In his weekly column, Android Central Senior Content Producer Nick Sutrich delves into all things VR, from new hardware to new games, upcoming technologies, and so much more.
Whenever someone gets their first VR headset, Job Simulator is almost always one of the first games they'll play. The game is as ubiquitous with virtual reality gaming as Beat Saber is and this has earned developer Owlchemy Labs quite the pedigree over the years. For that reason, the company's latest game, Dimensional Double Shift, immediately caught my eye.
Dimensional Double Shift, or DDS as I'll call it from now on, can be described essentially as a multiplayer Job Simulator. While Job Simulator sees you taking your time as one of four jobs, DDS splits the workload between two main job types to finish as many duties as you can within a shift. Each job supports up to four players, and you'll find that jobs change based on how many players are in the game and what workstations they're at.
While DDS is still a free-to-play game on the Meta Quest platform, the new Hexas dimension is the first paid DLC to debut. For $4.99, players will unlock Hexas and all the cheeky swag that comes along with it. Anyone can play in Hexas so long as at least one person in the party owns the pack, you just can't earn those sweet accessories unless you pay the $5. It's a great business model that mirrors Walkabout Mini Golf and ensures that everyone gets to have fun even if they don't have money to spare.
Heck, let's go
Hexas debuts the launch of public lobbies, as well as a completely new dimension to experience the cooking and mechanic jobs in. While the base jobs are the same concept, the ingredients, stations, and even mechanics of them can be wildly different.
Let's cover the basics first. DDS is a hand tracking-only game, meaning you'll toss those controllers aside and feel the sweet relief of your God-given hands in the air. The game's controls are weirdly tactile, given that you're just grabbing air the whole time, thanks to a unique system where items lock to your hand until you perform an obvious "letting go" gesture. That means you just dramatically open your hand very quickly to drop something.
Players start out in a lobby of sorts with two jobs to choose from: cooking or mechanic work. With Hexas, the dimension chosen is randomized, so you never know when you'll get to fix cars in Hell. You'll just have to play to see when it finally happens.
If you've played Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality, or Cosmonious High, you'll immediately feel at home with the game's mechanics. As a cook, you'll grab an order ticket and assemble it as quickly as you can, and the fastest players will complete more orders than everyone else. The mechanic job is more about teamwork since the entire team works on a single car rather than individual vehicles.
Owlchemy Labs games are wildly creative and are best enjoyed by people who enjoy role playing and exploration. As the CEO of Owlchemy Labs once told me, the best VR games "let you roleplay and don't put exposition in the way of your roleplaying."
That means when you start a job in Dimensional Double Shift, the workstation is your canvas. Each work station has completely different tools and machines with which to work. You don't move between stations during a shift, ensuring that teamwork is required when one person's problem requires a tool or part they don't have immediate access to.
Like all other Owlchemy Labs games, this is built for players with all sorts of heights and abilities, so you can adjust the height of your workstation on the fly, pass parts and ingredients between players, use hand gestures and your voice to communicate with other players, and so forth.
DDS's first dimension, Treeattle, is a parody play on the hipster hippy culture you might find in suburban and downtown Seattle. Hexas, likewise, is a parody of the larger-than-life attitudes and lifestyles you'll find in Texas, just with a demonic twist for comedic effect.
As with any good Owlchemy game, DDS rewards players for thinking outside of the box and combining items that otherwise might not go together. It also heavily leans into the alternate dimension concept where cars might have milkable udders or demonic patrons might enjoy a literal bloody Mary drink.
Everything is so ridiculous that it ups the fun factor even beyond what was in the original dimension, and the humor is just the right mix between older-kid-friendly and still hilarious to adults who understand the references.
As I've written about several times before, I love playing VR games with my family. Whether it's Dungeons of Eternity with my son or Walkabout Mini Golf with my wife, there's a real joy that comes with playing VR games with other people. For that reason, I absolutely had to play this one with them and the results couldn't have been better.
My son typically hates hand tracking games, but Owlchemy Labs has been perfecting hand tracking since Job Simulator and it shows. He didn't once complain about not being able to use controllers — something that's never happened with other hand tracking games — and was moving around with the precision normally only associated with using motion-tracked VR controllers.
My wife also enjoyed the heck out of the game, especially during the mechanic section when we had to co-op fix several different broken car parts. It was like putting both our hands on a physical puzzle and working together to solve it. The teamwork was amazing.
Owlchemy's CEO, Andrew Eiche, told me the company is already hard at work on the next big update. While he didn't commit to what sorts of new jobs we can look forward to, I'm confident that the next update will once again reinvent what DDS players have come to expect.
Now that lobbies can be publicly searched, it'll be significantly easier to find players online when you're friends (or family) aren't available to play. Given how great Owlchemy's previous games were when played in a room with other people, it shouldn't come as to any surprise that this game is a blast to play online.
Owlchemy's first online multiplayer game is a huge success — the game already surpassed 500,000 downloads and is the fastest-growing Owlchemy game ever — and Hexas doubles the fun for just $5. Hard to say no to that.
The Meta Quest 3S has the best hand tracking performance of any Meta Quest headset thanks to a dedicated sensor that can see your hands even in the dark! It's a great way to play games like Dimensional Double Shift and thousands of other amazing VR games, too.
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