sandbox VR can cut you a film afterwards. Not a clip. A film: one minute forty, a title card for every game, two scoreboard breaks, a winner reveal, and closing credits that read Sandbox VR Content Studios presents SQUID GAME VIRTUALS, starring Shots, Big Mike, The Rock.
It also does the one thing no phone in your pocket can do: it cuts between the two realities. One shot, three people in headsets on a grey floor. Next shot, the same three people in green tracksuits in a dirt yard with a four-storey doll turning around. Same instant, same movement, two completely different rooms.
It turns up by email, and the email is a link rather than an attachment: it opens a page on Sandbox VR’s own site where every clip sits ready to watch or download. So you do not have to think about any of this on the night. Play, hand the vest back, and the film is waiting for you by the time you have worked out where you parked.
Squid Game Virtuals · the film
One minute forty, in your hands
Drag it. Watch the room disappear.
drag me
The grey frames are a warehouse unit in Bergen County with nothing in it but a truss and a painted floor. The colourful ones are the same forty minutes. Nobody in that room could see what the film sees.
Scene by scene
The running order, all six of them
Six games, in the order we played them. The number under each one is whatever Sandbox VR’s app decided to count that round, which is not always the number you would expect.
At 0:11
Red Light, Green Light
In the roomThree adults jogging four steps and freezing solid on a grey floor, arms out, in silence.
In the arenaA sunlit dirt yard, pastel village houses along the back wall, guards in red jumpsuits at the edges, and the doll swinging her head round on a count. Gold coins lie scattered across the ground: you run, grab, and bank them before she turns. Move on red and you lose what you were carrying.
Their metric: coins collected
At 0:21
Repeat Racers
In the roomBarely any movement at all. Standing still, arms working, the occasional lunge.
In the arenaA circus ring under a striped big top, ringed with guards, with a bank of coloured lanes laid out in front of you. This is the newest game in the set — Sandbox VR added it on 28 March 2025 for season two, and describes it as a game that challenges players to solve puzzles and race to the finish line, with points awarded based on finishing position. Don’t finish, you’re out.
Their metric: longest streak
All three of us posted a longest streak of one. Make of that what you will.
Tester Scoreboard
- Big Mike 647
- Shots 504
- The Rock 486
At 0:34
Even or Odd
In the roomThree people sprinting from one side of an empty white floor to the other, stopping dead, then doing it again.
In the arenaA narrow back street: brick walls, shuttered gates, potted plants, a bicycle against a wall, guards at both ends. Somewhere in all that scenery is a number of something, and your job is to count it. Then you run — odd to one side of the room, even to the other. When the answer goes up, the floor under the wrong side opens and you fall. Your body is doing the falling, so it is genuinely frightening, which I did not expect from a game about counting.
Their metric: rounds survived
At 0:46
Simon Says
In the roomThe most undignified one to watch. Arms up, arms down, crouch, turn, repeat, faster.
In the arenaA white domed hall with ribbed walls and staircases going nowhere, guards standing at the edges, a countdown burning down on the wall and bright pink holes opening in the floor. Follow the call, hit the pose, don’t be standing on the wrong tile when the clock stops.
Their metric: fastest player
Tester Scoreboard
- Big Mike 1197
- The Rock 1050
- Shots 894
At 0:56
The Pendulum
In the roomDucking. A lot of ducking, and one or two very large sidesteps into empty air.
In the arenaThe prettiest set in the whole thing: a climbing frame in red, green and yellow under a wall painted with clouds, a slide off to one side, a clock counting down in pink. Then a giant painted ball drops in on a cable and starts swinging through the frame, joined by smaller spiked ones. You cross the scaffolding; the pendulums do not care.
Their metric: pendulum hits
Sandbox VR does not say whether a high number here is a good thing or a bruise. I have left it exactly as their app reports it.
At 1:11
Catch and Match
In the roomFull-contact shadow boxing. This is the one where a stranger walking past the window would call someone.
In the arenaA yellow industrial gantry hung over open water, cannons along the deck firing shapes at you, bins marked with a triangle, a square and a circle. Catch the right shape, drop it in the matching bin. Spiked bombs come through the same barrage, and you are allowed to throw those at your friends.
Their metric: shapes sorted
Two rooms at once
The room is white. The room is not the point.
Sandbox VR cuts a vertical version too, with the camera feed on top and the game underneath, running at the same moment. It is the clearest answer I have to the question people always ask about VR arcades, which is some version of “but what are you actually doing?” You are doing the top half. It feels like the bottom half.
How it ended
Big Mike, and it wasn’t close
Mikael led from the second game and never gave it back. What was close was everything behind him: after four games I was 156 clear of Schatze, and by the final whistle she had pulled all but twenty-two points of that back. One more round of Catch and Match and this post has a different second paragraph.
The lap of honour
A checkerboard dance floor, and three grown adults dancing in an empty room in Paramus.
Worth it?
What you actually get for the money
Forty minutes door to door, about thirty of it inside the headset, six games, a per-player scoreboard you can pull up on your phone a year later, and a cut film you own. At weekday pricing that is somewhere around $55 a head for a night that is genuinely hard to replicate at home, because the thing you are paying for is the empty room and the six tracked points, not the software.
If you have read my write-up of Squid Game: The Experience in Manhattan, this is a different animal. That was a pop-up with up to twenty-four players in a room, physical sets and real marbles. This is three of you in the dark with your whole body tracked. They overlap on exactly one game by name — Red Light, Green Light — and even that one plays completely differently.
I would go back in a heartbeat, and not only for this one. They quietly swap games in and out, so going back is not the same as playing it again.
Mostly, though, I want the rest of the shelf. Paramus also runs Age of Dinosaurs, a Stranger Things one they have tagged as new, a pirate ship, a dragon, and a zombie western they run in three separate versions. Same room, same six tracked points, completely different world. I am going to work through them.
Vests on. Mikael won the whole thing.
- Best for
- Two to six
- Fitness required
- Moderate
- You leave with
- A film
- Book ahead
- Yes
Everything scores per player, so it works as a night out with people you want to beat.
You duck, crouch, run four steps and stop. Nothing athletic, but you will be warm.
Plus a stats page per player that is still there when you go looking for it a year later.
Rooms and times, not tickets. Weekend evenings are the ones that go.
Three nights, one franchise
I have now done Squid Game three different ways
If there is a Sandbox VR wherever you land next, the room will be the same white box it is in Paramus. Go anyway. Take three people. Let one of them win.
Not affiliated with Netflix or Sandbox VR. Footage in this post was produced for us by Sandbox VR as part of the experience. Squid Game is a trademark of Netflix.
