I bought The Office Quest last week but switched it on for the first time last night, and completed it this morning around 6 am. Now, I didn’t pull an office all-nighter, but I woke up early, and the Switch was there, so why not?
The Office Quest, by 11Sheep, has been showing up in my feeds for quite a while. It’s always been cheap and intermittently on offer. I would assume that it was a lot of tat and Nintendo were trying to offload it. Looking at the graphics and the game genre, I still added it to my watch list and consequently purchased it after months of seeing it there.
The Office Quest, unsurprisingly, is set in an office, and you take control of an office worker facing the monotonous daily routine of data input, meetings and all that other nonsense we all like to avoid. A strange red shape appears in the room, and with that, our hero enlists his distraction techniques and skives off for the day.
You follow this enigma from room to room, eventually leaving the workplace altogether, engaging in simple point and click sequences and some very challenging riddles/puzzles. The character design, with them donned in animal onesies, and overall presentation of The Office Quest is brill.
The interaction is straightforward, though the puzzles… well. Some of them are so bloody hard that I did feel a rage quit brewing, and possibly a flying Switch. Each puzzle differs, such as memory games, while others are logic. A few of them were a piece of cake, like Sudoku and a mini-game of sorts where you control a bird. Others had me clawing my face and peeking at YouTube video solutions. Fortunately, in terms of experience, each playthrough can differ, so there aren’t any ways to cheat. I did this on 80% merit, 10% searching for a hint, 10% autopilot.
The not-so-good bits are the difficulty of some of the puzzles mentioned above and the length of the game. I wanted more. As much as I’d like to say I completed this in an hour or two because I’m so smart, I didn’t. It took me a few hours in the evening and a couple in the morning. Adventure games aren’t for speedrunners, but this was too short. And when I say that, I mean it with respect, as I could happily play more of this.
There aren’t any additional options unless you want to change the language, so once you finish the story, that’s it. Of course, you can play it again. While that is an option, and something I may be doing. Other than onesies and the sepia colour scheme, there isn’t much here that hasn’t been done before.
As far as I’m concerned, The Office Quest has lots going for it: entertaining, challenging, visually appealing and escapism. It won’t change your life, but it’ll make you enjoy it more. It’ll also validate your perception of office life.
The next step here would be for there to be a sequel or something similar in the same universe. This was a classic example of me pre-judging a game, thinking it would be a quick fix and then not played again, but I’m on a bit of a home run lately, what with Skyhill, Maddening Euphoria and now this.
