2016’s Job Simulator put Owlchemy Labs on the map, delivering an incredibly accessible virtual reality experience that put tongue-in-cheek humor at the forefront of the experience, and for the best part of a decade, the studio has remained at the top of the VR gaming space. Owlchemy’s latest project, Dimensional Double Shift, aims to keep it there a touch longer.
Released into early access back in September 2024, Dimensional Double Shift is a co-op multiplayer VR game that puts a rare spotlight on hand-tracked gameplay. Game Rant recently spoke with Andrew Eiche, Owlchemy Labs’ CEO (Chief Executive Owl, as they like to be referred to), who spoke all about the VR game’s humor, its upcoming New Joysey expansion, and the future of the VR industry. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How Dimensional Double Shift Differs From Past Owlchemy Labs Games
Game Rant: Could you give a top-level overview of Dimensional Double Shift for those who might not have heard of it?
“Dimensional Double Shift is a 2-4-player multiplayer hand-tracked VR game. You and your friends run a diner/garage that flies through the omniverse. You get to travel to various awesome dimensions and help the citizens there. The first of which is Treeattle, then we released Hexas, and now we’re talking about New Joysey. You do all kinds of zany things. The game is about being cooperative but also just hanging out and being an underpaid employee at a local gas station.”
Game Rant: Unlike Owlchemy Labs’ last few projects, Dimensional Double Shift launched into free-to-play early access. Could you talk me through the decision to shift to a free-to-play model?
“We agonized over it a little bit to get here, but when we looked at the store, the decision became obvious. VR has a very loyal and decently-sized player-base, but it’s not the size of say, PC or consoles or mobile by any stretch.
We were releasing a multiplayer game in VR, and we were like, how do we get enough people into the game in such a way that there’s always people there, and that you and your friends don’t have to sight unseen drop $80 to have the maximum experience? So we were like, okay, let’s make a much more permissive model where everybody gets one dimension for free, and then beyond that, as long as one person in your party has a dimension, you can access it. It’s even mix and match, so you could have one dimension and I have another, and we go from there.
We live in an era where demos don’t really exist anymore because the stores don’t really support demos. So free-to-play, for us, feels less like what you’ve seen in free-to-play recently, where there’s second economies, third economies, and all this. We’re doing shareware. We’re going back to Doom. But instead of sending a letter to Dallas, Texas to get a physical key back, you just get to try it out and, if you like it, you can buy it on the store.”
Humor Is At The Heart of Dimensional Double Shift
Game Rant: Humor has been a major part of Owlchemy Labs’ identity and Dimensional Double Shift is no exception. Could you talk me through the studio’s process of bringing its unique brand of humor into the world of VR?
“There’s actually a kind of hierarchy of humor when you talk about virtual reality. At the very top is the humor you and your friends create yourselves. The ideal version is that we are setting the stage for you all to participate in the humor. I think that’s what makes our game so special and what makes funny games funny. If you play a game, and it feels like the humor is falling flat, what’s happening is you’re not actually encouraged to engage with the game.
We start there, and everything falls down from there. That’s why there’s a quippy side character. You’re supposed to love to hate ALICE. Everybody needs a boss they hate. That was literally the goal with ALICE. We need you to hate your boss. So we put that in there. Then we go in and we do passes on the posters and passes on the appliances. A lot of it’s through the lens of what an awful parent corporate entity would put in here to make you feel like, “Oh, they’re just trying to make this job feel good. They don’t get it.”
When you create all that, and you build it up and up and up, eventually you get to the point where, hopefully, we’ve relaxed players, and they realize they’re not meant to be taking this too seriously.”
Game Rant: Were there any key points of inspiration for Dimensional Double Shift‘s humor?
“We work best when we have a foil, something to tilt at. Ours was these giant faceless corporations that hire people you’re essentially forced to interact with. You’re like, “Yeah, I work for them but…I don’t know…they pay the bills.” It’s like corporate feudalism.
It was fun to explore that. It’s one of the major themes you see. Conglomni Corp is the parent corporation. The person who owns Conglomni Corp is Conrad Glomni III, whose grandfather made the company. There’s a famous saying in business which is like, the grandparents build, the parents grow, and the grandchildren destroy. We’re on that bad third generation.
You go around the world today, and you see all sorts of weird things that happen, decisions that get made on the basis of spreadsheets. The malice in the numbers. No one explicitly set out to destroy Joann Fabrics, but in trying to make it more efficient for the sake of this magic spreadsheet, they hollowed it out. That was what we wanted to tilt at. That whole corporatization and financialization and conglomeration of it all.”
Game Rant: Do you have a favorite joke in Dimensional Double Shift?
“I have favorite characters. The characters have so many good jokes that make me laugh all the time. When you complete orders or complete car tasks, the characters will say something. Most of the time it’s like, “haha.” But sometimes they really get me. In Treeattle, my favorite character is ‘Wife Guy,’ who’s a guy who’s just a little too obsessed with his wife. In Hexas, I really enjoy ‘Pestilence Demon,’ who’s just disgusting.
In the dimension that’s coming up, New Joysey, there’s a character called ‘Woman Who Thinks She’s In a Relationship With You.’ She’s always yelling at you, she’s like, “I bet your wife likes it!” She’s mad, and you’re like, “I don’t know who you are lady!” Every time she talks it’s extremely funny to me.”
How Dimensional Double Shift Grew From a Vacation Simulator Update to its Own Fully-Fledged VR Experience
Game Rant: Am I right in saying this is the first hand-tracked game Owlchemy Labs has made?
“This is not the first hand-tracked game we’ve made, but it is the first one built from the ground up. We did hand-tracking in Vacation Simulator as an experiment, and that gave us the confidence to do Dimensional Double Shift.”
Game Rant: Could you talk me through the decision to make a full hand-tracking game following its implementation in Vacation Simulator?
“In Vacation Simulator, we mapped gestures to the existing button layout, and that worked really well. But what really got us was how much people like hand-tracking. The crowd that plays a lot of games love the controllers, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s a crowd that doesn’t play a lot of games, which is a lot of VR users. You get young kids who play a lot of iPad who are used to natural interaction, and you’re getting a lot of older players. Go ask Puzzling Places what their average age is, it’s surprisingly old.
When you’re dealing with those kinds of folks who weren’t raised on controllers, hand-tracking comes naturally. So the extension of that was, what if we built a game from the ground up where we did hand-tracking? So there are lots of little interactions, like you can pinch something and spin it around. Pinch doesn’t exist in controllers. Or you can grab something lightly and then squeeze it hard.
All those interactions came out of hand-tracking. And what we’ve found since then, is that, if you’re not a person that’s predisposed to controllers, a lot of players are excited it’s hand-tracked. To us with VR, the biggest hurdles we face are friction now. The technology is awesome. We literally play on a headset that’s completely standalone, that plays by itself. We can always increase graphical power and work on those things, and we should. But the biggest problem is messed up hair, or you have to put something on your face. Controllers are just another thing you have to deal with.
Everything you take away that you have to deal with increases people’s propensity to be like, “Oh, I can just put on the headset and not worry about the controllers or batteries.””
Game Rant: Who would you say Dimensional Double Shift is for?
“Our target demographic is people who want to hang out together who can’t stomach the motion stuff. I think, spiritually, we’re very similar to a lot of the other VR games that exist in terms of what our high-level goals are. Gorilla Tag and Animal Company are about hanging out. Walkabout Mini Golf is a different kind of hanging out.
Our game is very locked down, you don’t move. Ours is about the VR of the near. People don’t notice you don’t move because there’s so much stuff around you. Whereas some of those other games are explicitly about the motion. We’re making a game for people who want to play social VR, but maybe they don’t want to smack their arms into the ground and go upside down.”
Dimensional Double Shift Is Opening The Portal to an All-New Dimension
Game Rant: New Joysey is going to be Dimensional Double Shift‘s second paid expansion. Could you give me a top-level overview of what this add-on brings to the game?
“If you buy any paid add-on, not just New Joysey, you get access to the room browser. In New Joysey, we change the type of food you’re making, we change the machines you’re working with. In the garage there’s going to be a completely new set of modules as well as some modifications to some of the appliances. They get re-themed, so there’s like an electrical station that’s an arcade rather than a computer.
We want to keep some consistency as you’re jumping between these dimensions. You’re always going to be working on cars, you’re always going to be making food. But the type of food you make, the machines you use to make the food, the orders, the personality, the background, all of that changes.”
Game Rant: What’s your favorite thing that’s been added with the New Joysey expansion?
“I enjoy, in the diner, the pizzolo. It’s probably our biggest jump in a station because before we had a garden, then in Hexas it’s kind of garden-adjacent, but then we went different for this one. I enjoy a lot of the diner food because we stopped trying to make it relatable. We’ve got gabagool, we’ve got Jimmies, and we’ve got Rippers.
On the garage side, one of the things I enjoy is that things can be a little more difficult, or a little more puzzle-y to figure out. When you’re playing the baseline dimension, that’s the lowest skill level, and we can start to push that up. We obviously don’t want to make it inaccessible to people, we’re not here to make Silksong.”
The Future of Dimensional Double Shift and Owlchemy Labs
Game Rant: Is there a plan for how long Owlchemy Labs is going to support Dimensional Double Shift? Or a certain number of add-ons it’s looking to release?
“The plan is we’re in it for the long haul. If people keep playing it, we’ll keep supporting it. If every single person leaves and no one wants to play it, we’re not going to make a game for nobody! This was constructed as a long-term project, as something we could support for a while.
As far as the number of add-ons and dimensions, this is one of the reasons why we’re in early access. We’re trying to figure out what our players like. We have a number of dimensions we’ve already thought out, and we’re moving through them. Beyond that, it really comes down to what our community is gravitating towards, what they’re looking for. If people have things they love, come to our Discord, tell us about them there. We’re in there all the time.
I can’t make promises on what shape the game takes. Recently we added matchmaking, and that was at the request of our players. That’s kind of how we’re going. It really is a collaborative effort between us and the community.”
Game Rant: Is there a planned date for when Dimensional Double Shift will leave early access?
“There is a set number of dimensions that we have that we feel like would be the complete product. When we cap that off we will call it 1.0. Does that mean we’ll never go back and change anything? Not by a long shot. But there’s a certain number of features and dimensions we have in mind. Although, we’ve thrown a wrench in some of that because we keep adding features we never thought of.”
The Current State of VR Gaming, According to Owlchemy Labs' CEO
Game Rant: Looking from the outside in, some might say that VR hasn’t experienced the growth the industry was expecting it to a few years ago. How do you feel about the current state of VR gaming?
“I think that the people who say that aren’t looking. I think that tech, the bigger picture, and gaming, the smaller picture, is obsessed with millennials. If millennials don’t do it, then it doesn’t count. That’s the problem. If you talk to kids in high school, you would be like, “Oh my god, VR is unstoppable.” I have to not wear my Owlchemy Labs shirts out in public places because I get mobbed.
Everyone I talk to is like, “Oh my kids have VR. The cafeteria at school is split half-and-half between people who have VR and don’t. You either have Gorilla Tag or you don’t. I had to buy my kids two different headsets because this or that.” And these aren’t rich people that are buying them, these are just normal people.
So sure, if your metric for success is if a 35-year-old HR professional puts on the headset and does work, you’re failing. Why are you trying to chase someone who doesn’t want to do something when you’ve literally captured a generation? It’s amusing to me, because it would be like coming along in 1985 and saying, “The Nintendo Entertainment System is a failure because people aren’t doing spreadsheets with it.”
VR has millions of players, it’s just not doing the things that big companies really want.”
Game Rant: Would Owlchemy Labs ever go back to making flat-screen games?
“We’re wholly owned by Google, and we’re working with the Android XR team and stuff. Right now, VR as a medium is what excites us. There’s a lot of very interesting things in VR. I play a lot of flat games, don’t get me wrong. I think they’re wonderful. I wouldn’t say no to would we switch back ever.
But do we have any plans or are we even considering it? No we’re not, because there’s so much more potential this medium has. And like I’m saying, there’s an entire generation of people who are aging up and who will expect VR to be there, and expect this medium to grow. When I look forward, there’s still a lot of groundwork to lay, a lot of work to be done.”
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