The Subtropical Server Room

I didn't get all the way through this one, so I'm not giving it a star rating. However: what I saw of the game was a fairly standard You Hate Your Office puzzler, with obtuse managers, passwords to guess, and lunchroom appliances that look ripe for sabotage. Scenery is fairly minimal, and there are a lot of rooms that, at least at the start of play, have no obvious function.

The reason I didn't get further is that hint system doesn't work the way it claims it's going to: typing HINT gives a general clue and then tells you you can type HELP for more explicit spoilery instructions, but in practice the game seems to interpret HELP as being a synonym for HINT, and no clear solutions are forthcoming.

The hints I did receive suggested to me that I was going to need to do something moderately tedious and tricky ((Spoiler - click to show)decrypt and make use of a whole long sheet of chess notation) in order to make progress. It's possible I misunderstood and that the thing that stumped me was a red herring, but it was hard to tell, and none of my other experiments with the environment were leading anywhere useful either. As I hadn't worked up much of a commitment to my character and am not generally a huge fan of the Office Misery genre, I stopped there.

It is possible that this game would be a significantly different experience if the HELP/HINT system were revised, the text revised to give the player more direction, or both.

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