Game review: Budget Cuts

Because of course the right response to automation taking your coworkers' jobs is to sneak through your office and assassinate all the robots that have been taking their jobs with office supplies (e.g. scissors, letter openers) on your way to discuss the matter with the CEO.

... Wait, that's not the right answer? Well, that's what the main character has to do in Budget Cuts. All of your human coworkers keep getting summoned to meetings with HR, and they're not being seen again (at all, I mean, not just in the "they're fired and leave immediately" sense). Luckily, a mysterious friend has sent you a pager and uses it to send you codes you can use to receive messages and advice from her - between that and your prototype teleporter, it's time to see if you can escape whatever fate has befallen your coworkers.

It really is worth it. The enemy units in the game can only see your head, so there's real benefit to crawling around on the floor in order to hide behind cubicle walls or climb through narrow ducts. Even though the primary movement is teleporting, there's also benefits to walking around in your play area to peer around corners or get exactly the right angle on a teleport. These feel like exactly the sort of mechanics that a VR game should be taking advantage of, even if they can be a bit hard on my knees. The throwing mechanics (the only way to kill enemies) feel a bit frustrating to me - it's really hard to actually hit anything more than a few feet away, and quickly upgrades to impossible if the anything in question is actually moving - but it's also possible that I just suck at throwing things.

The story is certainly a bit silly, but still offers enough weird questions about the exact nature of what's going on to keep you engaged the whole way through. About my only concern there is that the game (like many other current VR offerings) is a bit short, and it ends with the dreaded "to be continued" - which was an irritatingly unexpected lack of a concrete end to the story.

... of course, it's not going to stop me from buying the continuation, when or if it comes out. Indeed, I look forward to seeing what else these people come up with.