Open Hours press kit.

Most competitive shooters end at the results screen. Open Hours starts there. The bartender knows you went eighteen-and-four last round. The vendor noticed you've worn the same chest piece for three weeks. The town remembers — every round, every loadout, every choice.

Open Hours is built around two short-session modes and one persistent town. Arena is 4v4 first-person combat in the Rocket Arena 3 lineage — 5 to 8 minute matches, killcam from the killer's POV on every death, skill expressed through cooldowns and movement rather than raw damage stats. Deep Dive is 4-player co-op wave-survival with a shared end-of-run objective; bots fill empty slots so the queue never matters.

Three rules guide every design decision. Skill is the ceiling — a new player with starter gear can beat a veteran with maxed gear by playing better. Gear is the lever, earned in matches, mode-aware so Arena and Deep Dive never cross-contaminate balance. Cosmetics are pure social signal with zero gameplay impact, ever. No pay-to-win. No grinding for stat advantages.

The town's NPCs are the moat. Three of them read your match history. Most lines come from a hand-written line bank or a template with your stats injected — fast, free, endlessly varied. The bartender goes further: real LLM dialogue on first contact and after notable matches, with hard caps so the AI bill never sinks the game. Server-authoritative architecture from day one means anti-cheat retrofit at launch is a config decision, not a months-long rewrite.

Open Hours is built by Laika Dynamics — a solo developer, in pre-alpha, in public. Every decision gets a devlog. The roadmap on the website tracks what's shipped, what's in progress, and what's queued.