Meet the timesheet

I have profoundly mixed feelings about it, but we are all living in the post-postmodern age. We’re all fluent in the may tongues of genre, reared on media that’s completely unselfconscious about the way it self-consciously displays its tropes and conventions. And as polyglots, it’s no surprise that we barely blink at the most outre of mash-ups – if everything is a signifier, why shouldn’t we lawnmower through the combinations until we happen across something that works? Thus it is that in space-year 2026, in the 32nd year of the Interactive Fiction Competition, we’ve got a [spins wheel] parser adventure mixing [spins wheel] absurdist workplace satire with [spins wheel]liminal-spaces horror.

This isn’t necessarily a bad idea or even one that’s especially off the wall, mind. As anyone who’s ever suffered under a bad boss knows, a work situation sufficiently messed up to evoke black humor can also readily be abusive, and whether you respond to any particular setback by helplessly giggling or helplessly sobbing can sometimes be a coin-flip. Meet the timesheet starts out on the former side of the genre lines, as the beaten-down protagonist is forced to duck out from a holiday party they’re not especially enjoying – though at leas it’s better than work – when they remember that they haven’t finished entering their hours for the pay period, and their supervisor is on the prowl. Once you’re in the cube farm, though, the stakes go higher: if the inhuman manager catches you, you’re literally dead meat, and the maze of identical office-cubbies takes on non-Euclidean dimensions.

It’s a cute conceit, and the gameplay cleverly realizes both parts of the theme: it’s split between the game of cat-and-mouse you play to evade the monster and find the few working computers you can use to update your timesheet, and the ridiculous magical-realist challenges you need to go through to keep each computer from booting you off due to a mandatory update or wake up a recalcitrant screen-saver or what have you.

The prose keeps up that theme of duality, but here I think there’s a clear winner. Compare this fine but uninspired horror bit:

From the west, they run and jump at you. You smell their garlic-flavoured breath as they fix their glasses on their nose. <You know, it is not personal,> they start slowly, <I know sometimes bureaucracy may look like useless extra work, but it is very important in reality.> It seems to go on forever, with a pedantic voice, explaining how it is the only way to analyse how you spend working time. As if an analysis on “easily fakeable” data could ever be more relevant than results and actual work. You are finally drained, but they go on and on, explaining the same concepts again and again.

To this comedy one, which to my ear has some awkward syntax that maybe suggests the author isn’t a native speaker of English, but which is energetic and entertaining all the same:

Your eyes are swollen, tired, and your sight blurs. You feel like the protagonist of an eye drops commercial. You close your eyes, and when you open them back, instead of the lifesaving claim of a brand, you realise you have overwritten the wrong cells.

On the puzzles, my judgment is more mixed. Both pieces have their virtues: figuring out how the map is laid out is satisfying, and the stalking mechanics are well-tuned, pushing you to keep moving without being too punishing or hard to read. There’s also a clever stakes-raising moment midway through that requires you to think creatively about how to keep track of the baddie when you can’t see him. Meanwhile, the computer-hacking (in the sense of “messing around”, not “running malware scripts”) bits are surreal in a good way, serving up distinctive weirdness that requires a lot of experimentation and outside-the-box thinking to progress. Some of the leaps of logic might go a little far for my taste – a bit clearer prompting to start trying to directly mess with the contents of the screen without worrying about the interface wouldn’t have gone amiss – but there’s a solid hint function that took the edge off these concerns.

This is an area where the two sides of the game do finally come into conflict, though. The part where you sneak from cube to cube is tense and pacey, relying on simple commands and a sense of danger. The part where you type seemingly-silly stuff into the parser until you hit on the command that, against all odds, logs you into a terminal requires an open, playful mind unafraid of making mistakes, and plenty of time to work through all your wacky ideas. Having to toggle between the two modes created a lot of mental tension for me – it’s frustrating to pause your trial-and-error explorations at a computer just because you see the manager coming, leading me to frequently push my luck and rely on UNDO draining the deaths of all impact (while the distraction would still lead me to lose my train of thought and get frustrated at the impenetrability of the computer-puzzle side of things). Each piece of Meet the timesheet works fine on its own terms – more than fine, in places – but despite the inarguable fact that this is a really fun set of concepts to throw together into a blender, the author probably would have been better off picking a lane and sticking to it.