Reviews by MostImmortalSnail

This may sound crazy, but I actually enjoyed the situation presented here at the beginning, where you're an office worker who keeps getting emails for tasks that should be someone else's responsibility, and the conceit of the game is delegating to the correct person by forwarding the emails. The pacing of the game makes it so that you do this all day and the actual work is skimmed over. I haven't done too much delegation in my life, but I thought it was charming and demonstrated the ideal of working in an environment where everyone has their appropriate tasks, knows what the other people are doing, and can delegate properly.

Apparently a lot of other people thought the start of this game was a nightmare about spending all your time delegating and not doing what you were hired for, so I could be naive or stupid. I always fantasized about working in an office when I was a kid. Yes, I was a boring kid.

I'm thinking about a blog post or internet comment I read years ago, title long forgotten, that was about how communication was completely essential in any organization larger than three or so people. The complexity of communication ramps up exponentially as an organization grows linearly, so any sufficiently large organization with a thousand or more people in it will require everyone to do a non-insignificant amount of communication and delegation to operate most efficiently, and will need special sub-organizations dedicated solely to managing communication and managing people in general. Maybe I'm deranged for enjoying the idea of this, the concept of being a cell in a larger body whose job is to communicate to other cells. I've been thinking a lot lately about how large organizations are like organisms, and organisms themselves are comprised of microorganisms, the patterns of life repeating themselves recursively. I find a certain appeal in the idea of being an eternal organelle in a fluid macroorganism, stripped of individuality, reduced to delegating bits of information between nodes, having no purpose of my own besides pure efficiency... but this is becoming irrelevant to the game, so we'll stop here before I really start digging into it.

Back to the story. The situation goes awry when (Spoiler - click to show)your coworkers start disappearing and their tasks are retroactively assigned to you as if they were never there in the first place. In-game, the disappearances are associated with Copilot, and represent how many businesses have been doing mass layoffs of workers in part due to AI. This is the horror part. If the first part of this game is meant to represent a relatively tolerable state of competent organization and management, this is meant to represent the dark side, when you realize the organism has no reason to care about the individual microorganisms comprising it and will eagerly overwork and abuse them as long as it's advantageous, sometimes even if it's not. Your boss assigns more and more work while insisting you can do it all yourself, and you're forced to accept it because what else can you do, lose your job? In this economy?

The horror is subtle but effective. There are people trapped in situations like this all over the world, stuck doing tasks for organizations that may have once been functional but are now dysfunctional and abusive, unable to leave for a variety of reasons. This game appears to be autobiographical to some degree, so I hope the author's doing alright, along with all the other current and prospective employees out there.

I'm impressed this game was made in 4 hours, because there's a lot of branching content and different endings. The subject matter is incisive and completely realistic, which makes it worse because real people have gone through this struggle and self-abuse. The supernatural elements are subtle. Rather, this game is about the horror of self-doubt and self-hatred, (Spoiler - click to show) particularly from a trans perspective: the inability to accept your identity and accept yourself as you are, which cuts the protagonist to the core.

There's a reason messages like "you need to have lived in these specific ways, or you're not really a member of Group X", and "all members of Group X have lived in these specific ways", no matter how unintentionally they may be presented, have never sat well with me.

A final note: (Spoiler - click to show)It's interesting that you can never get into a lasting relationship with Molly. It could represent how as long as you're hiding from yourself out of shame and self-hatred, you won't be able to find a relationship that will truly satisfy you. Depressing message, but this game is a depressing one.