An online game lives and dies on its community and matchmaking, not just for its longevity and the experience but for building momentum and word-of-mouth that propel a game forward. Possible greatness will always be lacking if this area falls short. While BlackGate has plenty of potential, and I hope it can build its audience, it’s difficult to recommend when enjoying the strong core mechanics underneath the surface is so hard in its current early access state.BlackGate imagines a blend of the Alien movies and Dead by Daylight in crafting its spacefaring, multiplayer-driven tension. A match begins when a maximum of five players have assembled, split between up to four crew members and one alien inside an incapacitated space station. The alien's task is to kill every crew member, while crew members work together to incapacitate it and repair the ship. For the latter, this involves fixing the engine, power, communications systems, and more, each enhancing the players when doing so. Fixing communication turns proximity voice chat into a ship-wide communication tool, while the dark corridors are lit once power is restored.This 4v1 setup is balanced by the relative strength of crew members and aliens alike. Crew members move around the ship by using thrusters coinciding with A and X on the Touch Controllers, while B has you brake in the air. Grip buttons can hold and push off walls while floating through the ship to get a burst of speed when used with the thrusters. Your ship map can be pulled up from your wrist, which also hosts a few generic pings for warnings and assistance alongside a tether for healing a crew member by attaching it to their backpack. Using the trigger will fire a stun beam that can temporarily stun an alien in place.The alien might be outnumbered, but you have more tools at your disposal. It moves faster, while it’s also possible to fire out noxious gas using the triggers that can blind and impede a crew member, making them easier prey. They can move through the ship vents and smaller spaces, or use pincers attached to the grips to attack a crew member and destroy locked doors. Before jumping into a match, the lobby lets you practice particular skills, while players can similarly jump into a set of tutorials prepared to help players get attuned to the controls.At its core, BlackGate is great and effectively creates a tense survival horror experience. Playing as a crew member, for example, you begin as a slow human who genuinely feels at the mercy of the infections lurking amidst the spaceship. With only slow movement and no power, dark corridors become tense centers of the unknown, the lack of vision making it impossible to know what’s lurking around the next corner. Visually, the game is a triumph on Quest 3S, creating a sense of clarity in where to go and core objectives without compromising the atmosphere.In this sense, it's a game attuned to and takes advantage of VR. Fully immersed in that world, the sense of dread you feel even when other people are nearby is wonderfully achieved. Great sound design, mostly ambient aside from the creaking of the ship that enhances the feeling of teetering on the edge, means that even with your team nearby, you never feel truly safe. Though the tasks required to repair systems are relatively simple (repair communications by turning dials to align a satellite, taking a ring through a wire course), they offer enough to make them feel like a race against time. Even when lights are restored and you gain more strength, you never feel safe, a testament to what the team has built.While the alien activities aren't quite as engaging, this is still enjoyable. You move far faster, using grippers against the wall to pull you forward. As an offensive alien intent on destroying the humans on board, however, you’re limited mostly to destruction and attacks, and can only be incapacitated rather than killed. You have to proactively search the ship, though without extra activities this can feel admittedly limiting, if still engaging. BlackGate is in early access, though, with plenty of time to evolve. New alien types with differing offensive maneuvers and attack patterns, coupled with variety in the games for the crew, could easily ensure each game feels different.At least, if you get the chance to play properly. As I mentioned before, multiplayer games live and die on matchmaking, and any new online game faces a self-fulfilling cycle where people want to play once a community has formed, but you need players to build a community. Playing at numerous times of the day, my difficulties were less to do with not finding new players but sustaining that enough to start and get through a match.Online matchmaking in BlackGate is host-driven, with one player hosting a game that others can join. If the host leaves, the match ends and all players are disconnected. On many occasions, I would begin launching a quick game only to find that I would enter a loading screen and be booted to the main menu without actually joining a match, the host having disconnected a session. This can also occur when joining a match by selecting a lobby directly from the 'Join Game' tab. After an at-times extensive wait for players to ready up or for a full lobby to assemble, the game sometimes ends before it even begins.Even when a game starts, if not the host, other players leaving a match tilt it in one direction and make it difficult to achieve your goals. This is understandable if you’re a crew member who dies at the hands of an alien, only able to communicate via voice chat or open doors without interacting with the world. It can feel like twiddling thumbs in such a state. Similarly, without clear communication, it can feel frustrating when crew members don’t help and you’re left at the hands of the alien with nothing to do but wait for death.These problems aren't exclusive to BlackGate. Still, this means that despite playing tutorials numerous times, becoming accustomed to the systems, and spending a few hours playing over a dozen matches, I couldn't complete a single match due to other players or the host disconnecting. Worse still, there are no penalties for someone quitting early to disincentivize this behavior.BlackGate is not without other flaws. I understand the idea of thruster-driven movement over analog sticks, yet it never feels like you have enough control to make movement manageable. Its map can also feel confusing on multiple layers. These are redeemable issues. There’s enough strength in the core idea that Megaverse did well putting this together, particularly in how far they’ve pushed the Quest hardware. That said, it seems like the game is only successful if every player acts exactly as the developer intended. One uncooperative or disconnecting player causes that experience to fall apart, as it so often does for me.Perhaps once the PC VR version is launched, crossplay is introduced to increase the player count, and certain kinks are ironed out, games can more frequently reach their conclusion. But, in that vicious cycle, it’s hard to recommend new players pick up BlackGate in its current early access state on Quest 3 and 3S, even if committed players are what this game needs most right now.