Office of Weirdness

Disclaimer: There are times when this review strays dangerously close to a rant and contains the prodigious use of the word 'hell'.

The game opens with a quick little question asking me how good I am with abstract thinking, since I'm pretty good I say so, and get told that I'll be given a test that is quite hard. Cool, a bit of interaction and the game hasn't actually started, this is looking good, or it would if the text had read 'OK, I will prepare a quite hard test, rather than 'OK, I will prepare quiet hard test.'

Custom music starts up, and quite disturbing it is too, not in the obvious screaming voices, gibberish or whispers in the dark, this is discordant, tonal and puts your teeth on edge. The developer has achieved this by having two distinct audio tracks running at the same time, one as BGM and the other as BGS, so they can overlap with some unnerving harmonics. It's clever and I appreciate the effort, but for all that cleverness it doesn't last, the developer has obviously forgotten to configure a loop because after a few minutes you're just left with that buzz you get when a speaker is playing NOTHING AT ALL, oh wait change floors and it resets, but after a while it just begins to give me a headache, a real world headache that is, so F1 and off the effects go.

There are custom graphics in this game, not a single default set anywhere, the interiors of the office floors are uniform but distinctively different to anything I've seen before, the character sprites are gaunt and elongated with an unnatural gait, each character and coloured NPC has an individual face set, and the shadow NPC's all share the same half -seen one, as if they aren't really there. Quite a lot of work has gone into this aspect and it shows.


I do not want to walk in this park at night, or at all.

The walking speed is painfully slow, but oddly there is a group of items, or perhaps skills, called Run, Hurry up, Slow down and Waiting, which appear to be very fast, fast, slow and stupidly slow. No idea why anyone would choose the latter two, but at least I can use Hurry up to get moving.

Unfortunately the game is plagued with horrendous English, in both spelling and grammar, so bad in fact I have to assume that not only is English not the native language of the developer, they used Google translate for the dialogue. Tenses are all over the shop, word choices are incorrect, punctuation is non-existent or misapplied and modifiers are misplaced. I believe the developer's native language may be Polish, simply because the untranslated save screen lists 'pilk' rather than 'save' and pilk is Polish for computer file or document, which seems to fit.

The entire game takes place within a single office building and the floors are designated by their primary colour scheme which is Black and White, Green, Blue, Yellow, Azure, Khaki, Orange, Red, Pink Purple, Dark Blue and Grey in ascending order. My first task after coming to work here, or I think coming to work here since the application I submitted was entitled exit application not entrance application, is to go to the pink floor, oh gods, pink. I detest pink, bad things are associated with pink but it is ok because the pink floor is actually purple, so all good.


That's all right, so is the actual building, extremely...and this floor is not pink, it's purple.

Well actually it's not all good; it's pretty awful, because with the exception of hue all of the floors are exactly the same. Same design, same furniture, same doorways and stairs, same plants, same everything and you have to traverse them time and time again to get from one coloured floor to the next to complete one asinine fetch quest after the other. Sartre got it wrong, Hell isn't other people, hell is the mind-numbing uniformity of this game. Yes I know offices can be somewhat monotonous, but no variety, no personalisation, no individuality at all? I stand by the hell comment.

No save option, what the hell? Oh wait I have to talk to the ladies in the information booths; they'll save for me, fine, I've no idea how that works but at least I won't have to go through that terrible incomprehensible slow intro again. Then again everything in this game is slow, the default walking speed, the transitions between scenes, the dialogue, it's all slow.


Can't argue with the logic, the punctuation and grammar however, that's a different story.

And the ladies in the information booth are supposed to be secretaries; I think the information booths are supposed to be desks, but who the hell knows?

Ugh ugly menu interface with the unwanted choices just removed to leave empty spots in the menu box, no finesse there. By the way 'walking' is where you'll find those helpful Run and Hurry up skills.


I've got 7448 something, days I think...what? Also I have no idea what tirips means.

There is one redeeming feature in this game, and it's not in the game at all. The developer has included a text file in the game folder with a walkthrough/puzzle answers, and for some reason the word diaphanous is used in the walkthrough, how the hell can someone who can't correctly punctuate 'it's' know the word, and indeed the meaning of diaphanous?


I can't even begin. I told you pink was bad.

What the...on one of my aforementioned asinine quests I go outside the building, it is two stories high. How the hell do they fit 11 floors in a two storey building? And then I get this;


Oh, good a legitimate reason to stop playing. Also śnieg means snow.

Well at least I learnt a couple of words in Polish I didn't know before.

The creative application of the atonal music and stylised graphics in this game show that the developer has the potential to do something interesting and different, but the English is so deplorable that even without the game breaking bug above it's pretty much unplayable.