Office After Hours Review (PC)

I’m six cups in, and the magnitude of the office space’s  ever-changing atmosphere is quickly becoming more incomprehensible with each passing gulp. The hand on the nearby clock is barely moving, and the O/T wage packet is scarcely worth the trouble that I’m putting myself through to make ends meet. But I’m here, not because I want to be, but because the boss says that I have to be. It seems that there’s still work that needs completing, and that, somewhere in the backrooms of this daunting administrative cortex is a blessing in disguise—a reason to keep shoveling on. Perhaps I’m in over my head. Maybe, just maybe, the caffeine is tricking me into thinking that this place, in the Office After Hours, everything is as it should be. But it’s not. Oh, things aren’t quite normal here.

It should be an ordinary day at the office. Aside from the occasional hallucination of an oversized beast bulldozing its way through a network of cubicles, the pattern isn’t massively different. But there are small hints—occurrences that make me question whether or not I’m dreaming, or if I’m wide awake and lost in some perpetual nightmare of vivid images and tainted memories. I think I have a purpose that stretches the boundaries of my employment contract. The problem is, I’m not sure what it is. Yet, with each cup of coffee that I take back, that hidden goal is gradually becoming more apparent. There’s something awfully strange going on here, and I’m about to find out exactly what it is, even if it means losing out on that all-important severance package.

Going the Extra Mile

Office After Hours places you in the shoes of an ordinary office employee—a person whose job it is to spot anomalies in the environment. Well, technically, that isn’t the job, so to speak. But, it is what you spend your time doing in this two-for-one walking simulator hybrid, with the lion’s share of the experience mostly consisting of a relatively short hour-long game of spot the difference in a semi-formal world. With over forty anomalies to unearth and a collection of locations to explore, the journey itself sees you mulling over areas of interest, analyzing fine details, and gradually sinking into a questionable frame of mind as the office transforms from an ordinary place into a outlandish hub for some rather peculiar happenings.

If you’re vaguely familiar with “spot the anomaly” games like The Exit 8, then you ought to have a good idea of how these sorts of transitions roll out, as well as how the general gameplay mechanics work. To put it simply, the game’s primary objective is to comb through distinct areas of your workplace, using the power of intuition to pluck out certain changes in the atmosphere. As you locate one anomaly, another is likely to appear. Likewise, the mood shifts the deeper you go, and the mundaneness of office life gradually begins to emerge as something a little more serious. I won’t stack up the spoilers here, but eh — things do indeed get, shall we say, weird.

Between Satire and Fear

Office After Hours is, first and foremost, a horror. But it isn’t just that; it’s a comedy, albeit a satirical one that pours most of its energy into waxing the cultural fabric of office work life. It isn’t quite on the same page as The Stanley Parable, though it does make the occasional effort to divert the course and substitute a good old-fashioned jump scare for a quick jab of a joke to whet the mood. And to be fair, while it doesn’t always manage to make the best of the situation with its inclusion of subtle office humor, it does manage to escalate its chosen hybrid format with some genuinely comical locations, several of which break beyond the gloominess of the hollow cubicles. Again, no spoilers — but you ought to know that there are some “special” spots stitched into this universe.

For a relatively short game, there is actually quite a lot of content for you to work with here. With thanks to its thirty unique story-based anomalies to shovel through, a handful of extra anomalies to snuff out, and a solid variety of clues and bite-sized puzzles to complete, you could quite easily lose yourself to the office graft for a couple of hours, give or take. It helps, too, that the game itself isn’t lauded by any major technical issues or loose threads. Sure, it’s a little bit on the low end of the scale graphically, but it makes up for its visual shortcomings with a pretty decent horror story and a significant amount of palpable jump scares and small details, to boot. It isn’t perfect, but it definitely serves its purpose as a genuinely good spot the difference IP.

Verdict

There’s a lot more to Office After Hours than meets the eye. On the one hand, it doesn’t deviate much from the traditional “spot the anomaly” blueprint à la The Exit 8. But on the other hand, it does manage to infuse some surprisingly good office satire into the mix, thus making it more of a two-for-one hybrid with multiple moving pieces to show for an otherwise familiar design. And it’s a darn good representation of the genre, too, with a unique selection of anomalies, a tantalizing atmosphere that feels awfully eerie, and an ever-shifting world that rarely lets up on the brakes to let you catch your breath or give you room to think.

When all’s said and done, it’s a short game that doesn’t provide a great deal of replay value, so don’t expect to be able to log your hours in on a time sheet and receive the whole pound of bacon, so to speak. That said, if you enjoy pocket-sized horrors that bathe in the prowess of B-movie jump scares and satirical stories, then I have no doubt in my mind that you will find exactly what you’re looking for in Office After Hours.