Shady Job Review (PC)

Say what you will, but let me assure you that there is nothing suspicious about four construction workers doing their jobs. Question the human-shaped bag all you want — there is absolutely nothing shady about it. Even if you happen to spot the cargo wriggling, you can boil it down to a figment of your imagination—a temporary lapse in your peripheral vision. Shady Job has no business with the mafia — none whatsoever.

It took the jury less than seventeen seconds to figure out that I was, of course, telling a little white lie when I told them of the construction job and the duties that it entailed. Looking back, it was painfully obvious, too, given that the ̶b̶o̶d̶y̶ ̶b̶a̶g̶ bricks had an awful habit of scissor kicking the living daylights out of people. It wasn’t even worth denying, either. Sure, we could have pinned it on the mafia and passed the blame on to the suited tyrants, but it never would have altered the outcome. We were the middlemen in the fight, and, if I’m being honest, we were terrible at our jobs.

Put yourself in our shoes for a minute. Picture this: the mafia wants you to take a “corpse” to the pinnacle of a construction site and bury it in concrete. The only problem is, it isn’t a corpse, but an active, breathing victim who, strangely, just wants to live. So, what do you do in a situation like this? Do you flee from the site and confront the mafia, only to receive a harsher punishment, or do you see the job through to the bitter end? Everything is already bagged and tagged — you need only transport the “cargo” to the target area and turn a blind eye.

On paper, Shady Job sounds easy—to collaborate with three friends and to bring a bag to the top of a tower. In reality, though, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. See, while the idea is relatively straightforward—to take a suspiciously weighty bag to the highest point of a building site—the steps one would need to take to reach said apex are anything if not threatening. The tower, even under the supervision of professionals, is in tatters, and the verge between the bottom and the top is in pieces. Oh, and that bag — that’s also moving around a lot. Put two and two together, and you have quite the headache to deal with.

Like any good rage-inducing platforming excursion, Shady Job is all about pushing yourself to the limits—to see how far you can travel before the stress takes over and the controller in your palms miraculously “disappears” into thin air. As this isn’t your ordinary A-to-B courier gig, you have a lot more to fret about here, as in, a flimsy body bag that wants nothing more than to make your job a little harder by flopping and flailing around just when you think you have built the perfect crossing. And that’s essentially what Shady Job is: a co-op courier job that is, true to the spirit of its moniker, a tad shady.

It goes like this: the mafia has ordered you to dispose of a corpse at the top of a construction site. As a result of this direct order, you find yourself in a rather sticky situation, with a troupe of incompetent tradesmen, an unfinished tower, and a fish-out-of-water bag. Alas, you are not a slick antihero in a classic crime drama, but a regular (and somewhat idiotic) builder who, for some reason, must carry the weight of the world on a pair of flimsy shoulders. With that rather thin skillet to keep you afloat, you can erect bridges, construct shoddy walls, and compile seemingly random objects into walkable pathways. The only thing that you can’t do is bury a body without triggering a butterfly effect.

Shady Job isn’t a game that wants you to win, nor is it a game that forces a habit of rewarding you for your actions. If anything, it’s a game that likes to punish you for, well, doing your job. If, say, you build a bridge or a makeshift structure that can allow you to cross to a new portion of the map, then it’s highly likely that something will knock you back. And by something, I mean, well, the body in the bag. Sure enough, it is the thorn in your side that, frankly, you can never escape from. As the volunteers in an underlying mafia plot, though, you aren’t exactly in a position to ask the questions or raise any complaints.

Needless to say that Shady Job is a bit of a pain in the backside to navigate. Like Stumble Guys or Rubber Bandits, your character is about as useful as a paper napkin, mainly due to the fact that they cannot build to save their own skin, and anything that they do manage to pull out of the bag is often tied to some form of caveat. Structures break, bridges collapse, and of course, colleagues perish in a bottomless abyss — a lot. As a ne’er-do-well of the trade, you simply have to take full advantage of your trusty plunger and a whole lot of iron girders to make the most of a bad situation. And no, it doesn’t often go according to plan.

For a game that is as niche as bagging and tagging a corpse on a construction yard, Shady Job is a lot of fun to stumble through with a few friends hitched to your utility belt. Frustrating at times, sure, but all in all surprisingly entertaining. While it might not offer much more than a sloppy courier gig, it does make the most of what it has, with some comical visuals, ragdoll physics, and a decently-sized environment that comes fully equipped with moldable set pieces and sandbox elements. Granted, it can be difficult to differentiate between what is mechanically broken and what isn’t, given that, well, everything breaks here. But then, I think that’s sort of the point. It’s a messy game, and yet it wears its shoddy design like a badge of honor.

Verdict

Shady Job adds a slither of morbid joy to an otherwise peaceful ragdoll-like co-op game, with as little as a black body bag, an inept workforce, and a crumbling tower of iron and rubber. Concept-wise, it’s all rather bone-headed and ridiculous. But then, if we’ve come to learn anything from past PvE games, it’s that you can have more fun if the premise is kept simple and to the straight and narrow. Shady Job is exactly that, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything greater, either.

Of course, if you happen to enjoy games like RV There Yet? or Friendly Steps, then there’s a good chance that you’ll get a good kick out of covering up a bloody murder in Shady Job. It might not wow you, but it’ll give you something to laugh about, at least. Well, until the body bag rolls away or pushes you off a bridge that you spent ages building, anyway. That’s an entirely different story.