Google’s directly competing services aren’t on Vision Pro, but that doesn’t mean the company isn’t doing business on Apple’s headset altogether, as it has now brought two of its most influential VR games to Vision Pro.
Google’s XR studio Owlchemy Labs today launched Job Simulator (2016) and its sequel Vacation Simulator (2019) on Vision Pro, respectively priced at $20 and $30 on the App Store.
The tongue-in-cheek simulator games parody both the worlds of work and play as seen through the eyes of robots who have replaced all human jobs—and have taken human vacations too.
To boot, the franchise has been one of VR’s most successful to date, with both games going multi-platinum across all major VR headsets, and regularly showing up in the top most-popular VR game charts since their respective launches.
The Vision Pro releases of both games are in large part thanks to the studio’s early adoption of hand-tracking, as Apple’s headset doesn’t support motion controllers of any sort. Consequently, this has also allowed the studio to bring a hand-tracking mode to the Quest versions too.
“Owlchemy Labs has always been committed to pioneering hand tracking technology and putting our games on the most innovative platforms,” said Andrew Eiche, CEO at Owlchemy Labs. “Bringing Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator to Apple Vision Pro feels like the most natural manifestation of our goals. The fully immersive environments look stunning on Apple Vision Pro, and the games have been optimized for the hand- and eye-tracking capabilities of the platform.”
Acquired by Google in 2017, Owlchemy Labs is also known for the Emmy-nominated title Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017), and its latest VR game Cosmonious High (2022).
This technically makes for the first Google-owned apps to release on Vision Pro. At the time of this writing, notably missing is YouTube, Google Maps, Meet, Drive, and Photos. The company has said however a YouTube app for Vision Pro is on the map, although it’s not certain when that’s set to arrive.
Owlchemy Labs, the Google-owned VR studio, announced it’s bringing the chart-topping VR games Job Simulator (2016) and its sequel Vacation Simulator (2019) to Apple Vision Pro.
The studio’s seminal ‘Simulator’ franchise has had its fair share of success over the years, with both garnering over a million downloads across all major VR headsets. As testament to its staying power, the studio’s successful job place parody Job Simulator regularly shows up in the top most popular VR game charts since its launch on the original HTC Vive in 2016, with both titles making for great beginner VR experiences since they largely focus on family-friendly, room-scale fun that anyone can easily pick up.
Owlchemy Labs says both games—Job Simulator priced at $20 and Vacation Simulator at $30—will include their respective free content updates when they launch on Vision Pro, which are slated to arrive “soon,” the studio says.
Both games were originally designed around VR motion controllers, which the $3,500 Vision Pro notably lacks, which has put many developers in a pickle as they either seek to adapt their existing VR titles to Apple’s controllerless XR platform, or create a new IP entirely.
That said, it’s safe to assume the studio has adapted both titles to use the headset’s hand-tracking capabilities, which will not only be interesting to see since they’re such object-oriented experiences, but also to watch whether other VR studios follow suit to cater to the new platform that deemphasizes immersive gaming in favor of casual content consumption and productivity apps.
Founded in 2010, and later acquired by Google in 2017, Owlchemy is also known for the Emmy-nominated title Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017), and its latest VR game Cosmonious High (2022). We’re still waiting to see what the studio has in store from its GDC 2022 teaser, which promised to be it’s first-ever VR game built from the ground-up for hand-tracking, and first to feature multiplayer. Whatever the case, it’s clear the studio is continuing its mission to release its most popular VR games on every headset possible.
We chronicle a partial history of one of VR’s best-known developers: Owlchemy Lab.
I’m listening back through an interview with Andrew Eiche and Devin Reimer of Owlchemy Labs and we’re talking about the subtle genius of Half-Life: Alyx’s distance-grab mechanic. It’s part of a 90-minute chat that weaves through the recent history of VR and the wide range of attempts by developers to zero in on products with an audience. Our conversation takes a detour into how Crisis VRigade is secretly one of the purest expressions of the VR shooter and the conversation somehow winds back to their belief that hand-tracking is the next big frontier for VR mass adoption, and others just aren’t seeing it yet.
It’s a fascinating talk and equally insightful to listen back to, but it wasn’t exactly what I meant to discuss. Their studio works to make VR software as immersive, comfortable and accessible as possible at a time when VR hardware is often the opposite. It won them immense success with Job Simulator and their subsequent release have recieved positive reviews from critics and fans, as well as charting in top seller lists (though, notably not as highly as Job Sim). Is that a good showing four games on from the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive?
Owlchemy certainly isn’t out to make VR’s most explosive shooter or epic sword-swinging RPG, with the studio instead focusing its work carefully around existing constraints to craft experiences within current limits. Its been a bit of an experimental research and development lab even while, in recent years, the studio pursued this work operating under the umbrella of one of the world’s largest tech companies. Even today, Job Simulator sits on top sellers lists as one of VR’s most recognized and successful titles, not to mention being followed by multiple successors that each pushed VR design further down this very specific line of thinking.
“We’ve got to remember that today,” Eiche once said to me, “we’re getting more new players into VR than we are getting former players.”
While the studio’s leaders are famously practiced at smiling through questions aimed at uncovering their future plans, looking back at the unique studio’s path and focused design efforts, we can still find hints pointing to Owlchemy and VR’s future.
Owlchemy’s Origins
Owlchemy started in 2010 just when market fatigue and saturation were settling into the mobile gaming market.
“Mobile just kept going downhill and our games were continuously doing better, but we were following that trajectory down,” Reimer says.
They were working on titles like Jack Lumber which, as Reimer explained it, is all about being “a supernatural lumberjack out for vengeance on the forest because the evil tree killed his granny.” While the slapstick humor in their work continues today, gone are the days of keeping the lights on by developing for dozens of platforms fueld by hardware maker partnerships, like a specific port for a Blackberry phone that Eiche says “maybe a hundred humans ever bought” and an HP laptop with a Leap Motion hand-tracking sensor built into it.
“That’s how we survived,” Reimer says.”When people talk about like startup companies and stuff like that, they always like paint over it as this like perfect genesis…That’s always the way that it works, but that’s not the way that real companies ever start.”
The company attempted an approach where they would pursue a project under contract for someone else and then return to their own intellectual property. They even did a Kickstarter for a game called Dyscourse, to which Reimer says they learned to “never, ever” do crowdfunding again. They also started giving talks about surviving in the harsh wilderness that is indie development.
In retrospect, this period didn’t just help them survive, it also helped prepare for VR’s multi-platform consumer origins on console, PCs, and phones.
“It was like: ‘We’ve been training for this our whole lives,’” Reimer says.
Still, like any skeptical developer protecting their time, when the Oculus Rift’s Kickstarter launched in 2012 Reimer says he made a list – specifically, a list about why VR would fail. Or fail again, even. He blocked out a week of his time for the investigation and got started.
“It was like ‘headsets are too heavy on the head,'” he recalls. “Okay, mobile phones are starting to solve some of that. ‘The optics are bad.’ There are [now] advances in optics. And I went through that list and then I ended up calling Alex [Schwartz, Owlchemy co-founder] and I was like ‘This is going to happen. This is going to happen this time.'”
The studio started with a vehicle for its earliest tests being one of Owlchemy’s contract jobs, a superheroic jumping game called Aaaaa! for the Awesome!, in which you…jumped. You jumped very high, in fact. And then you fell.
“It was early days for VR,” Reimer recalls. “It’s first person. It’s just falling. I think this could work in VR.”
Owlchemy pitched a VR version, openly admitting it wouldn’t make money and that this was only for research purposes.
“It took us two days to get it up and running and then an entire month to make it not suck,” Reimer says.
Owlchemy had to figure out not only how to get a game running in VR for the first time but also some of the things we now take for granted, like VR menus and how to make it playable end-to-end without asking users to leave a headset. Owlchemy fumbled around just enough to release its work on Oculus Share, the now-extinct portal for early VR experiments and experiences.The reaction to the game was positive enough to get Owlchemy noticed. Not just by the VR enthusiasts checking for new experiences on a daily basis, but also by the companies busily plotting the next stages for consumer VR.
A Job Offer From Valve
By early 2014, VR was gaining steam.
Two years prior, the Oculus Rift had become one of the most talked-about Kickstarter projects of all time, raising nearly $2.5 million. ~$350 DK1 headsets were adding countless more loops of cables to developer studies and enthusiasts were sampling the first PC VR content via Oculus Share. But, slowly but surely, it was becoming clear Oculus wouldn’t be the only name in VR.
“Valve had been working on some of this early prototype stuff, and we knew a little bit of what they were working on and they decided to do the Steam Dev Days and they were gonna show a bunch of VR,” Reimer says.
Owlchemy was invited to host one of three talks on VR that February, the others being handled by Luckey and Michael Abrash, then of Valve and now heading research at Meta’s Reality Labs. From that, Reimer and colleagues were treated to Valve’s fabled VR room demo, which featured a crude VR headset that was positionally tracked using dozens of markers plastered all over a room. There were no controllers and the headset was incredibly bulky, but it represented the next step toward immersive consumer VR over the DK1, which could only track the direction of your gaze and not the position of your head.
You’ve probably heard at least one major VR figurehead describe that demo as a lightbulb moment for VR. Reimer isn’t one of them.
“I came out of that demo so depressed,” he says. “Because I realized that this is where VR was going and I could not see how in the short term we could bridge the gap on the technology side. We had this whole giant tracking problem that was like, how are we ever going to solve this in the short term? And then also what’s the input side of this equation? That is a whole other thing.”
Despite the reservations, Owlchemy pushed on with its next VR project. The Oculus Rift DK2 was on the horizon and would introduce its own positional tracking, albeit in a limited fashion with a camera facing you.
“We like sat down and started building all these pitches and we hated them all,” Reimer says. “Why don’t we like anything that we’re building? This should clearly be the future.”
Then the final piece of the puzzle fell into place.
Owlchemy was again treated to a new demo from Valve, this time for a device it was building with HTC. It represented yet another major step for VR, this time introducing fully-tracked controllers – and Valve wanted Owlchemy to build something for it.
“They were like: ‘We’ve made two. You can have one.'”
“We were like: ‘Cool.'”
And so the headset — along with the rest of Owlchemy — went to Reimer in Winnepeg, Canada. Or at at least most of it did; some parts of the setup they had to 3D print themselves.
“Valve at the time had the most 3D printers per capita or some crazy statistic,” Eiche points out. “And so they just sent us an STL file and it was like… what are we supposed to do with it?”
So they figured that bit out, and how to stitch it all together, and how to use the controllers with two USB wires. They then had a week to build a demo in what Reimer describes as the “most pivitol” seven days in the history of the company.
“The four of us just sat in my basement and programmed and drank and played video games for a week straight without sleeping. And Job Simulator is what popped up the other end of that thing,” he said. “The first thing we built was this little table with cubes on it.”
He put it low enough on the ground so he could sit on the floor and spent the next 20 minutes stacking cubes. He then removed the headset and made a proclamation about where VR was going:
“It’s physics!” he said.
Back To Job
By “physics”, Reimer meant a sense of agency unlike anything else felt in a virtual world before.
With two motion controllers reaching into environments there were direct consequences for your physical actions. What’s one of the most common places where your physical actions can have interesting consequences? Jobs, of course. And so Owlchemy started prototyping different jobs.
Reimer notes it was often “extreme things” that the team expected to be incredibly fun in VR. But the extremes didn’t always work. Things like juggling weren’t as compelling as the team thought they might be, whilst ideas like window washing ended up being incredibly uncomfortable to experience.
“We ended up having this kitchen […] and it was interesting because immediately it was like: ‘I understand what I need to do,'” Reimer explains.
“And that was another big learning was that, early in VR, there was this tendency to be like ‘I can do anything, it’s all virtual, so just whatever.’ And what we learned was that by leveraging people’s previous experience, you can side hop so much of the tutorialization or learning or anything like that. And then let people just do what they want into the world.”
The more it honed in on this idea, the more Owlchemy started to see its work validated. Reimer recalls one player putting an egg down, noticing it start to roll off the side of the table and then instinctively catching it. “All of a sudden it clicked,” he says. “This is probably one of the most complex human computer interactions that has ever taken place. It was such low, low lizard brain of solving this entire complex loop. But it just happened because we could leverage so much of what humans are good at to begin with.”
It’s around now that Eiche came onboard, having worked on some VR for a consultancy firm (he recalls one demo to a senior partner who proclaimed: “I wouldn’t be caught dead with that s**t on my face.”)
Full development on Job Simulator took place in a rented house in Austin, Texas. Reimer and Eiche recall a house full of VR developers and equipment chipping away at what made the game tick. This was not exactly a safe process. Reimer wrote on Twitter recently about prototype controllers that would give him electric shocks and making the house sound a little like a testing field for VR crash dummies.
“I’ve never had a controller that made me bleed and gave me high voltage shocks as much as that one,” he says. “I winced when I went to grab it.”
For a developer obsessed with VR comfort and safety, its notable one particularly treacherous area at the office was the loft.
“At the time you could only make square [VR] spaces because it was so early,” Eiche explains. “You couldn’t do polygons or anything like we do now. And part of the loft extended out over an open balcony, like over the second floor. So it’d be like, ‘Hey, if you feel the banister hitting, just don’t lean too far. It’s a one story drop on two other developers.'”
Owlchemy’s leaders were starting to feel pretty confident about where they had gotten with Job Simulator. The game was shaping up to be one of the best examples of what separated VR from flastscreen media and it would appear in the launch window for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PSVR. But, come release, the developers realized even the most optimistic projections for their own work had been modest.
“In my wildest dreams, I never could have imagined the reach of that game,” Reimer says.
This, it turns out, was something of a paradox. Job Simualtor has indeed been fantastically successful, still topping charts today. But consumer VR — at the time — was not. It’s usually this point in a developer retrospective that I’d tell you how the studio in question weathered the coming storm as VR’s install base limped out of the gates in the face of high prices and complicated setups. But Job Simulator’s continued success — it still ranks in the top 10 selling PSVR games on a monthly basis six years on — makes Owlchemy an oddity in the VR space.
Owlchemy’s leaders attribute success only partially to those sales, but also to their pacing and refusal to undergo explosive growth as investment in VR reached dramatic highs. Should they have gone and made a flatscreen PC game after Job Simulator? A mobile phone game? Heck, the controller grips resemble the grip of a gun and its one of gaming’s most popular genres, they could’ve gone the route Stress Level Zero went down and honed first-person shooter mechanics in VR.
“Everything is risky, right?” Reimer explains. “[So] why not bet on the thing where we can see this trend line? We don’t know how long it’s gonna take for this trend line to find success. But PC is going to get harder. Mobile’s going to get harder. This one is on the other trajectory. And so we can build something where we’re scaling with it.”
As far as the prospect of a shooter game goes, Eiche has some thoughts.
“Aiming is actually incredibly difficult and most people don’t realize like shooting sports are an Olympic sport,” Eiche explains. “So it’s an actual difficult thing. And one of my favorite things to watch is people who are really good at first person shooters try to play shooting games in VR because they’re not good.”
Just because you’re good at something on a gamepad, doesn’t mean you’re good at it in VR and while shooters are a popular form of videogame, Owlchemy sees VR as reaching much wider than that.
“The two things that we like really focused on there was can we build something that works for anybody? Anybody can pick up and play and have a good time,” Eiche says. “And also an important point of that is to not make people sick. Because the VR of that era, damn near a hundred percent of the titles you play would make you sick…assuming your users have all this back knowledge [on sickness] is just not a good way to build human computer interactions.”
From Rick & Morty To Google
Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-Ality was something of a continutation of Owlchemy’s alternating development cycle – something original followed by something under contract.
Early on, they had no idea if Job Simulator would take off, let alone the wider VR market, and the deal with Adult Swim Games to make Virtual Rick-ality gave them a security that, as it turns out, they wouldn’t end up needing.
“Essentially for us, it was the thing that was going to make sure that, if the previous game wasn’t successful, we can continue to make the next original thing,” Reimer says. “And so from a strictly business and financial standpoint, Job Simulator ended up being that thing. It gave us the confidence to be able to not worry about that success.”
That’s not to say there’s any regret about working on Rick & Morty. It’s an enormously popular property, for one thing, and it enabled Owlchemy to build out yet more tools and learn more lessons it could take into future projects.
“That was very in our minds with Rick & Morty,” Reimer says. “What cool stuff can we build that’s going to make this awesome game, but also will allow us to R&D and also build these things that we can utilize after?”
“It allowed us to break out of Job Sim for a little bit,” Eiche adds, “and do something fun. Originally we did bots [in Job Sim] because we didn’t want to have bipedal characters. So that helped. A lot of what you see in Cosmonious High today are lessons that we had learned in Rick & Morty, like we had to high five a character, and that was impossible back in the day. Now every character can be high-fived at any time in Cosmonious. I know that sounds like such a silly small thing, but you high-five Rick and that broke so many times. We had to put so many patches out to fix it.”
It also gave Owlchemy the opportunity to work on some more traditional game elements like implementing voice acting and performance work.
“We got to try a lot of different things in that IP that ended up being kind of case studies on how to, and how not to do things going forward,” Reimer adds.
Development for Rick & Morty also took place during that cold VR winter, years before the release of the Quest headset. But as the industry reckoned with what type of content was going to help VR take off and more shooters and traditional gaming genres started to enter the scene, Owlchemy noticed a curious lack of Job Simulator imitators.
“Let’s say, hypothetically, you build a word guessing game,” Eiche suggests. “Then a million clones appear. And there’s all sorts of reasons why our game is a little too complex to clone, but […] we actually assumed many times that ‘Okay, we’re going to release Job Sim — once we realized it was going to be big — we’re going to see a lot of bright and colorful games with hands and kind of adventure style-y and performative like our games are.’ And then we’re like ‘Hey, nobody’s doing that. Okay, we’ll release Rick & Morty.'”
“I was starting to get to the point of paranoia right before launch,” Reimer adds. “Everyone’s loving this. Everyone’s going to want to do this. And at the time I just didn’t give us, being so inside that bubble, enough credit of the complexity of what we had pulled off.”
Job Simulator’s success had eliminated the anxiety of surviving from game to game. But it also made the developer a very lucrative target for acquisitions, and that’s exactly what happened. In May 2017, a month after the launch of Rick & Morty, Google announced its intention to acquire Owlchemy, long before Meta had started buying up VR development teams.
“We had this unique situation where our worlds were aligning,” Reimer says of the move. “We had kept pushing on VR for everyone and Google was like ‘Yes, that’s how we’re successful, when VR can be for everyone.'”
Interestingly, Owlchemy never did the things you’d expect a content studio to do when it gets bought by a giant corporation. It hasn’t made exclusive titles for Google platforms, for example, and it hasn’t avoided other platforms as a result. In fact, even if the team did want to do something exclusive to Google it’d be tough. After all, the company pulled out of VR hardware and services years ago after failing to get the Daydream mobile platform to take off.
Isn’t it a bit strange for a company that doesn’t make games and doesn’t provide any VR services or hardware to own a VR game developer? Reimer says the continued success of Owlchemy’s titles means that relationship hasn’t felt under threat.
“They wanted to set things up was to be this wholly-owned subsidiary,” he explains. “At Google, we don’t make games internally, this is not something we’re good at.”
Google’s leadership recognized, instead, that Owlchemy is good at releasing VR games to platforms with tracked hands.
“Let’s let you do that,” Reimer explained of Google’s direction to them.
The Quest In Lieu Of A Daydream
It’s at this point my coversation with Reimer and Eiche stopped being so much documentative as it was philosophical. A hit title under your belt and an acquisition by one of the world’s biggest technology companies sort of takes the wind out of the scrappy indie narrative, and both Vacation Simulator and Cosmonious High are still fresh in everyone’s memory.
Vacation Sim was the studio’s first shot at a sequel, and looked to further expand Owlchemy’s understanding of interaction and exploration. Last month’s release of Cosmonious High, meanwhile, returned to a lot of the character work first established in Rick & Morty, and was also Owlchemy’s first game to allow for free teleportation to explore any part of a map.
Perhaps what was most interesting about the development of each, however, was that Owlchemy had to work out how to get them — along with Job Simulator — on standalone hardware.
“Oculus runs a lot of experiments,” Eiche recalls of learning about the Quest for the first time. “So to be perfectly honest, we were like ‘Oh, this is another experiment. That’s going to be very expensive. It’s great. We’re really happy that they’re pushing in this direction because we think that’s what [VR] is going to be.’ But I think Devin even said we’re still five years out, this is just them monkeying around with some experiment.”
Reimer specifically believed 6DOF tracking on a mobile headset within this timeframe was a pretty unrealistic expectation. But, once Owlchemy had a clearer view of where Meta (then Facebook) was heading with Quest, it knew it had to change gear. The pair wanted Job Simulator on Quest as soon as possible and at the same level of fidelity you could experience on other platforms. No small order, as any Quest developer will tell you, but the developer’s work porting to PSVR in the past helped them cram it in, with Vacation Simulator following soon after.
Cosmonious, as I learned in an interview last month, was another tricky task. In fact, the team nearly cut the paint system it had implemented into the game. Nonetheless, all three of Owlchemy’s original games are now running on Quest and ready to introduce new players to VR.
So, where does Owlchemy go from here?
The Future
“The next thing that we’re seeing going forward is hand tracking,” Reimer says with confidence. “We are all-in on that. I’m treating it very much like the early days when we were like, ‘No, Job Simulator is going to be two tracked controllers’ and some platforms that I will not name said, ‘No, that’s got to work with a [gamepad] controller.'”
This is a bullish perspective on a method of input that’s still finding its, well, hands. Still, big advances in hand tracking are being made seemingly by the month; Meta just updated its hand tracking solution on Quest 2 and its Project Cambria headset could stand to improve things further still. Reimer and Eiche, meanwhile, aren’t ready to confirm that their next game will be hand tracking-only just yet (the pair say they’re still in R&D for what’s next), but the Owlchemy team already uses the technology in its own workflows. If it does go in that direction then they’ll be figuring out what’s best for the control scheme all over again.
“We’re not going to do karate Beat Saber,” Eiche jokes.
But what about the haptics of physical controller buttons?
“There’s always going to be a place for controls, right?” Reimer replies. “Because just there’s always a place for kind of the flat games, there’s always going to be a group. We still use a mouse. We have touch screens and I’m sitting in front of two monitors and still typing on a keyboard and a mouse. So that’s not going away, but I think what we’re trying to focus on is like the extreme mainstream adoption area.”
“We need to continue to engage the mass [market]. To make sure this stuff is working for everyone. Because we are all going to be using VR at some point here in the not too distant future.”
Looking to cook up a storm in VR? We’ve got you covered — here’s our list of the best VR cooking and food games on Quest, PC VR and PSVR.
The gaming industry, and more recently the VR industry, has a bit of a love affair with the cooking genre. There’s just something about chopping, frying and assembling food in virtual reality that is so attractive to developers and players alike.
Luckily, we’re now at the stage where we have enough games to assemble a list of the top five cooking and food games across all VR platforms. We’ve ranked them from worst to best, but realistically each game brings something different to the genre — any of these are good options, depending on what you’re looking for.
5. Job Simulator – Quest, PSVR, PC VR
This is one of the oldest VR games on this list, dating all the way back to a release on the original Vive headset in 2016. It’s also not technically a full cooking game in and of itself. Job Simulator sees you take on menial tasks across a few different levels set in different work environments – a car repair shop, a convenience store, a boring office cubicle and, most importantly, behind the grill at a restaurant.
It’s that last level that gets Job Simulator a spot on this list — it’s basically the original cooking game for VR, one of the first to grace us with its presence. Since its beginnings on the Vive, Job Simulator has released on loads more platforms, including Quest 2 with enhancements, and received new modes and levels. It consistently features on the PSVR top seller charts each month and, as of January 2020, it reached 1 million units sold across all platforms.
Clash of Chefs VR takes the age-old premise of many cooking games – prepare food with increasingly complex ingredients and methods, for an increasingly impatient and growing customer base. There’s four kitchens with different cuisines – American, Italian, Japanese, and Mexican – but regardless of which you find yourself in, the name of the game is time management under pressure.
There’s a fair amount of content for each kitchen and there’s also a competitive multiplayer mode as well, where you are pitted against others and can throw knives or plates at your opponent chefs to disrupt them.
Clash of Chefs is a solid entry in the list, but it doesn’t bring anything particularly new to the genre. Still, if you want something simple and tested, this might be your go-to.
Despite the ‘simulator’ tag, this is really a part-authentic, part-slapstick mixture of cooking interactions featuring hundreds of dishes and a wide range of ingredients. As expected though, it’s all about time management and steady hands here. There’s a big focus on precision — the game will ask you to season food a specific amount, or cut items into perfectly equal pieces, which isn’t always easy with VR controllers.
There’s a career mode and a sandbox mode. Career mode will see you open a restaurant and gradually move through a selection of dishes, earning money to buy new items and upgrade your setup. The sandbox mode focuses more on fun and silliness — throw food, start fires, do whatever you want.
Lost Recipes is perhaps the most markedly different title on this list – where most cooking games focus on precision, pressure and time management, Lost Recipes strips this away entirely. It falls somewhere between a game, simulator and educational tool — instead of working to a clock, you simply follow the recipe at your own pace with almost no external pressure. It’s all about learning and taking your time, accurately reproducing authentic recipes from three ancient cultures.
It’s a short experience, because it’s essentially about learning how to cook these dishes and understanding the meaning behind them. It’s a slow, meditative and really special VR experience. The most amazing part is that its structured in a way that will let you take what you’ve learnt and apply it to your own cooking. I managed to cook the steamed fish in real life after playing through the level in Lost Recipes — it’s quite an amazing achievement from Schell Games.
If you want something more laid back that will focus on teaching you about the recipes and how to cook them, then Lost Recipes is your best bet.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you want VR’s closest experience to frantic console and PC game Overcooked, then Cook-Out: A Sandwich Tale is the game for you. This is a multiplayer-focused title that will require you and your friends to cooperate under increasingly stressful conditions to make sandwiches for impatient customers.
It’s all about the balance between hectic action and overwhelming chaos — as orders come in, you’ll need to work together to make sure each sandwich gets the right ingredients, in the right order. Some players will only have select ingredients in their fridge, requiring you to communicate with the other players to make sure everyone has what they need. It can be hectic and difficult, but it nails converting that chaotic and stressful Overcooked style of gameplay to a VR headset.
It’s that time again, when PlayStation reveals the top downloads for the past year. And it comes as no surprise that long-reigning platform champs Beat Saber (2018) and Job Simulator (2016) have again clinched the top two spots as the most-downloaded games for PSVR in 2021.
PlayStation released the list today, which shows off PS4, PS5 and PSVR downloads for the whole of 2021. split across North America and Europe.
Note: the list below represents paid downloads only, and doesn’t account for physical disc sales, DLC, or free games.
PSVR Top Downloads – 2021
US/Canada
EU
1
Beat Saber
Beat Saber
2
Job Simulator
Job Simulator
3
SUPERHOT VR
SUPERHOT VR
4
GORN
Creed: Rise to Glory
5
Swordsman VR
Swordsman VR
6
Creed Rise to Glory
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
7
Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series
GORN
8
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
RICK AND MORTY: VIRTUAL RICK-ALITY
9
RICK AND MORTY: VIRTUAL RICK-ALITY
Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series
10
The Walking Dead Onslaught
ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission
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As you can see, there’s a bunch of overlap across both EU and NA rankings, with ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission and The Walking Dead Onslaught making it into the top 10 of those respective regions. The latest list also looks shockingly close to last years. Without more detailed data to go on though, it’s difficult to tell exactly what it means.
A bit of speculation: much of the top 10 is essentially populated with the standard array of ‘must-have’ titles, and it’s been that way for a few years now. This may betray the relative stagnation of the PSVR platform, and could point towards good user attraction, but poor user retention. Not a single title in either section was released in 2021. On top of that, most PSVR hardware bundles have been difficult to find in shops or online, so it stands to reason that a small number of newcomers trailing in throughout the year have driven content sales.
Whatever the case, PlayStation is getting ready to release its next-gen PSVR 2 headset for PS5—possibly near the end of this year—which looks usher in a new age of console VR gaming for the company.
The upcoming headset’s specs are a massive leap in comparison to the first-gen PSVR, which was released in 2016. The newly dubbed PSVR 2 is packing inside-out tracking, eye-tracking tech, significantly higher resolution and honest-to-goodness VR controllers—which means much of PSVR’s game catalogue may not be backwards compatible. This might otherwise explain the lack of investment in high-quality exclusives over the past year.
On that front, Sony is already planning at least one big title: a made-for-VR game set in the Horizon universe. And if it’s set to be a launch title, it’s well positioned to take advantage of all the cool tech Sony is packing into PSVR 2.
Job and Vacation Simulator developer Owlchemy Labs has revealed its next VR project, Cosmonious High.
Due for release on Oculus Quest and PC VR headsets in 2022, Cosmonious High casts players as a student at the titular high school for aliens. You’ll meet a weird and wacky cast of characters and work with them to solve problems as an unexplained series of malfunctions plague the school.
Check out the reveal trailer below. This being an Owlchemy game, expect the developer’s trademark sense of humor and vibrant visual palette.
As you can see in the trailer, Cosmonious High will include typically unique VR interactions from Owlchemy. The player seems to gain specific powers under pressure, like firing water and ice out of their hands to put out fires or freeze things in place. It looks like the game also has a communication system in which players select emojis to talk with other students and teachers. The developer also notes that this will be its largest game world yet and give players the choice of where to travel.
There’s no mention of a PSVR version yet but, with the PS5 VR headset expected to release in 2022, it’s always possible we see it there.
The game will be Owlchemy’s first brand new VR IP since the launch of Job Simulator in 2016. That game got a follow-up in 2019’s Vacation Simulator, and the team also worked on Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality. Owlchemy itself was acquired by Google in 2017.
What do you make of Cosmonious High? Are you going to be picking the game up? Let us know in the comments below!
Virtual reality (VR) developer Owlchemy Labs is well known for its colourful and zany titles like Job Simulator and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality. Today, the studio has revealed its latest project, Cosmonious High, keeping to that same fun-loving formula that has served those previous videogames so well. But this time there’s even more chaos!
Cosmonious High is an alien high school with a quirky cast of characters and plenty of interactive features to keep players busy. Playing an alien who has crash-landed into the school on their first day of class, you’ll learn how to unlock and use special powers to help repair the school and return it to its former self.
Set to become Owlchemy Labs’ biggest VR world to date, Cosmonious High will feature dynamic characters that respond to natural gestures like high fives and fist bumps. Designed as one big interactive playground the school is filled with mysterious malfunctions to sort but you also have to make sure you attend class, you are a student after all.
From meteorites crashing through the walls to fires randomly breaking out, your hands will be able to magically adapt to the various situations, like turning into water to put those flames out. It’s not all work though, you’ll be given complete freedom to explore the school, chatting with students in the Grand Hall or heading to Chemosophy to perform some experiments.
“With Cosmonious High, we’re breaking all the bounds. Players can go anywhere, interact with any character they see, and use their powers to resolve—or cause—as much chaos as they want,” said Chelsea Howe, Product Director at Owlchemy Labs in a statement.
“We always pride ourselves in creating experiences that players can immerse themselves in while also injecting our own brand of humour and style. I believe we are doing just that with Cosmonious High; its world will feel familiar to our long-time fans and welcome new players,” Andrew Eiche, COOwl (Chief Operating Owl) of Owlchemy Labs, adds.
Owlchemy Labs aims to bring Cosmonious High to Oculus Quest and SteamVR headsets in Spring 2022. As new details are released, VRFocus will keep you updated.
If you time it right then there can be some great savings to be had on high-quality virtual reality (VR) titles and currently Humble Bundle’s latest is difficult to beat. For only the second time the platform is offering a VR-specific deal where you can get up to eight PC VR titles for an incredible discount.
Called the Humble Spring into VR Bundle, the limited time offer allows gamers to unlock a selection of videogames depending on how much they wish to spend, with proceeds helping to support charitable endeavours. So for a minimum of 71p you can pickup zero-g sci-fi title Detached. Bump that up to at least £10.66 GBP and you’ll unlock Star Trek: Bridge Crew, Surgeon Simulator: Experience Reality, Swords of Gurrah and Espire 1: VR Operative.
Literally for a few pence more – £10.77 to be precise – you can add three more titles to that list, Job Simulator, Sairento VR and Borderlands 2 VR. Of course, if you are feeling charitable because you’re saving so much – total price would be £160 for all of them – you can up the bundle donation as you see fit.
The main charity highlighted for the Humble Spring into VR Bundle is Stop AAPI Hate, an organisation described as “a national coalition addressing anti-Asian racism across the U.S.” It was founded by the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council (A3PCON), Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA) and San Francisco State University’s Asian American Studies Department. But you can select a different charity should you wish to support one more local to you or focused on a field close to your heart.
In any case, the Humble Spring into VR Bundle is a great deal if you’ve been looking to expand that VR library with a nice mixture of titles, especially as there’s no Steam sale currently. VRFocus will continue its coverage of the latest VR software and hardware deals, reporting back with further updates.
Pick your price and donate what you want to the Humble ‘Spring into VR’ Bundle and get 8 PC VR games including Borderlands 2 VR and Sairento if you commit at least $15. The deal is available for two weeks, until March 21.
Humble Bundle: Spring into VR
Humble Bundle is a charity-based bundle website in which you choose to donate however much you want. If you donate at least $1 then you get Detached, pay at least $14.67 to also get Star Trek: Bridge Crew, Surgeon Simulator: Experience Reality, Swords of Gurrah, and Espire 1: VR Operative, and if you pay at least $15 you also get Job Simulator, Sairento VR, and Borderlands 2 VR. That’s over $160 worth of PC VR games.
This is only the second PC VR-focused Humble Bundle and it’s a really solid collection of classics that all headset users should consider having in their library. The $15 price tag is a great deal for any one of the top tier games on offer here, so getting all eight really is a good bargain.
Just like all of the bundles, you get to choose where your money goes by splitting it up between the game publishers, the Stop AAPI Hate charity (or a different one of your choosing), and Humble itself as a company. You can divide your contribution up however you see fit, including all of it to just one source if you want.
When you buy a Humble Bundle you’re given a Steam key for each of the included games. If you get a key for a game you already have, you could give it away or give it over to a friend.
Find out more about this Bundle on the official page.
The last few months have seen Google wind down a lot of its VR work, but the developer of Job and Vacation Simulator says it isn’t going anywhere.
Yesterday brought news that Google was making its VR creation platform, Tilt Brush, open-source. Hidden inside the announcement was the snippet that Google itself will no longer be updating the platform. Paired with the recent news that Poly is also shutting down, not to mention the gradual death of the Daydream mobile VR platform, and it looks like Google’s interest in VR is growing thin.
We had wondered what this might mean for Owlchemy Labs, the creator of celebrated VR titles that was acquired by Google in 2017. The Simulator series — particularly Job Simulator — continues to rank highly on games sales charts. Yesterday, CEO Devin Reimer took to Twitter to confirm that the team is still building new VR games.
“With Tilt Brush’s announcement some folks have asked if this changes anything at Owlchemy,” Reimer wrote. “It does not, we are continuing to grow, build awesome games for everyone, innovate and push VR forward! We also can’t wait to announce our next big thing!”
Owlchemy hasn’t revealed its next project after last year’s release of DLC for Vacation Simulator, but did assure us it was working on a new title during our 2020 Summer Showcase. Hopefully the team will have more on what’s next at some point later this year.
What do you think Owlchemy Labs is working on next? Let us know in the comments below!
