Every day I get emails

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.