It was capitalism all along.
Check Out The Company Man Review for Xbox Series X:
The Company Man, a 2-D action platformer developed by Malaysian indie studio Forust and published by Leoful, is an homage to office life .
Gamers play as Jim (The Office?), who, on his first day of work for a big company, gets tangled in the wheels of the corporate machine and has to decide between being a Keyboard Warrior for good, or eeeevvvviiillll.
Gameplay
This game is fun, it’s funny, and it’s beautiful.
Jim’s abilities are straightforward. Players start with simple slash and jump commands and slowly upgrade their abilities to shoot angry emails. I didn’t use most of the weapon upgrades, which mainly consisted of shooting more power Reply-All and Chain emails, preferring to stick with my Keyboard Sword, and the most basic email attack.
The fun is in all the enemy’s abilities. Each enemy has a unique attack that gets increasingly complex as Jim works his way up the corporate ladder. There is a wide variety of enemies and attacks from level to level, from paper-shark-H.R. representatives to ice-zombie-tax accountants, to gazelle riding artists.
It wasn’t just the enemies that had variety.
Each level of The Company Man is unique in terms of aesthetics, sound, and puns.
Marketing was my favorite level. I loved the urban-jungle-up-in-the-clouds look and the immensely fun (and frustrating) portals, though the enemies in Sales and Legal were the best of the whole game.
Story
Okay, I might be talking a little meta, but hear me out.
Long, long ago, in ancient Greece, there was a guy called Aristotle. He came up with a theory for dramatic storytelling. The idea is that a protagonist, who is a mix of good and bad qualities, suffers through adversity. The audience empathizes with the main character and suffers with them. At the end of the story, when the suffering is over (through death or triumph), the audience should experience catharsis, which means something like purification, something like purgation. The important thing is that the audience should feel a release of emotions.
The Company Man does the first half of this really well. Jim is a flawed character. He fires (kills) everyone indiscriminately, whether they are an enemy, a poor intern, or some schmo trying to increase their passive income.
He makes a choice that causes his receptionist crush, Alice, to walk out on him. Still, he keeps going, following orders and telling himself that he will change things when he takes over.
Players then find out that Jim’s motivations are deeper than just greed in two flashback scenes (the second of which totally tugged at my heart and caused me to feel empathy for little baby Jim).
I was all teed up for my purgation, what with childhood trauma and corporate malpractice, only to reach the end of the game and there be no catharsis. It felt like going to the club and the music being all build-up but no beat drop.
The CEO level of the game takes about 15 minutes to get through, followed by a 30-second screenshot that “wraps up the story” before the credits roll.
I can’t describe my level of “what the heck?!” at the end of the game.
How Many Hours?
Maybe 2, maybe 5. It depends on how good you are at jumping. I got stuck in both Accounting and Marketing (and briefly rage quit) because of jumping, but I’m also terrible at jumping in video games; it’s been a problem I’ve lived with ever since the first Kingdom Hearts.
If you don’t have my issues, though, this game could be played in 2 or 3 sittings. I don’t think figuring out the boss fight patterns will hold players up too long. Each boss has around 4 moves that are easy to figure out. The most challenging parts of the game are when the player is faced with 2 or 3 different types of enemies simultaneously (or, as I said, you suck at jumping).
Overall
7.5/10
I liked this game a lot, but it lost points with the ending.
The game seemed to be building to something. There was a whisper of an interesting plot, but the end of the game was abrupt and unsatisfying.
Why go to the effort of hinting at a dark, painful backstory and then have no payoff?
And when the player realizes that the whole game turns on a single bathroom-based joke?
*Big sigh* Disappointed.
I also took .5 points away because of the cost. I know that money has got to be made, but there also needs to be bang for the buck.
Selling for 19.99 on Xbox and Nintendo Switch and 15.99 on Steam, this feels like a lot of money for a game that takes between 2-5 hours to play and that I can’t see myself playing again.
Related: Reviews by Michelle Jones
I'm a completionist gamer who just needs to find that one last object and clear that final dungeon. I love all video games, from open world sandboxes on a console to a mindless match three on my phone. In addition to gaming and writing, I am a graduate student working on a thesis about the ancient Icelandic Sagas. Feel free to ask me anything about Vikings.
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