The irony of a trade fair like Gamescom is that you always play the most vibrant games while trapped in the dullest of spaces. This was especially true for my half-hour with Owlchemy Labs’ latest VR game, which took place inside a plastic box decorated with four white chairs, a white table and a white sofa. Thankfully, the set dressing did not speak for the game’s content. Dimensional Double Shift – out today and free-to-play – is a heady cooperative VR caper that sees you scrambling for tools and trading (see: throwing) objects and ingredients between your co-op partners to complete tasks in an intergalactic diner.
Crucially, though, there are no controllers in sight. The only available input method for Dimensional Double Shift is hand tracking, so much so that the game’s code base doesn’t even feature a developer backup for controller input. Across a chaotic workday, I used my fingers to snatch orders, my palms to catch toppings, and pinched to take the lid off before pouring wobbly pancake fluid onto my local grill. You can also shake to pour salt into your hand and then pick up the group of granules to season a dish. Players are split across four stations, each with unique machines and food items, from potatoes and tortillas to blenders, blowtorches and vegetable gardens.
The play space is full of playful touches, too, such as a water sprayer that can be loaded with alternative fluids (like egg whites) to speed up your frying efficiency. Griefing your colleagues with foodstuffs is just as fun as collaborating on one of the game’s dubious dishes. Dimensional Double Shift is Overcooked with extra room for human error, and it’s a blast.
“Your parent company, Conglomni Corp, has decided it would be cheaper if one of these gas and grills covered multiple dimensions, and so invented the concept of dimension shifting just to make you run a gas station,” explained Andrew Eiche, CEO of Owlchemy Labs, who I sat down with after my session. “So you grill, burn, cook, you know, serve the different customers of the omniverse. You play two different shifts, one in the garage, where you’re, like, trying to figure out how to fix this car that’s not always straightforward with, like, little puzzle elements that require collaboration with other players, and then the diner side where you’re fulfilling orders, sharing ingredients and preparing food for the customers.”
Owlchemy Labs is betting big on hand-tracking
After experimenting with hand-tracking for 2019’s Vacation Simulator, Owlchemy Labs decided to lean into it wholly until something clicked. “We found that not only is hand tracking at a level that’s usable today, but In many ways, it also feels like what will eventually become the primary interaction in VR,” Eiche said. “With Job Simulator initially, we explored what it meant to interact with things when you have these controllers, and we’re doing the same thing with the hand tracking here. Where do we abstract, and then where do we really simulate how you interact with objects?”
It works incredibly well in practice, but the decision to make Dimensional Double Shift a hand-tracking-only game is bold. Notably, it isolates the game from platforms that don’t support the input method. But for Eiche, this is a gentle pressure Owlchemy Labs can exert on the VR industry, hopefully leading to greater uptake of the future-forward format. “For mass adoption, friction is your main barrier,” Eiche said. “It’s like the internet; it was usable by a bunch of nerds until somebody came up with search. But we’re already seeing VR headsets become general computing devices, and for your average user who mostly computes on a phone and might use a laptop for their work, they don’t want to figure out how to use a controller,” he continued.
As an Index Knuckles stan, I used to bristle at the thought of hands-free VR, but Eiche has a point here, and the proof is in the quirky pudding served up at Owlchemy’s in-game diner. Even with almost a decade of experience playing and consulting on VR games, I can’t get past the (comparative) meditative bliss of pulling on my Quest 3, using my fingers to seamlessly navigate its menus, issue a software update, download a review build, or watch some YouTube. There’s an intuition to hand tracking that clears the torment of setup that plagues other platforms and leaves most headsets gathering dust. Anecdotally, it also makes for a much better experience when demoing virtual reality to sceptical friends and family.
Eiche knows that many VR games, especially hardcore experiences, will continue to demand a controller for more precise input. Still, for Owlchemy’s use case, the benefits of hand tracking outweigh the accessibility caveats created by a controller.“We play with so many different players, and it’s much more straightforward to do hand tracking because I don’t have to explain things to them,” Eiche said. “Cosmonious High has a few pretty complex interactions for basic users, like teleporting by pressing up on the thumb stick – that’s very confusing! And using the powers is like, you know, ‘press one of the face buttons,’ and they’re like, ‘It has a face?’.
Mixed modalities and the future of VR
Only time will tell whether hand tracking will take off as the new primary input method for VR, but Dimensional Double Shift is a determined step in that direction from one of the industry’s brightest studios. However, the broader problem of cementing virtual reality in our daily lives is still lurking in the background. On that front, Eiche has some ideas. “I think the biggest thing you’re going to see in VR in the next five years is this general computing thing – a focus on looking at the device, not as a video game console or a work device, or these buckets you shove it in, and more thinking about what an app or an experience looks like when it lives in a spectrum,” he explained.
“I think there’s a huge space for somebody to design a game that starts flat, moves to mixed reality, and slides into VR, allowing you to move between those modalities in a way that makes sense and is clear, and then you can easily keep playing the flat version on your console, right?” Eiche continued. “I think you’ll see that there’s a space for VR that exists that’s unique. It’s not trying to displace anything; it’s its own media. We need to stop being like ‘you’re going to do all your work there’ – but you’re going to do some things there that are unique, that you can only do there. There are VR games, and I think our games exemplify this, that you can only play in VR.”
The gangly mayhem of Dimensional Double Shift’s interactions speak to Eiche’s ethos and make it an unserious game by design, which fits perfectly with Owlchemy’s pedigree for rib-tickling VR adventures. The in-game sriracha knockoff is called Spicy Gil’s Cloaca Cooker, to name one example that got me giggling. “We have this hierarchy of humour we talk about, and the number one humour we can inject into our games is the jokes you make with your friends,” Eiche said. “We want to create situations where you and your friends can laugh, have fun, and make inside jokes. Then we go down the list and integrate, like, NPCs saying funny things and funny signs in the environment encouraging you,” he continued. “We also have character archetypes, like this grandma who sometimes shows up in the diner and says, “I put on my diaper for this meal!”
Owlchemy Labs has undoubtedly carved out its niche by making a string of irreverent but mechanically interesting VR games, and that dynasty continues with Dimensional Double Shift. But while playful humour has brought the studio success, Eiche points to the inherent physical roleplaying embedded in a game like Job Simulator as the studio’s secret sauce. “Our games short-circuit your brain back to that childlike state, so you immediately return to a place of play – It doesn’t take you out of the game; it puts you primarily in there,” he explained. “The problem that you run into with serious games is you can always take a comedy game seriously, but you can’t take a serious game comedy – they try to prevent you from being goofy, and we’re just like ‘go, go, go!’”
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