Razer's bringing good vibrations to Razercon with a $300 vibrating seat cushion

Razer's new haptic gaming cushion is, well, interesting. It's called the Razer Freya and it's a pretty self-explanatory device: you load it onto your chair, plug it in, and the six padded regions, each with a motor embedded within it, start a-rumblin' in time with in-game actions, sounds, or music. The idea is, with haptic feedback vibrating down your back and backside, you'll be more engrossed in your game.

It's certainly an idea—one that a few haptic companies have been pushing for a while now. There are haptic vests, haptic chairs (including one from Razer), haptic chair accessories, but never, as Razer tells me ahead of Freya's release, a cushion.

I tried the haptic gaming cushion out ahead of its announcement over at Razercon just now. Loaded into a Razer gaming chair with the cushion attached (it's held on with a couple of adjustable straps and should work with most chairs) I sit back enough to get the full force of the device. I watch our long-standing Razer PR sadistically turn up the vibration force to maximum rumble in the new Razer Synapse 4 app and load up Final Fantasy XVI.

Final Fantasy is one of the games that supports the haptic cushion natively, meaning the developers have specifically coded support into the game and tied to certain actions. Hogwarts Legacy was also mentioned as having support baked into the game, as will Silent Hill and Snowrunner. I'm told support for future games will be made easy by a Unreal Engine 5 plugin. Though that's still relying on developers to support the thing, even if it's as easy as ticking a box in UE5. 

If specific support for Freya doesn't happen for a particular game you play a lot of, the haptics can also be set to respond to in-game sounds instead.

But back to my rump-shaking experience. With Final Fantasy loaded up, I was ready to kick butt and get my butt kicked in return. Tapping furiously on the provided keyboard and mercilessly murdering large lobster-looking creatures with one fell swoop of my magic hands