As a lab technician on the Orwellian megacorp Ringo, your job is to kind unusually unspecific genetic samples into 4 totally different tubes – all day, each day. Every pattern is recognized by a selected form or sample or another rudimentary icon, however no matter it’s, it’s good to be certain that the proper ones go within the right tubes or your pay is docked. Oh, and the precise shapes and patterns, in addition to different bewildering necessities, are altered every day by your faceless masters. Welcome to the world of CorpoNation.
These recognizing a similarity to the award-winning Papers, Please are usually not mistaken. However whereas that sport handled the merciless vagaries of immigration, that is all concerning the dehumanisation of employees inside a systemised company surroundings the place the workers are fairly actually prisoners within the capitalist machine. However sorting stuff isn’t all you do. Every evening you get to crawl again to your pod condo and log in to your Nineties-style laptop to learn banal Ringo information tales, swap bants with different employees through on the spot messaging and play state-sanctioned video video games. There’s a list to purchase customisations in your room, and common emails encourage you to place all of your pay again into the financial system. The classic Mac OS-style interface and glib humour work very well to ascertain the sinister retro-futuristic environment of the sport, and, as with final 12 months’s glorious Videoverse, discovering snippets of narrative via chats with fellow employees is a lovely train in techno-nostalgia.
However that is solely the start. As the times drift by and the arbitrary modifications to your each day job develop extra advanced, you start to obtain illicit communications from some form of insurgent guerrilla group inside the firm. Must you report them? And in the meantime, the place is it that badly behaved staff disappear to? And what’s within the meals tablets they’re providing you with? All these mysteries and narrative threads are brilliantly dealt with via the claustrophobic medium of your laptop display and work electronic mail system, whereas the muted blue-and-white color scheme and glitchy pixel artwork intensify the sinister temper – there’s no escape from this monotonous grind. Or so it appears.
CorpoNation is a pointy, humorous critique of late capitalism by which each second of your life as a lab employee is commodified and exploited, and the place fixed, insidious calls for are made in your consideration, even if you’re ostensibly off the clock. However with the obligatory video video games it makes you play in your downtime – a point-and-click model of Avenue Fighter and a easy tackle Solitaire – it is usually a pastiche of the live-service gaming phenomenon, which has turned play into an inescapable Skinner field of fetch quests and loot hunts.
What’s actually sensible about CorpoNation is the way in which it makes use of industry-standard compulsion loops to trick you into turning into an unquestioning wage slave, determined to beat the efficiency quotas, not solely to get a greater score, however so to afford a pleasant new gaming chair or a company branded bedspread or some meals tablets. And due to this, your publicity to the menacing hacking collective on the centre of the story has additional affect. Serving to them requires messing along with your each day efficiency quota, and going too far means defaulting in your payments or having to handle with out consuming. As in Papers, Please, you’re lowered right into a nightmarish, soulless contraption that weaponises all of the tropes and gadgets of gaming to darkish impact.
You permit this fashionable, compact and intelligent sport feeling relieved to be free, however then an hour later as you sit at your laptop answering infinite work emails or grinding in some identikit live-service fantasy sport, it’s important to ask your self – am I actually?
