A Day in a Hell Corp

It’s a sign that a writer has reached their decadent phase when they turn their critical eye upon themselves and begin to obsess over their process, but I am feeling stymied about how to start my review of A Day in a Hell Corp and the only way I can think of to break through the logjam is to let you behind the curtain a little bit. See, typically my reviewing is two or three days ahead of my playing, which is an important part of how I’m usually able to get through the Comp: between work, taking care of my kid, various chores and errands, and maintaining some minimum of a social life, and cramming 85 games into 45 days, I need to maximize the efficiency of the hour and a half to two hours a night when I can actually sit down and write reviews. And that time lag is a big piece of that, since as I’m doing the laundry or cooking or taking a couple minute break between meetings, my impressions of a game are marinating in the back of my brain, and I can mentally workshop different angles to takes, these to propound, gimmicky intros to use as a way into talking about the game, so by the time I’m in front of the keyboard I can just go without needing too much in the way of anticipatory throat-clearing.

The previous 250ish words, though, are of course anticipatory throat-clearing of the lowest order: pure waffle, the kind of tap-dancing that a sophomore bangs out to bulk out their two-and-a-half-page essay to the requisite three-page mark, valuable only to the extent that they gift an editor a moment of satisfaction as they drag their red pen across in a diagonal slash. And yet, despite my method theoretically safeguarding against such a result, here we are. Why? Well, for one thing, I don’t actually have an editor, but the main reason is that every time I’ve tried to think about A Day in Hell Corp over the last couple of days, I’m overcome by a wave of irritation that renders analysis untenable.

It’s not that its bones are irreducibly awful. What we’ve got here is an old-fashioned Twine game with puzzles, but none of the systems that edge a choice-based game into the “parser-like” category – I suppose there’s a vestigial inventory, but there are only a couple of different items you can pick up, and they automatically enable a choice to use them when appropriate, so that hardly counts. Similarly, there’s a bit of navigation, but the map is simple and there’s not any need to retrace your steps after you’ve cleared each small region. So basically you just wind up going from room to room, clicking through all the links, then circling back once you hit the end to see what’s changed based on your first round of clicking – the puzzles all solve themselves through lawnmowering, so no actual thought is required; it’s not especially satisfying but this can be a brainlessly pleasant structure upon which to hang a story, so like I said, not irreducibly awful.

The same goes for the story, I suppose, though its margin of grace is much narrower. You play a middle-manager demon eager to win a competition whose prize is a celestial vacation, and as a result you have to review the torments of the souls under your care to find ways to dial their suffering up to 11 (a running subplot is the way you screw over, and are screwed over in turn by, your coworkers – it’s an imp eat imp world out there). This is rather broad as workplace satires go, and the gender politics are gross (female demons are either super hot or grotesque, and none of them are smart), but again, a good writer could do something with this setup.

The issue though is that we are not dealing with the work of a good writer, or at least one whose style is to my taste. In fact, I kind of hope that an LLM was used to generate some of this prose (though let me be clear that there’s no disclosure to that effect), because the alternative – that a human being wrote all this – is depressing to contemplate:

"Whoa, in that orc infirmary, those alembics and potions, they’re one crazy, funny mess!

"Alembics: All scattered on the shelves, these alembics got wild shapes, like glass giraffes or hunchback witches. They’re bubbling and gurgling, with colorful smoke and funny sounds, like whistles and burps. Some of the stoppers pop off like champagne, making it even wilder.

"Potions: The potions, in bottles all shapes and sizes, colors like rainbows and glowing. Labels all scribbled and unreadable, like spider tracks, and the effects are crazy, like laughing fits or turning into dancing pumpkins. It’s a real hoot!"

The whole game is like this, every interaction exaggerated into zaniness, visible flop-sweat coming off of the text as it tries to convince you how crazy and over the top the mild humor is:

"The moment you grab that hammer and smack the alarm clock, everything goes kaboom in a total mess. But the alarm clock? It’s still there, perfectly fine, like nothing ever happened. Oh, the irony! And just then, the hellish door opens up, ready to take you to work. Good day, huh? :sweat_smile:"

Or:

"Orc nurses run back and forth, tripping over their own feet, while screaming patients are carried on creaking stretchers. An atmosphere of total disorder, where every step is an adventure into the bizarre."

Or:

"So, our antihero, with a clumsy leap, jumps onto the table. First move? Epic fail, the gum falls and sticks to his tail. Second try? Even worse, he ends up with a foot in a bucket some jerk angel left there, now all rusty—real funny, guys."

It’s exhausting, sucking all the energy out of even the slightly-better gags; I didn’t think you could make whale laxatives enervating, but the game accomplishes it. There’s no sense of pacing, no quieter bits allowing for escalation into comic chaos, just increasingly-incoherent noise wearing down my rational faculties. Heck, there’s one late-game puzzle involving a union rep and some misers that I still don’t fully understand, since the dialogue felt like it was fed into a make-snarkier filter over and over again until the original meaning had long since fled. Perhaps there are people who do find this stuff funny – I’ll confess that maybe I’d have been among them when I was twelve – but these days I find comedy needs some sense of restraint in order to land. Here in IF land, it’s not the mind, but writing, that can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven; that’s certainly the case here.