Fired

(I beta-tested this game)

As late-period capitalism slouches its way to the trash-heap of history, to be replaced by something that’s almost inevitably going to be worse, the scope for systematic revolt narrows, and the stakes for individual acts of rebellion rise in parallel. The getting-comeuppance-on-a-crappy-boss plot perhaps peaked in the late 90s, with Office Space and the retroactively-incredibly-creepy American Beauty, but there’s something evergreen about an unjustly-terminated employee wreaking their righteous revenge.

Fired offers that fantasy in spades – and actually, you don’t need to do too much of the hard work; you’ve already accumulated hard copies of the evidence that will bring your corrupt old boss down, but now that you’ve been fired and stripped of access to the office where all that stuff has been moved, you need to break in and get it back. In addition to this narrative catharsis, it also offers closure for sinned-against employees by containing a litany of invective, imprecation, and swearing that would make Captain Haddock blush:

"this boogystained breakfast director, this pukebag of a dumbass, this sleepyhead, this freshwater sailor, this pedantic cretin"

This revenge-fantasy is definitely funny, but it’s also nicely designed; there aren’t too many puzzles and too many hoops to jump through as you pursue your vengeance, but they’re cleanly designed so each leads on to the next, and there’s a bit of a sandbox vibe to proceedings: rather than pursue your quest to the bitter end, you can declare partial victory at almost any time, and there are various actions you can take that can wreak extra havoc on the company at risk of having an arrow pointing to you as the culprit. These mostly just reduce to optional, incomplete endings, but they’re logically and entertainingly narrated, and make final victory all the sweeter. There are also a fair number of bonus points available to careful players who go beyond the jokes to examine their surroundings carefully, so while Fired works well as an angrily satirical take on workplace abuse, it’s got more than enough substance to be satisfying to play on its own merits, even if you’ve never personally writhed under the thumb of a supervisor who’s venal, stupid, smelling of bilgewater and pink mold, a scabrous sphincter on the face of the earth…