Cubes and Ladders

Update
When I leave feedback in reviews, they are just meant to be a resource for the author(s). Hopefully a helpful one. That said, it’s always cool when someone applies it to their game. When this happens, I leave little "update" notes my review to acknowledge it. Cubes and Ladders is a little different. This is the first time where an author made substantial changes from my feedback that genuinely shift my entire rating.

Everything below the line at the end of this message is of an earlier version of the game where the gameplay had unevenness and small technicalities that made it a four-star experience. I am preserving it as a historical record of sorts because it shows the creative process that goes into game creation, which is one of coolest things about interactive fiction.

Here, the author made a great game, received feedback, and used the feedback to make an excellent game. That is something that deserves recognition, and I hope this is conveyed through this review. Changing a rating is not something I do on impulse or at a whim, but it’s earned its five stars.

In the old version of my review, I listed some weak points that are now resolved. You will not encounter them when you go to play the game. I also mentioned in the beginning that you will either like Cubes and Ladders or dislike it. The changes have made the gameplay more user-friendly. Players can enjoy the surrealness without wrestling with technicalities. Because of this, I feel that it will be more receptive to players and appeal to a wider audience.

Everything else that I discussed (gameplay, story, art, etc.) is the same. I still stand by that. Go read it right now if you want to know more. It is the same high-quality game except that the flaws mentioned in my review are now history.

Please play Cubes and Ladders if you are interested in surreal interactive fiction, a creative take on the office setting trope, or cool artwork.

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This is a game that you will either like or you won't. I liked it. Quite a bit, in fact, but I don’t expect the same for everyone.

In Cubes and Ladders, you play as Jordan Michael, a tech support employee. You work at Minimax, a company that used to be a rockstar... in the realm of selling copier machines and other office-based technology. Since then, Minimax has lost steam. To compensate, management switched its specialty to providing financial services. This has proven to be a mediocre band aid.

Now, Minimax has started another round of downsizing. Rumors of layoffs have begun to circulate amongst the few employees the company has left. You are one of them. (Reminder: You have a meeting with your boss at 9 AM.)

Gameplay
I have played a variety of takes on the office game genre, whether they are realistic slice-of-life stories or plotlines where the staff are supernatural creatures. But I cannot recall ever playing a surreal office game. This was not something I considered until I saw Cubes and Ladders.

In some ways, Cubes and Ladders is your typical office game (my boss wants to me to submit a report by noon) but it more ways, it is not. And if you are expecting a surreal trip down the rabbit hole, you will be disappointed. Instead, the game opts for a more subtle approach to the genre. And that’s just one reason I enjoy it.

The start of the game perfectly captures the essence of an office game: your boss is miffed at you, she wants a revised report turned in before noon (which means you have a time limit), there is a clock at the corner of the screen as a reminder, and there are some rumors about the company floating around the office. First time through, I thought this was going to be a game where you complete a series of tasks for your boss and/or upper management to earn their favor. Cubes and Ladders soon departs from that.

Your boss gives you an evaluation sheet explaining why your yearly report is so horrible. Immediately, the anxiety starts crawling in because she wants a revamped report in a few hours. Fortunately, the surreal office setting has some tricks up its sleeve. The answer is as simple as (Spoiler - click to show) making a copy of the report, but Minimax does not build bland office machines. Entering the storage closet opens a realm of worldbuilding as a plaque on the wall explains Minimax’s achievement of the Complexifier.

An old photocopier with a standard paper feeder and exit tray above and a maintenance compartment below.

The machine hums away oblivious to its obsolescence.

The Complexifier is currently switched on.

Apparently, the machine transforms the contents of the report itself, so it is more exciting, more informative, more… you know, content. Your boring report is now a Complex Report.

The report is overflowing with buzzwords, colorful graphs, and projections. It's a voluminous presentation explaining the year-end performance of Minimax Inc. It's substantially thicker than the original.

We now know that the game’s world is not bound by normal physics. Machines can alter the written word itself. It reminds me a little of the machines in Counterfeit Monkey (be sure to play that next) that change the spelling or meaning of your word to create a new product. It was here that I realized that Cubes and Ladders was not your typical “office game.”

I feel compelled to share this: Never have I encountered a cubicle maze that was kind of… nice to explore. In a calming and/or hypnotic way. It has atmosphere, a surreal dreaminess with an undertone of corporate monotony fizzling away in the background. Soon there will be nothing. It’s just you, wandering around a desert of workstations.

You're in a maze of empty cubicles. You could get lost in the sameness. The buzz and flicker of fluorescent lights surround you.

The writing conveys the mind-numbing monotony. But the artwork is what kicks in into a pleasing effect. The space becomes interesting. Combined, these formed a unique cubicle maze that I liked to get lost in.

Wait, there’s a cubicle maze? No, there’s no maze in this game. At first it seems like a vast, sprawling map, but it is considerably smaller after you take a few random laps. Nine locations in the maze, plus two storage closets. I made a map, but only because I felt like doing so. I didn’t need to. A far cry from the cubicle mega-maze in Above and Beyond!

Still, at the end of the day, a cubicle maze is still a cubicle maze.

The sticker features a cartoon lab rat holding the message: "Life is a maze we never escape."

So true. Including in this game.

Gameplay challenges: I came close to giving Cubes and Ladders five stars, but the implementation could use some more refinement.

For example, it does not take long to submit your snazzy new report to your boss, but when you do, she tells you to wait until 12:30 for the executive meeting to be over. This means having a few hours to fill where every turn takes up a minute. There are other tasks you can do until then, but one requires that you have the report, which is being used at the meeting. Therefore, you must wait until the meeting ends to make further progress.

The game does permit the “wait until [time]” function, but it needs to be more obvious that the feature is available. I only learned about it from the walkthrough. Technically, and I hope you only read this after you attempt a playthrough, (Spoiler - click to show) you can complete the entire game without ever giving your new report to your boss. As long as you win before noon.

The other little tidbit that kept bothering me had to do with (SPOILERS) (Spoiler - click to show) finding the research lab. You entice Ray with treats. When you give him the first treat (the melted Oreo), he tells you to keep up the good work and bring him more. It is established that the puzzle is to bring him a satisfactory quantity of snacks for him to help you. But if you give him the donut first, he allows you to access the lab and leaves without requiring another offering. Something about that seemed disjointed to me. It has the feeling of well what’s the point of having the Oreo to begin with? Trivial, but it stood out to me.

Also: The flashlight is trash. It's worse than the Anchorhead flashlight on day three. The laser pointer is far more reliable, although its lifespan too is limited.

Story
The story is partly hinged on the circulating-rumor-in-the office concept, but it goes in unexpected directions. Fact is, Minimax is on the decline. When you hand in your revised report to your boss, (Spoiler - click to show) she gives you a memo that confirms that Minimax is laying off the remaining cubicle workers, including you. Sure, you get a severance package, but is that what you really want?

You can choose to dig deeper. There has been a change in management. Max Prophet Sr. was the founder of Minimax and a master at creating office machine inventions until he died in a work-related accident (it truly was an accident; in case you were thinking otherwise). The business has been handed down to Max Prophet Jr. who does not even pretend to know what he is doing. He fully admits to being unable to match his father’s potential. If only a clever employee would get the ball rolling… Message: you can save Minimax. But you won’t accomplish it by sitting around your cubicle waiting for the workday to end.

I welcomed this opportunity to find more Minimax inventions! I think the winning ending could have been a little more drawn out to see the impact of your discovery, but that’s just wishful thinking. You become innovator of the year with an office, but I wonder how long that will last. All you did was combine preexisting tech to complete a machine. I just hope Jordan Michael has what it takes match the founder’s legacy. What the heck, it’s still a good ending.

There are some alternate, less ideal outcomes to this game. I have a bone to pick with the flexibility of one of them. (Spoiler - click to show) If you fail to turn in the report by noon, you lose your job. If you succeed with that task, you have until 5pm before the workday ends and the game calls it quits. If you fail to save the company before 5PM, this is what happens:

The good news is that you're free to find a better job away from the struggling Minimax Inc. But too bad you didn't get a positive recommendation from your boss.

This ending is called: *** Best of Luck in Your Fast Food Career ***

BUT YOU DID GET A RECOMMENDATION. After handing in your updated yearly report, you are told that you will get a “glowing letter of recommendation.” Plus, that little memo notice you receive says that Minimax will provide you with severance. This ending has no mention of either. I feel like there should be two separate endings. One where you fail on your final day and are sent packing (resulting in the fast-food ending), and one where you get your promised recommendation and crawl off to whatever job that recommendation takes you. Instead, the game crams them into one ending.

Characters
We do not know much about Jordan Michael aside from a few fun facts provided when you examine yourself, but that’s okay since the game is directed as you (the player) rather than the protagonist’s identity. I suppose the name could be either male or female, so I’m just going to say that the character is gender neutral.

The NPCs in Cubes and Ladders are like fixtures of Minimax itself, creating a fatigued, fleeting atmosphere that goes well with the story and setting. This bleeds into the gameplay, making character interactions more passive, perhaps even at the expense of puzzles.

For example, there is a guard in the cubicle maze who will prevent you from going south, making it seem like there is something important down there. *Turns out, (Spoiler - click to show) you can access the south location by taking a three-move detour. What do we find? More cubicles. He is not guarding anything at all. The puzzle is not important, only what it says about the character’s relationship with Minimax (although you can make him fall asleep if you want). With Minimax downsizing, there is no need for someone to guard an empty cubicle farm. His job is obsolete. And yet, he’s been an employee for almost two decades. There is a sense of clinging to this identity as long as possible.

*Correction: Following a game update, you (Spoiler - click to show) can no longer bypass the guard. The puzzle is now required!

We see this trend in every character. Ray too has been a long-term programmer and muses about the company’s heyday. He almost regards himself as a cynical relic of the company who, despite his contributions, is not exempt from the possibility of being laid off. Meanwhile, Rich is an experienced employee who is 110% a team player, loyal to Minimax, and proud of it. While he is less likely to be laid off thanks to his position in financial sales, there is still an underlying anxiety about being let go.

I liked this portrayal of the NPCs because it alienates the protagonist (you’ve only been there for a few months, newbie) who is the only one moving around in search of a solution to Minimax’s problems. When face-to-face with an NPC, you never feel like you are being heard, which is partly the point. Every turn count, NPCs will spew work related but meaningless fragments of corporate buzz words, idle workplace chat, and self-absorbed ramblings about reports, profits, and Minimax products.

The tradeoff of having detached NPCs is that interactivity is reduced. I do wish they could respond to more dialog prompts. My favorite leave-me-alone line was, "'Run along, kid. I'm busy losing money here.'"

Visuals
The writing is good, but not enough to stand on its own as a surreal game. The visuals bridge the gap to make the storytelling excellent. Every location has a visual that appears upon your entrance. A few appear to be heavily filtered photographs, but most are illustrations made with different mediums. My favorite ones were the office building at the start of the game and the drawing for the storage closet.

I loved the art, especially how it portrays the characters. People are silhouettes. You never quite see their faces, and if you do, it is a distorted appearance, often cast in shadows or strange angles. For example, when you first enter your cubicle for the 9AM meeting, you see your boss at your desk.

Your boss is sitting impatiently in your office chair.

The artwork shows her seated and facing away from you. Her outline is an angular haircut paired with a sharp business skirt and top. The shadows make it where you can’t quite tell where the chair and her body begin and ends. It is all melded into one figure. This visual left a strong impression on the character that the sentence could not convey on its own.

Final thoughts
The entire time I kept wondering when the ladders would come in because the “cube” part was covered by the cubicles, but the second half of the title must be a symbolic reference to the corporate ladder concept. Makes sense. But yes, Cubes and Ladders was a great experience.

I would recommend this anyone, not because I think that everyone will like it, but because it offers something new for the surreal genre and “office game” concept. Besides, the gameplay is light. I’m not trying to lure you into a puzzle-fest extravaganza. If anything, try it for the visuals. The surreal elements simply pulled me in. Artwork, setting, characters, Minimax gadgets, you name it.

I hope the author continues to produce work like this. It is a great piece of surreal interactive fiction.

Satire is a tricky beast. Oh, I get the allure – it’s a writer’s dream to cut the Emperor down to size with razor-sharp, Swiftian wit and reveal his naked form to all and sundry. But there are many ways the implementation can go awry. Pitch it too dry, and people might not notice you’re taking the piss (well, I say “people” but I’m mostly thinking of sixteen-year-old-me watching Starship Troopers). Go too over the top, and you’ve got a toothless parody – nobody ever had second thoughts about the carceral state after watching Naked Gun. But worse yet, if you don’t quite grasp why the system is actually bad, you can wind up making superficial jokes while reifying the too-comfortable worldview you thought you were tearing down; what starts as satire ends as propaganda.

Cubes and Ladders is a parser-based lampoon set in the target-rich environment of corporate America; as a fledging employee at photocopier-turned-financial-services-firm Minimax, you’re told that the report you’ve written for your boss is too short, simple, and buzzword-free to cut the mustard, and you’ve got to zhuzh it up before the noon board meeting where layoffs are the agenda item of the day (for some reason, the photocopier-turned-financial-services firm is struggling). For what appears to be the author’s debut game, there’s a lot of ambition on display – there are several characters with relatively deep conversation trees, a turning-point midway through that adds a whole additional layer to the story, a fun running gag about your character’s ability to detect the hyper-specific scents that mark out everybody else at the office, and a Vorple-based presentation that shows off a robust suite of AI-generated art (more on this last bit later).

The puzzle design is quite solid, with the game often hitting that sweet spot where it feels harder than it is. There’s a maze that mostly serves to just waste a bit of time and lightly poke fun at cube farms, a confrontation with an elderly security guard that unexpectedly solves itself, a multi-step puzzle to retrieve a branded baseball cap that’s just out of reach, and a mess-around-with-the-complicated-machine puzzle that again winds up being fairly intuitive in practice. Admittedly, they’re not all winners – there’s a guess-the-combination puzzle that I solved only by noticing that there was only one number written down anywhere rather than through any real sense of logic, and which requires some finicky syntax to input besides – and the fact that there’s a time limit made exploring more stressful than I’d have liked, but the batting average is solid, with reasonable clueing and satisfying aha moments.

Circling back to the implementation, though, there are some more flies in the ointment here. I wound up taking an expansion port right off a large machine that I’m pretty sure was meant to stay there, a fair number of non-scenery items aren’t given descriptions, and I experienced noticeable lag when inputting some commands (the game can’t be run locally, so could be I was just having a slow internet day, though). Provoking more hair-pulling is the fact that save, load, and undo appear to be disabled; beyond the time limit, it’s also possible to die in this game, via a pratfall that would have been funny if I could have just typed UNDO and not done the stupid thing, but which instead required a full replay and occasioned plenty of grumbling.

The AI art that’s a centerpiece of the presentation is also not up to much. It’s exhausting to have to recapitulate the broader conversation about LLMs and AI-generated art every time it comes up in a review, so I’ll just say that while I’m very much on the skeptical side of these debates, even folks far more comfortable with generative AI than me would have to admit that the pictures are a bit of a mess, showcasing impossible spaces and uncanny figures in a way that took me out of the game; the author mentions that the pictures were generated based on their own sketches, and I’m pretty sure I would have preferred just seeing those.

And not to bang on about the AI thing, but that brings me back to where I started, which is the question of what exactly Cubes and Ladders is saying. Look, I get that this is just a silly parser puzzle game and not worth getting too worked up about, but I’d be lying if I said the ending didn’t leave a sour taste in my mouth. After spending the first half of the game trying to avoid being laid off while enduring lectures by all the other characters about how everyone was looking at me to innovate (there’s no dialogue option to say “I’m pretty sure I’m getting paid minimum wage, how about you do the ‘innovating?’”, sadly), I wasn’t too surprised when the back half moved from trying to save my job to trying to save the company. And this is presented as an act of regeneration, turning back to using engineering to actually create things again after the company founder’s failson decided to move into investment banking. Except the punchline is that the game-winning invention is a socially-useless arbitrage machine (Spoiler - click to show)(it predicts stock fluctuations based on yesterday’s newspaper) – never mind that all you’ve done is figured out a way to move money around in such a way as to make rich people ever richer, at the expense of people who aren’t lucky enough to be able to pay for your prophecy engine, the ending straightforwardly fetes you for your accomplishment, rewarding you with a corner office overlooking a golf course and your former boss as your new assistant.

It’s an ending that could work to make fun of the empty cult of “innovation” that animates corporate America, but if this is satire, I admit I didn’t get it. Cubes and Ladders gets some hits in along the way against over-the-hill salesmen who get too excited for company merch and bosses who talk only in corporate platitudes, but these are glancing blows at best against capitalist ideology. I’m not saying I can only enjoy text adventures with an orthodox Marxist pedigree by any means, but if a game seems like it’s trying to say something, it’s hard to ignore when that “something” appears to be unquestioningly reinforcing an empty worldview – all the more so when it’s festooned with ugly and questionably-ethical corporate art.

I’ll close by emphasizing again that there’s a lot of promise here; the puzzles are good, the writing quality is solid, and modulo the ill-advised decision to eliminate saving and undoing the implementation mostly impresses. And once again, not every piece of IF needs to have a political axe to grind (god, that sounds like it would be tedious). But if you choose to write satire, you either go for the jugular or you risk looking like a lapdog.

Played: 7/10/24
Playtime: 1/2 hr, 86 pts, fired; additional 1hr “won” with walkthrough goose
CW: AI art

CnL has a lot going for it, I wish so much of it was not qualified. This is a pretty classic parser experience, wrapped in an attractive package and oozing with wit.

The wit is the least qualified success in the work. It is suffused with pre-cancellation Scott Adams’ Dilbert vibes, which, death of the artist, when at its best was crushingly on point in its lampooning of empty business jargon. Most NPCs are endless fonts of vacuous business platitudes, and the game’s unbending commitment to the bit sells it terrifically. The game ups its ante by building these farcical lampoonings into its puzzles and plot beats. Occasionally laugh out loud, it is always wryly amusing and keeps things bubbling along. As a player you can decide whether this train of humor is still fresh, but for me, the work’s total investment just sold it.

The game’s presentation is crisp and clean - the vertical illustrations siding the clean font text panel establishes a graphic identity that is pleasing and engaging. The illustrations themselves flex between functional and part of the gag, and often work pretty well. There are some stylistic hints and non-uniformities that clue their AI authorship. For me, I concede that the artwork works with the vibe pretty well, introducing a 1950’s Man in Grey Suit overlay to 90s-00s corporate cult culture. It is not unsuccessful. The ambivalence you are detecting is that even when AI art is successful, and I have played other works where it was as successful as here, I inevitably struggle with its larger implications. “Death of the Artist” only makes sense to me when the artist was at least once alive. If this aspect of AI art does not bedevil you, you will doubtless find this less ambiguously successful.

The gameplay experience was more traditionally asterisk’d. There were many design and bug artifacts that I understand may now be addressed: weird state glitches, cross-room disambiguations, missing synonyms, moon logic puzzles and lack of reasonable alternate solutions.

These were not everywhere, by the way. There are plenty of lateral thinking, assemble the clues, and search for item puzzles that land squarely in parser tradition, often with humorous twists and satisfying clicks.

This review sounds kind of whiny and mopey doesn’t it? I actually enjoyed the experience a lot more than this review might be conveying. I think I got into that weird space where I enjoyed it enough to want to enjoy it even more, and felt those frictions more keenly. It is a worthwhile play - wryly amusing on several levels. Pretty fair, fun endstates even in failure. Its puzzles as often parser classics as glitchy-but-still-pretty-fun. I wouldn’t let my moping hold you back. Death of the Reviewer! (Especially as the updated version is probably even better)