JOB SIMULATOR
All work and… play some
Sure, keep your friends close, but forget about your enemies – it’s your kitchen appliances you should pull closer. All those devices you’ve bought to make your life easier? Now they want to make a living for themselves. Your oven aspires to cook books for accountancy firms. Your microwave dreams longingly of its timer running 9:00 to 17:00, Mon-Fri. And your Tefal two-slicer is tired of making toast in the morning. It wants to be the household breadwinner instead. Set 34 years from now, Job Simulator depicts a world where the technology overthrow’s already happened. Humans have lost their jobs to circuit boards and transistors (take a look at the robotext masquerading as stories on certain gaming websites right now in ’16 and you might fear that process is already underway) and have forgotten what it was like to actually be employed. Luckily, the smartest robots around have pieced together four VR cartridges – Convenience Store Clerk, Office Worker, Gourmet Chef and Automotive Repairman – for fleshbags to experience the past.
The pitch of this comedy imposter-sim is simple: you stand on the spot with a PS Move controller in each hand and complete a series of tasks to keep the bosses happy. Free-play mode aside, there are between 13 and 17 basic jobs to do for each scenario’s ‘story’, and they’ll have you spinning, crouching and flailing about like an octopus in order to build sandwiches, or repair car engines, or serve hot dogs, etc.
A quick safety note: make sure you’ve got room to stretch out in all directions before playing, lest you should punch a wall and take the skin off your fingers like I manage to do by hurling an egg at a customer.
LABOUR FEIGNS
Dropping into a new scenario is fantastic fun. Just being in these worlds, tinkering with all their props, provides laughs, and developer Owlchemy’s done a great job of both hiding quirky features to encourage goofing around (don’t miss the Minesweeper clone on the office computer) and coming up with chucklesome scenes that play up the farcical pitch (the robots’ frequent misinterpretation of human phrases is showcased perfectly when I’m asked to “burn a CD” by sticking it in a toaster).
If only the fun lasted longer. With just the four areas available, it doesn’t take long to poke everything to see what it does. More levels would have been welcome, but Job Simulator’s task instructions do the most damage to longevity.
While I like the fact that I can get away with freeform solutions to certain requests, there’s very little to figure out; mission briefings are essentially just walkthroughs. The pieces for smart, puzzly challenges are here, but the game’s content for you to tick everything off in a workmanlike manner. I know it’s called Job Simulator, but that can’t have been its aim.