Cubes and Ladders

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.