Every night until Christmas RUST LTD. is rolling out a new update to Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades as a VR Advent calendar.
The 5th annual “Meatmas” for H3VR comes each night on Steam at 12:05 am Pacific time via an opt-in beta branch. On December 25th, the celebration will culminate with a fully decorated tree “and a pile of presents for everyone to open,” according to the game’s lead Anton Hand.
H3VR is a VR sandbox game centered on satisfying gun handling. It features a variety of shooting ranges and game modes like take and hold to play around in. The game also features humorous walking hot dog characters instead of typical humans as enemies. If that sounds strange it certainly is, but H3VR is also one of the best reviewed, highest selling, and most regularly updated VR games on Steam. Multiple times per month for the last four years RUST LTD. rolled out new features for the game with many of those updates working to draw in different audiences. That continuous effort has drawn in lifetime sales of more than 300,000 copies.
While H3VR is constantly seeing updates, the Christmas one is an enormous change planned out months in advance. “Meatmas” updates in previous years included other Advent calendars as well as critiques about gamification loops and micro transactions. This year’s calendar will put a new firearm in the game each day through the 24th. There’s also a comedy story to unfold on a giant map “set in the ruins of the North Pole” where you’ll reveal “the dark secrets of Santa Claus and the border drone army that was his undoing.”
”Users told me that we were the only ones who got them anything for Christmas. That’s part of what keeps me doing this, even though it’s beyond exhausting,” Hand wrote in a direct message. “If they’re like me, they don’t have another context where they’re opening gifts on that day. So we’ve never stopped.”
