Every day I get emails

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.

Apologies for the juvenile self-censorship in the title, but I like writing these silly little reviews, and I'd rather not risk a ban for something as pointless as saying a naughty word.

My mom has worked in Human Resources for longer than I've been alive. I think if I showed her this game it would give her night terrors, and I mean that as a compliment. Every day I get emails is a horror title exploring one of late-stage capitalism's most insidious poisons: The Squeeze. I'm no economologist, so take my word with a grain of salt, but in layman's terms, The Squeeze is what happens when a corporation realizes they're nearing the limit of how much money they can make by improving themselves, so now the infinite growth demanded by shareholders must be wrung from cuts. Take a grocery store: after raising prices to the limit of what consumers will accept, ensuring they buy product at the lowest cost possible, and patching any holes in their business that pennies might be slipping through (notice how many more places charge you for bags after COVID?), where else can they scoop out an increased profit margin from last quarter? Well, cutting their cashiers on staff by half and adding more self-checkouts, maybe. Or tasking one person with the stocking responsibilities that would normally go to three. Of course, you'll chew through personnel a lot faster this way, but that's a problem for the next fiscal year. Who cares?

Well, you should, and Every day is an example of exactly why. It's somewhat unclear what specifically the player character's job is, but it clearly has something to do with science textbooks, so it's not some do-nothing "team cohesion innovator" position. As days wear on, though, you're slowly pulled away from your job, into sales, and printing, and tech support, and god knows what else. Surely, your main role must suffer, typos and incorrect info must slide under your nose with much greater ease now that you're doing seven jobs at once. Not to mention the effect it has on your psyche: home-cooked dinners and an hour of reading before bed get traded for eating shredded cheese out of the bag and doomscrolling on the couch until you pass out. Marx would have a field day.

I've been trying to move away from "what could have been"s when doing these reviews, but man...this game would have been so cool with a Papers, Please sort of approach, where you have to actually look up a staff directory to see who you need to forward each email to. I kept finding myself wishing I could read the actual content of each message, rather than just the PC's summary, and I honestly think a proofreading/fact-checking minigame is exactly the kind of mechanic I would lose my mind over. On the other hand, this was a comp game, and was made in under four hours; to implement any of that even in the Grand Guignol category would probably require either a full production staff or a particularly ruinous manic episode. I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that Every day is a vastly better game than the one I've been knocking around in my head for years but haven't actually opened a design doc for yet, if for no other reason than you can actually play it right now.

Every day I get emails is exactly the kind of title that makes me excited for Ectocomp. It's short, and in some ways a bit basic, but the central conceit does more than enough to carry it. Plus, it gave me an excuse to ramble about the evils of capitalism in this review, and that's always welcome.

This is the last game I'm playing/reviewing in Ectocomp, and is the most-rated one in the comp so far. Having played it, it's easy to see why.

You play as an employee in a firm that seems to specialize in educational software. For some reason, you constantly get emails intended for people that aren't you.

The game was trickier than I expected, and I wasn't paying attention at first, so I didn't know who to forward emails to for a while (which is part of the gameplay). This enhanced the experience, as it got several people mildly annoyed at me and made me feel like we were all playing the same game in multiplayer.

Then, things begin to change. The workload gets harder in ways that shouldn't be possible, and a greater burden has to be shouldered. The ending is ambiguous, which I liked.

Unlike most petite mort games (which tend to be quick sketches of games due to the time constraints), it seemed to completely polished and fully fleshed-out, which makes sense as it seems to be scoped well (with a system that doesn't require much branching, if any, but still rewards interaction by having you guess who to forward an email to).

A great game to end the competition on!