I picked up this game for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I currently work in an office. Granted it is a small office housing only three other people and directly below us is a rather tasty brewpub and taproom, but it is an office. And I worked in a workers compensation insurance claim office (in various departments) for three-and-a-half years. Also, the idea of an office full of people inexplicably wearing onesies was rather humorous. So I picked up the game when it was on sale and over the course of a week, playing here and there, I spent about five hours and finished the story.
Because this is a point-and-click game, I did overthink a couple of the puzzles, but thankfully all of the puzzles were relegated to an area, so it was not like I had to go from one room in the office, down a flight of stairs, into a bathroom, down a drainpipe through a hole in the floor of the bathroom in order to use the key that I found lodged inside a coworkers CD drive to unlock the electronic safe that had shorted out due to the leaky bathroom pipe which contains the printer paper you need in order to print out the report that you have to deliver to your boss. No, the puzzles here were not that stupidly complicated even though some did span a couple of screens, but the screens were literally screen-sized playing areas. And, you did not have to worry about inventory management, or wonder when you were supposed to use that stapler in order to unlock the hidden ending.
I think my biggest critique with The Office Quest was that there was not enough office in the game.
Only the first section of the game is spent in the actual office, but then you climb out through a grate located in a storage room, through a pipe/tunnel and then you emerge out of a tree in a forest.
The rest of the game is spent following a flitty red/orange object that distracted you back at the beginning of the game, your Magoffin if you will, through a series of bizarre locations, meeting all kinds of strange characters along the way.
The puzzles are a combination of logic puzzles with some environmental puzzles thrown in for good measure, as well as a couple of I-Have-No-Clue-What-To-Do puzzles, again because I tend to overthink point-and-click games. I did, in fact, have to consult various walkthroughs for a couple of the puzzles, one of which required me to go back a couple of screens to events that started after you leave the screen (as in, there was not a car full of people when you were last in the screen, and two screens later, you are expected to know that you should go back and find a said car full of people in order to get $50 from one of them?).
I feel like by the end of the game I felt. . .good? It is kind of hard to explain. I enjoyed the game overall and although I did need assistance on a couple of the more confusing and obscure puzzles, I thought that I did a decent job in figuring some of the more difficult ones out on my own, which is a good feeling. As the credits rolled, I did not feel in awe by the experience, which was a little disappointing after having eyed the game for over six months. That being said, I am happy that I picked up The Office Quest and spent the time with it, even more so because it was on sale.
~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Instrumental
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