Hi. I’m Madiha.
Whenever Virtual Market comes around I always have so many pictures and so many experiences and I never know what to do with it at all other than save it. This is my attempt to do a little more than that and to create a little retrospective. Most pictures are from my perspective and show my friend Esther. We play together in a private instance so there aren’t any other people around but us and the world we are exploring. We usually use Hoyoverse character avatars in VRChat so Stelle Honkaistarrail is there.
Anyway.
What is Virtual Market?
Virtual Market or Vket is a promotional event for 3D modelers and a variety of corporate sponsors to promote stuff in beautiful virtual maps that I primarily interact with using VRChat. As I have talked about before, VRChat doesn’t actually require VR, so essentially, you can play it as a walking simulator on your computer you already have. Virtual Market has a large selection of themed worlds and people submit avatars, models, 3D accessories and clothing, and a couple other things (like music or webcomics or TTRPG books) that fit the theme of the particular world. Most of the time, the exhibits in Vket worlds contain links for you to go buy the 3D objects so you can play with them in VRChat.
However, the worlds are also just very pretty and fun to walk around with. It’s a great conversational backdrop as you walk around with friends. Esther and I have had so many conversations and memories while walking around in Vket worlds. Recently, the worlds have also had more interactive elements. A feature of the past few Summer Vkets in particular has been a horror themed world with a story that you uncover from clues and documents, and a small puzzle to solve that leads you to some actually well-crafted scares. Even the Parareal worlds now have some storytelling elements, often featuring Vket’s pink-haired mascot character, Vket-chan. They are very fun and eventful and worth visiting!
However, they are sadly limited time only. You just won’t be able to visit these worlds again after the event period is up. (I have found a handful of old worlds reuploaded to VRChat by searching, but I don’t believe this was an intentional choice of the organizers.) I wish it wasn’t that way– there is so much good 3D aesthetic work being done in these! But them’s the breaks, it’s how they draw attention. Thankfully, I take a ton of screenshots so I have my own memories of the events preserved.
You can also look at the world list and search the map names on youtube to find videos of people walking around in them. There are also VRChat influencer streamers who must have hours and hours of video of these places. Your mileage may vary (I don’t watch any VRChat content generally– it’s a game for walking around with my bestie and chatting, for me), but there are ways to satisfy your curiosity.
Anyway, I’m going to talk about each map in the Summer 2026 event and share a couple of things that really stood out to me, and shares the pictures if I took a picture of those things. If a map has multiple versions, unless it is important (like with the horror map) I won’t mention them separately and just talk about the overall theme. I’ll also talk about some of the soundtrack that stood out to me.
I want to preface however that I believe these maps were generally designed to be full of people inside them all doing activities and making noise– so my experience of them, as someone walking around with just my best friend Esther, is perhaps anomalous to the design intentions. When I say oh, this map kinda bored me. Well, probably the people who went to the version that was full of people running around and yelling might have had a different experience than me. They might not even know there was a BGM.
Also if I sound like a bit of grouch sometimes, that’s just how I am. These are all really cool experiences and if it’s ever your first Vket, if you have an opportunity to check this stuff out with a friend along, you should just check it out and make your own fun. That’s what it’s all about. I’m just recounting my own experiences, and if I literally can’t remember something about a map it was probably boring to me.
Parareal Central Ignition Point (Hub)
It’s the hub. There is a lot of cool design work, like the fun gears and bulbs and other technological aesthetic bits framing the map, and the blue of the skybox, and things like that, but its main purpose is to hold portals to the other worlds and stuff like acknowledgments and credits. That’s totally fine, it’s just not something that really excites me. The soundtrack is alright. Nice and bouncy and energetic, gets you in and out the door like it’s meant to. Overall it’s a good looking map, it just has a utilitarian purpose.
The most important thing about it is this art of Vket-chan they use for the website thumbnail:
She’s literally gorgeous. I love the colors, it’s such an explosive illustration.
Now let’s centrally ignite our way to the real maps.
Parareal Broadway
I was so excited when I saw this was a world theme for Summer 2026. I really wanted them to play up the kinda glitzy nostalgic showbiz sort of theme and as soon as I heard the electro swing soundtrack start up I knew they nailed it. It’s a gorgeous map and super fun to walk around in. The Parareal maps are the corporate sponsor maps, so while they’re often gorgeous because they are trying to be aestheticized reproductions of real places, I’m not like, particularly excited to talk about the casino ads or whatever.
Also look at this Vket-chan standee they just put in a corner right at the beginning:
She’s GORGEOUS! What a diva! A real showbiz star! This doll’s going places I tell ya!
There was a really cute like flapper outfit for the popular avatar base “Shinano” that I was transfixed by:
Later on there was a fun dancing “Manuka” as well. I love this element of dressing up popular avatar bases. It’s like you’re seeing little characters you know around, but it also shows possible dress-up options for your own avatar. I have dabbled in editing Shinano and Manuka for my own personal use in VRChat and while it’s a lot of up-front money (I finally decided to get them because of the weak yen! It was like 30 dollars when I bought Manuka and like 35 when I bought Shinano) it did teach me a little Unity and it is just fun to add some personality to your VRChat experience. But also I mostly run around as Firefly from Honkai Star Rail because a lot of my personality is feelings about fictional characters.
The dancing Manuka was part of a stage performance you could join that includes some popular avatar bases (I only know Manuka! I don’t remember the other two unfortunately.) It would be a little wonky depending on what avatars you used but Stelle and Firefly from Honkai Star Rail performed well. It’s a super neat thing to include to fit the Broadway theme, and it lets the player (and a few friends!) participate and take a lot of fun pictures of their avatars together, which is a classic VRChat activity!
As previously insinuated, the soundtrack was killer too. Picture in your head what a “Broadway” themed walking simulator map would sound like in 2026– if you are as obsessed with electro swing as I am, you will love the soundtrack for this map. This might have been my favorite Summer 2026 map.
Parareal Akihabara
A staple of Summer VKet is a “Parareal” version of a famous Japanese locale where you walk around and see japanese advertising, which is fun and novel for me, who has never been outside USA territories and only ever sees USAian advertising. These maps are always incredibly colorful and I enjoy walking in locations that follow at least some sense of real world verisimilitude. Honestly, a big part of Vket is getting to walk around places that are professionally designed to look real-ish– rather than small rooms or surreal vistas. (I’ve never been to Akihabara so I am hedging my bets with my language choices.)
Parareal Akihabara has a cute little running story where you must help Vket-chan to solve strange bugs that are threatening the map. You solve these bugs by customizing a little companion doll that flies around you during the map and when a bug appears, the doll blasts it to resolve it. The dolls are cute and I liked the customization aspect. Everyone gets to make their own doll and the dolls are server-side so everyone gets to see everyone else’s dolls as they run around. There is enough variety that you and a friend can make different dolls– but there were probably a lot of repeats in the public instance.
Check out this smug Vket-chan watching as you purge the evil Vket-chan responsible for the bugs:
In the end it turns out that the bugs were caused by Vket-chan having trouble reconciling that mass attention and engagement with humans can lead to many different perspectives on her own being, and this can lead her own self to have many different emotional reactions as well. The “good” Vket-chan accepts the fears and anxieties of the “evil” Vket-chan and together they move into a future where they continue to be a cute mascot and make beautiful maps for human beings to peruse. I love that for her.
It’s a cute story, and I love Vket-chan’s design so it is cute to see her doing little animations. It’s novel for a VRChat map to have this sort of traditional video game storytelling. As an aesthetic experience I was very happy that it was there. Otherwise I’m just like, being horny at the Suntory booth or whatever.
We need to talk about Vket-san, the mommy type Vket-chan alter. She has been a recurring character in Vket attached to the Suntory booth. For years now she’s been handsomely encouraging players to try out Suntory’s alcohol-free drinks. But unfortunately, Vket-san has relapsed in this event. Mom’s back on the sauce. In this event you go on a festival date with Vket-san and participate in a lot of minigame booths while she gets so progressively drunk that she doesn’t realize you’re getting handsy with each other. It’s crazy. As a woman who is easily attracted to pink thing anime girls, I was very pleased. But as a fan who has been watching Vket-san’s journey with admiration– well, she’s a cute drunk so I suppose it’s fine.
Let’s check in on my favorite rabbit for a second.
Good. Very good. Still pyon-ful. I can just hear the pyon-pyon. Let’s feed her a carrot.
The soundtrack for this map was very upbeat and snappy and a good companion to the stage. It makes for a good energetic loop that didn’t drive me totally insane, unlike some other maps. On that note, I should mention that I don’t think the soundtrack is available for streaming anywhere– you can buy it on booth, but unless you participated in the event and have happy memories of the whole thing, I don’t think these are particularly great values. I love the music in these, but it’s because I’m a fan.
Deep Mist (Horror world)
When the theme for this map was revealed I was so excited. I LOVED the idea of an Innsmouth/Silent Hill type haunted town setting for a Vket map. Previous horror maps were all incredibly interesting and were strong forays for VRChat into creating not just venues but themed experiences– the difference between being a store with an aesthetic and being a little theme park. Deep Mist took a while to get there. I was initially disappointed with it, but the second map is really strong. I think if I had played both in one sitting, I would have had a better opinion of both, rather than thinking that First Visit was kinda weak and Final Harvest was awesome. First Visit is really a pacing tool/tone piece, and literally all the experience/theme park stuff is in Final Harvest. They should encourage you to play both in one sitting.
The story of Deep Mist casts Vket-chan 2 (the less pink and therefore less interesting of Vket’s two mascots) as a private detective trying to find a missing person and solve the mystery of a weird town. There’s all the stuff you expect if you know the milieu: a cult, a ritual, and an incoming, meaningful festival tradition that is unique to this remote town and has a sinister history. They are summoning a Cthulhu. There are a few Cthulhus in fact. And when the Cthulhus hit, it’s pretty damn cool actually. And all of the eldritch stuff hits at the very end of [Final Harvest] the second of the two maps. But to access the horror experience, you need a piece of information only found at the end of [First Visit]. Therefore you must play both. You should in fact play them one after the other to get the most out of it.
I literally think I would love both of these if I just played them the same night. Them’s the breaks.
The “theme park” sequence is really cool. The ritual causes a fog to roll into the town and you must work your way through the map backwards, through side streets you can see from the main area but can’t access normally, in order to escape. Along the way you have to use weapons and items to interact with monsters and ritual items in order to complete your escape. There are a few light jumpscares, but it’s mainly ambiance– there is creepy stuff all around you. There are also light gameplay elements. You never “die” like in a video game, but there is stuff like an alleyway full of little parasite creatures that latch on to you and make you move slower unless you shake them off. I keep saying “theme park”. I think the stuff that happens in this map is like if a theme park ride covered you with nickelodeon goo or something. It won’t kill you, but it adds texture to the gameplay, it bolsters the kayfabe. It’s very fun.
I’m going to let myself be mean for a second. I wish I could link you to the soundtrack for Deep Mist [First Visit]. This map’s soundtrack drove me completely fucking insane. Listening to it on loop while exploring First Visit was a real trial for me. I don’t know what it is. The soundtrack for Deep Mist [Final Harvest], the second version of this map, was much nicer to listen to, and that second map was also more engaging overall– it must just be me not liking the twangy country guitar stuff I guess.
Last year’s horror theme was “Anomalous Research Lab.” I loved this theme. I am sucker for that kind of stuff. It’s Lobotomy Corporation and SCPs and all of that. It was a fantastic theme for a Vket map that had great horror theming throughout, and people contributed a ton of cool booths with interesting stuff because its very easy to imagine “your most fucked up 3D model” fitting in with the theme of “SCP facility.” Deep Mist had a fantastic horror section at the end of [Final Harvest], but I felt like the theming ended up being too subtle and so to me it wasn’t as memorable as stuff like Anomalous Research Lab or 2024’s Komorisaki Village. I still really enjoyed it, but it didn’t make Esther and I pop like crazy in the same way that ARL or Komorisaki did in previous years. However, it was still a very fun map overall.
So it was your doing all along rabbit… I won’t show you any mercy. You’ve pyon’d your last pyon…
Oh before I forget here’s a quick roundup of cool booths I saw in Deep Mist:
That last one was crazy to find by the way. Personally I don’t find goo goo babies Shinano horrifying. I think women should get to do whatever they want with their partners as long as everyone is happy and horny as they want to be. But it is small town USA after all. It’s probably horrifying to them.
Ohh-Edo! MECHANICA
Steampunk Japan. Very colorful map and I enjoyed it a lot but there is not a lot to say about the theme itself. The architecture, color palette, etc, it is succinctly summarized in the premised. It has very cute theming and it’s very colorful. There are one or two areas where it’s kinda weird how to proceed with the map. I felt like an idiot for not being able to find which way they wanted me to go in an instant.
The main draw of the map for me was Gennaiko Hiraga, a girl version of Hiraga Gennai. She is an inventor, calls herself a vtuber, and appears throughout the map to block or open paths and provide cute little photo ops. There is a little mechanic with these where you and your friends stand in a spot and a separate camera interface places your models in a scene with Gennaiko, and you can take group pictures with her. However, a lot of these made the colors kinda weird and I ended up not liking the results as much as pictures I just took by hitting F12 or using the game’s built-in screenshot camera tool.
Gennaiko herself was really cute and because of the theming, there were a lot of cute models and art on display in the booths, so while the map theme wasn’t mind-blowing, it was very pleasant and relaxed and very simply enjoyable. The soundtrack was very like, “electronic with a dash of Japanese” in a way you would expect from the theming, and it was fine enough. It didn’t drive me crazy, nor excite me, not particularly memorable, it just kinda fades into the background while being pretty upbeat and energetic.
I take a lot of pictures of booths, but I am not sharing a lot of those because, any given booth doesn’t really make the maps for me. In aggregate, I can think of the booths as cool or cute or fun, but rarely does a booth stand out above the map’s theming, and I can only include so much in these retrospectives before it becomes unwieldy. Having said that I loved the art in this booth, especially the blond girl. And it gives me something to complain about– this booth had no links to the creator’s pages! I want to be able to click a link and navigate to the artist’s accounts, or to their booth to see what they are selling! It’s always a shame when I see a booth without any links because it makes me feel like I’ve missed out on properly experiencing an artist whose booth I really liked, if I can’t follow them outside of VRChat!
I don’t know if there was a filter or something I ought to have clicked but these just ended up weird. It’s a shame because all of these photo ops with Gennaiko are very cute and have novel props in them.
Every map other than the Parareal ones have two different versions with different booths, and Deep Mist’s second map was fundamentally different in its total offerings, but both versions of Ohh-Edo were similar enough that there’s not much to say. The next map has three versions! And aside from the soundtracks and the booths, they are not particularly different either. Just thought I’d mention that.
VOLTAGER
THEY LOVE IT WHEN I TURN UP THE BASS!
This is kinda embarrassing to admit but I never took like many representative pictures of what Voltager looks like. I just took pictures of Esther or pictures of booths with women on them. The thing I remember the most about Voltager is the soundtrack. I thought I took more pictures of it, but I guess I just didn’t. I think the thing that was most memorable to me was this avatar Esther found in a booth that has a wheelchair. She’s so cute! Unfortunately you can’t push her around when she’s on the wheelchair.
Also, the wheelchair is an option, and not a default state in the avatar, so you have to toggle it on at every spawn if you like it. Or at least, we couldn’t find a way to make it persist between avatar swaps.
This is the concept art for the theme:
It’s supposed to be like a giant gambling machine of some sort that also contains a casino. But the map is never actually this colorful in VRChat itself, unfortunately. In fact the most memorable thing about the theme is choice of music, which comes in a few different flavors of dancey electronic music with a lot of energy and fun bass drops and such. I know people in the world are very mad about gambling so maybe it is a controversial choice to go with the gamba theme but I mainly just found it kinda uninspiring.
I think it contained the most booths where we actually tried stuff on though, or that grabbed us.
The Alter Vista
It’s a mall, lol.
There’s a bit of a fashion theme throughout and a little runway at the end. It has a cute mechanic where you can take a picture and it shows up on the fashion posters and magazines throughout the venue. Mine was bugged and only showed my character, but Esther’s properly showed both of us, so thanks to her pictures you can enjoy Stelle and Firefly being fashion icons throughout the Alter Vista. It’s very cute.
The music is fine. It’s very cute and upbeat. Not much to say. It’s a mall! It was fun to walk around.
We found this PS1 demake Shinano that was very cute too. Anyway, moving on.
SKY PARK-Renew
It’s a mall, lol.
It has light “park” theming in the design and decorations and it is kind of cute overall. There’s a little boat ride you can go on. The music was really catchy! It had some really emotional string swells too. I think the BGM brought the experience up a notch. Added in some of the energy that was otherwise missing. I don’t mind some of these maps being malls– like, in a sense they are all malls but some of them are malls with REALLY GOOD themeing and some are just malls. It’s fine for a change of pace.
We saw some good ads around.
I love when VRChat people pose their avatars together for an ad. It’s like I’m in a real world place with its own celebrities. It makes the fantasy really complete in a certain way, you know? I hope the roleplay girlies are having fun.
Cocoon Art Aquarium Redive
Really cute aquarium themed world. Because of the strong themeing there are a lot of aquatic models and arts and stuff like that here. I do really enjoy when a theme is very strong and straightforward and so all the submissions just kinda perfectly follow on from it. Yeah the sexy jellyfish woman avatar is on sale here obviously, where else would she be? Yeah they put giantess yuri in it, like, obviously.
Where else would it go?
The music for these is the kind of stuff that I’d just listen to if it wasn’t part of the map. Relaxing water-themed ambient. Very floaty and dreamy sounds. Stuff that completely fades when you’re walking around with your friend talking about giantesses and mermaid sex and stuff like that, you know?
There was this one horrifying surrealist meat beast storytelling thing in one of the booths that if I’m being honest I just kinda dissociated through. I hated every second of it and found it repulsive. But it is cool that you don’t know what you’ll find in a Vket booth thanks to scripting. And it was very effortful.
I hate these guys. I don’t like looking at them. I just. I just don’t like looking at them.
I’m not knocking the artistry. I just don’t like looking at them.
Argdella Rediscovered
I took exactly two pictures of Argdella. That should tell you how I felt about it.
Argdella is sadly the reprise world that feels the most like a reprise, because the theme was not super strong to begin with. Like it’s a fine venue to walk around but it’s very simple. Some of the other reprises this time around, like Cocoon Art Aquarium, had really strong themes. Argdella is the fantasy map, and there is always a fantasy map, but it’s theme is ancient abandoned green ruins, so it’s not super gripping to me. Here is the other picture I took of Argdella which is this REALLY good outfit for Shinano.
I really want to get this one and apply it to my Shinano-based avatars… but I can’t be so frivolous with money anymore. If you want me to be able to afford more little outfits for my avatar: join the Patreon.
The soundtrack for Argdella had like an accordion or something on it? It had a sound that was very like, “the producer asked for mysterious slash ethnic and here I am, delivering.” Very par the course for fantasy. It’s not that it’s bad, I actually think it’s pretty fun, but it didn’t really excite me. Sometimes the music helps you get into the mood and helps sell the experience, and sometimes everything is a little too rote and you don’t really come away with anything from it. I was like oh yeah, this is what this green rock map sounds like obviously. I don’t want to be too mean. But I think this was the only theme where we only did one of the maps and didn’t even look at the second one.
Poppy Street
The theme of this map is those little Japanese nightlife districts that are built entirely in alleyways. There are a lot of narrow roads and the booths are inside little buildings. There is a suggestion of a much larger area, but many paths are blocked off by seemingly innocuous or easily surpassed obstacles that, with the magic of video games, are impossible to surmount because of invisible walls. Such as those cats.
There is a little mechanic where if you see two little guys posed in some of the dead end corners you can click them and you and your friends can take the same poses for pictures. It was pretty janky, and must be pretty avatar dependent. Sometimes our characters would be posed correctly, but a lot of the times we would be floating off of where we were meant to be, and at other times things just wouldn’t work at all. I am not sure what avatars would have a better time of it though– ours are human shaped and sized!
There was a nice variety of booths with different things in them, like indie vtubers, and a really good model of a smug purple thing (above). Because of the simple design, and a very gentle ambient soundtrack, it ended up being a very vibesy map that was more about talking with Esther than anything that otherwise happened in it. That’s not to say it was bad though! I really enjoyed the theming, and Esther I know seems to especially like these sort of tight street maps. It’s simple but it works.
Overall, I always have a blast with Vket! It’s hard to give like objective “reviews” of the maps (and certainly you’ve read this far and you know I didn’t try.) I enjoy walking around with Esther and talking about stuff. These maps are always awesome conversation pieces, and I mean that in the best way! There’s so much stuff to see, so much art, music, and the maps themselves and their themes, there’s a lot to experience and discuss, and it always draws out memories and reflections and *moments*.
It’s VR*Chat* and these are some of the best places in the game to hang out and do just that.
I thought of trying to think about how I would stack these up with previous Vket experiences. I’ll always think about the GFE Vket-chan date map from last year, that was so fun and cute, and last year also had Anomalous Research Lab which had awesome themes that really touched on aesthetics I am personally very interested in. Overall, I think I liked 2025 better but that’s not to say 2026 was like, skippable or whatever. These are always fantastic to play, and I do want to the organizers and collaborators to keep trying new themes and doing different stuff every year to keep it all fresh. So I am happy with this one.
Anyway. That’s all for the summer. Summer’s over.
Except in hit web novel Emptiness Effigied! It’s still summer for Detective Mona Alexandri for a while, and she and her beautiful sword-wielding assistant and lover Olesya Maratqyzy have a lot of summer adventures to go on yet. Download and read my supernatural lesbian detective mystery/thriller novel today and tell all of your friends! It’s like 250,000 plus words of free fiction! Read it or I’ll go crazy!
Have fun reading my novel and also in VRChat I guess! See you in Winter 2026!