Okay I kinda loved this game and kinda hated it. Loved: the aesthetics, the oddball comedy, the surrealist touches, and the gameplay, which has just the right amount of balance and variety to keep you engaged for ten hours or so.
Hated: the fact that all this game's excellent style and design is basically in service of...nothing. Based on the title you might expect Yuppie Psycho to have something to say about corporate culture, institutional dehumanization, upward mobility, bureaucracy...something! But the few promising gestures at satire in the beginning fade quickly into the background, and it becomes clear that this game is not really about yuppies (or psychos) at all, the developers just thought a sinister corporation would make a good setting for a survival horror game.
Which, fair. It is a good setting, and the developers do, as I said, knock it out of the park with the aesthetics. The horror is more conventional than the premise suggests (you won't get much commentary on the more mundane horrors of an office job), but well-done as these things go. The plot, however, is some hot nonsense. I understand the mystery-box style of storytelling they are going for here, and I'm definitely not averse to a little ambiguity or confusion, but the plot is just so obviously cobbled together from spare genre parts, it really feels like they had some cool character designs they wanted to use and just kinda tossed them in a story-blender. I dutifully earned every ending, clinging to a desperate hope that one of them, just one, would provide some faint sliver of thematic resolution, but it was not to be. Maybe the biggest flaw in the end is the flatness of the characters; everyone is colorful and quirky but no one is very human or memorable, which sadly dilutes what little message the game has.
That said, if you like horror, and you're in it more for the style than the substance, Yuppie Psycho is worth playing. Despite my reservations, I did enjoy it enough to play it to completion. I just wish the aftertaste wasn't so bitter.
Hated: the fact that all this game's excellent style and design is basically in service of...nothing. Based on the title you might expect Yuppie Psycho to have something to say about corporate culture, institutional dehumanization, upward mobility, bureaucracy...something! But the few promising gestures at satire in the beginning fade quickly into the background, and it becomes clear that this game is not really about yuppies (or psychos) at all, the developers just thought a sinister corporation would make a good setting for a survival horror game.
Which, fair. It is a good setting, and the developers do, as I said, knock it out of the park with the aesthetics. The horror is more conventional than the premise suggests (you won't get much commentary on the more mundane horrors of an office job), but well-done as these things go. The plot, however, is some hot nonsense. I understand the mystery-box style of storytelling they are going for here, and I'm definitely not averse to a little ambiguity or confusion, but the plot is just so obviously cobbled together from spare genre parts, it really feels like they had some cool character designs they wanted to use and just kinda tossed them in a story-blender. I dutifully earned every ending, clinging to a desperate hope that one of them, just one, would provide some faint sliver of thematic resolution, but it was not to be. Maybe the biggest flaw in the end is the flatness of the characters; everyone is colorful and quirky but no one is very human or memorable, which sadly dilutes what little message the game has.
That said, if you like horror, and you're in it more for the style than the substance, Yuppie Psycho is worth playing. Despite my reservations, I did enjoy it enough to play it to completion. I just wish the aftertaste wasn't so bitter.