As I sat in a suite inside a downtown San Francisco hotel, I found myself slapping the butt of a pig as part of a sequence of events needed to help fix someone’s monster truck.
I wasn’t alone in this room, mind you. I had the CEO of the company who made this game, the COO of the company, a few marketing folks from both Owlchemy and their external PR partners, and two other employees on the other end of the VR headset, each performing similarly insane tasks in the upcoming expansion for the wildly popular VR title, Dimensional Double Shift.
It was at that moment that I needed an adult.
Wildly creative moments like these make Owlchemy one of my favorite companies making games, and it feels like this team has fully unlocked the secret sauce that makes VR experiences inherently compelling to play. In my nearly thirty minutes with the expansion for Dimensional Double Shift, I slapped a hogs butt, milked multiple udders, juiced fruit and made blood-spiked beverages for the patrons of a ‘50s-style diner, all set within the backdrop of a flaming hellscape named that took inspiration from Owlchemy’s own backyard.
Set within Hexas, Gas N’ Grill has opened a new location that is just as wacky as before, and despite having not played DDS in a few months, hopping back into my role as a Gas N’ Grill employee felt almost seamless.
This is because every action you perform in Dimensional Double Shift feels inherently natural thanks to the game’s use of hand tracking, which turns your own hands into the controller itself. I’ve written about Owlchemy’s implementation of hand tracking in VR before with a Job Simulator demo, and honestly it’s such a perfect way to control games like this. Using the best controllers we humans have - our own two hands - feels like second nature versus learning how to control everything with a controller, no matter how good the Meta Quest 3 controllers are.
Reaching out to slap the pig’s butt alongside Owlchemy CEOwl Andrew Eiche might not have had the haptic feedback maybe pressing a button on a controller might give thanks to rumble features, but it felt much more intuitive and, if I’m honest, a bit more embarrassing as I can only image the view everyone else in the room had as we were doing this.
Again, I fully needed an adult.
Reaching over to grab a piece of fruit while running the diner to toss to a co-worker never felt wonky or weird, either. As with the Job Simulator demo before it, my hand became the haptics, and within minutes I was grabbing fruit, throwing it into the nearby juicer, all while using my other hand to hand items and ingredients to my co-workers, grab another item, or simply add a glug of blood to a drink.
Instead of learning how to use a controller to control everything, I could instead take in the scenery around me, the team’s boundless creativity on full display.
“We have the Rule of Funny,” Owlchemy CEOwl Andrew Eiche told me during an interview after our demo. “In comics, there is the Rule of Cool, where you can throw out any canon if it’s funny enough. We have the Rule of Funny, where you can throw out any canon if it's funny enough.”
Eiche explains that this creativity is the result of a team that “pushes” to be more creative. Owlchemy’s COOwl, Sandra Marshall, says that this creativity is encouraged thanks to everyone on the team having a voice to provide ideas.
“Everyone has a voice. We really encourage if you have an idea, it’s encouraged to [be shared]. Everyone can contribute to the creativity.”
“I didn’t ask anyone to put a pigs butt in,” Eiche said with a chuckle.
Hexas itself highlights this as well. Despite an art style that doesn’t necessarily delve into hyper realism, the fact that we were in a fiery hellscape never escaped my mind. It’s a broad view of Texas, where Owlchemy is based, with everything from BBQ eateries to demons pulling up to the counter donning wide-brimmed cowboy hats. And the trucks were monster trucks, in both a figurative and literal sense.
The $4.99 Hexas Dimensional Pack is the first major add-on for the wildly popular Dimensional Double Shift, which has gone on to become Owlchemy’s most popular title since it launched its open beta (now in Early Access) last year. The Job Simulator creator attributes this not simply to the “tailwind” of their other titles on the Quest platform, but also the inherently social and physical gameplay elements they bring to their titles.
In my time with Dimensional Double Shift, I’m not looking to be someone else, controlling them like some disembodied third party. Instead, it’s myself performing actions I might do normally: grabbing items, pulling levers and, yes, spanking pig butts (despite being mostly vegan, I do cook a mean Carnitas when the craving hits).
At the end of the day, the social aspect is what has me smiling ear to ear whenever I’m playing an Owlchemy game. I do not think milking the udders, making drink orders in a hellspawn-frequented diner, or changing the spark plug fuses on a literal monster truck would be nearly as entertaining without the people taking part in this absurdity alongside me. The Hexas Dimension Pack will also come with a new room browser to make meeting up for a shift even easier now.
All of this has helped to catapult Dimensional Double Shift to over half a million downloads since its open beta launch, becoming the company’s most downloaded game.
“We’re finding social is the special sauce that really makes immersive, immersive,” Eiche eplained. “And it wasn’t obvious when we started this. People were like, ‘Multiplayer is cool,’ but it didn't seem like that was the key feature that people wanted.”
Yet, Owlchemy decided to build a title around this feature - an inherently social experience that can truly immerse players. And the numbers speak for themselves.
“We were like, ‘It'll be great if we have 50,000 players by the time we launch Texas.’ And then we were like, ‘Oops, we did ten times as many players.’ So yeah, it speaks to something that people want to play because, you know, it wasn't a given.”
Season of Discovery Hotfixes - 17 April
Season of Discovery Hotfixes - April 17
