Vacation Simulator is a sandy sequel to Job Simulator
A summer holiday
We should have seen this coming. Job Simulator devs Owlchemy Labs have announced Vacation Simulator, which brings the slapstick VR work 'em up to Vacation Island. Job Simulator was all about trying and failing to perform mundane tasks while being jeered at by robots, so Vacation Simulator will probably be about trying and failing to relax while being jeered at by robots. Don't confuse that with the non-existent Vatican Simulator, which this news post was almost all about thanks to a typo.
You can soak up some virtual rays in the trailer below.
Alec called Job Simulator one the best VR games, and this excerpt should give you a pretty good idea of what you'll get up to in Vacation Simulator:
"Job Simulator is funny, but more importantly it understands that the nature of wearing a plastic box on your head and waving plastic sticks around is a) to be encumbered and b) to recreate only coarse approximations of reality. And so it is that, primarily, you knock things over, set things on fire and generally break things via designed cack-handedness, in a boxy, jokey alt-future where robots rule the world and are bemusedly recreating long-forgotten human jobs such as frychef, bored clerk and car mechanic for their own entertainment."
It seems the robots have moved on to simulating our entertainment for their own entertainment, bringing this in line with Ian M Banks' utopian vision of a society ran by machines for the benefit of humans. Only with less philosophising about the value of hedonistic pleasure compared to intellectual pursuits, and more slapstick volleyball competitions.
What other activities are available in Vacation Simulator? I'm not privy to any more information than what's in the trailer, so I can only guess based on that. Fishing is clearly a thing, if by fishing you mean scooping up strange, modular hermit crabs from the seabed and throwing them at sentient CRT monitors. Actually, if it's anything like Job Simulator then I'd imagine throwing objects at sentient CRT monitors forms an integral part of most activities. Butterfly catching also looks like its in the mix, as well as a beach-based return for burger-flipping.
One element of Job Simulator that I particularly enjoyed were the sight gags that often lurked in the background, though I'm struggling to spot many in that trailer. I do like the way the inflatable rings are actually all robot-appropriate squares. Can you see anything I've missed?
According to the trailer, Vacation Simulator will maybe/probably be out at some point in 2018 for Rift and Vive cybergoggles.