Working at a diner or a garage with friends may not seem like the most glamorous job, but when you shift that experience into VR it turns into a chaotic, fun way to spend time together. I recently had the opportunity to play Dimensional Double Shift, the latest game from developer and publisher Owlchemy Labs, where you can join your friends in the interdimensional service industry. Thanks to some fun and intuitive mechanics and goals, I’m looking forward to the rest of what Dimensional Double Shift has to offer.
After meeting up with my demo compatriots in a lobby, we joined hands over one of the two available work settings: a diner where you serve up various food and drinks or a garage where the team works together to repair a busted alien car. While we had time to try both scenarios, we opted for the diner first, where we were set up facing each other, surrounded by various shelves of food or food prep equipment.
My station gave me immediate access to tortillas, plates, fresh-grown vegetables, a water hose, and a few other tools to help me serve up food. Though I couldn’t reach across the work area, I noticed my fellow wait staff had vastly different setups, which meant we’d be required to communicate and even hand food off to each other to ensure it was prepared on time.
One of my tools was a food processor that came with two settings. The first would mince up whatever I dropped into the top, turning any meat or vegetables into meal-ready chunks and depositing it onto the plate I’d placed below. If I pulled a lever on top of the machine, however, it would convert the processor into a makeshift food cannon, firing off the food chunks at two of my coworkers.
In an ideal scenario, I would be helping them prepare a meal that required diced carrots or potatoes, but in execution, I used it to shower them with chunks of meat, a decision that thankfully carried no negative repercussions. Thankfully, with Dimensional Double Shift’s cartoonish aesthetic, the whole affair was less like something out of a horror movie and more of a silly diversion.
This art style lends itself to the weird “don’t think too hard about it” mindset that comes with the game. Does it make sense for raw meat, vegetables, and other foodstuff to all go into the same processor and come out in perfect shape for consumption? Of course not, but you’d also have to deal with angry customers if you goofed off too much at a real job. This also means you’re free to express yourself however you like, including in your character settings.
Simply looking at your wrist brings up a menu, giving you access to the usual system settings and allowing you to change your appearance. With a few pinches, you can change your hairstyle and color, choose your facial hair, change your skin tone, makeup, accessories, and more. Best of all, you don’t need to wear a hairnet! You can even add unlockable titles to your employee badge, letting people know you couldn’t resist setting your hands on fire with the blowtorch in the garage level.
Speaking of the garage level, it was my favorite of the two settings. The food-themed chaos of the diner was fun, but the feeling of everyone working to repair the same car felt like a better execution of Dimensional Double Shift’s premise. There were still unique workstations for each player, requiring communication and sometimes tossing items to each other, and occasionally, you’d have to work with another player to pry open a stubborn compartment. While the diner allowed each player to partially focus on preparing their own orders, the garage gave everyone a very visible common goal.
One of the only drawbacks to the experience was the game’s control scheme. Instead of using VR Controllers, Dimensional Double Shift utilizes hand tracking for more intuitive interactions with the world. This made adjusting to the VR setting easier, but the control scheme wasn’t without some issues. This may have simply been due to less-than-optimal lighting in the play area, but there were a few occasions where my in-game hand refused to pull a lever or activate a tool.
Given the collaborative nature of the game, you will naturally need at least one other person to play it with, with four players being the max party size. Thankfully, Dimensional Double Shift will be free to play when it launches in Early Access, making it a less daunting investment to get the gang signed up for a shift at the space diner. With the promise of future dimensions to come, you’ll want to keep your eyes on Dimensional Double Shift. In VR, the possibilities for entertainment are endless, but goofing off with your friends at work is a great way to spend an afternoon.
Dimensional Double Shift releases September 26th on Oculus Quest.
