In a day and age where every turn-based game with comedic elements of some kind is labeled as "inspired by Earthbound," it's ironic that one of the few indie games to actually give me Earthbound vibes isn't even an RPG at all. The Mother series's reframing of JRPG tropes through contemporary American towns is succeeded in Yuppie Psycho with survival horror and a gigantic, labyrinthine office building- you save your game by making a photocopy of your face, brew coffee for health instead of combining herbs, and scavenge for these limited supplies by searching through desks and filing cabinets. The survival horror elements, though, aren't exactly a highlight, as it's often more funny than unnerving, and it focuses on experimentation and pure exploration rather than making getting from point A to point B as draining as possible. I'd instead summarize it as a game where the fun comes from accessing new areas and seeing weird things happen all around you. Most of it is downright dumb, a lot of it is cool, but all of it is entertaining. Where else can you trade slices of cheese for printer paper with the creepy guy upstairs, talk to your sexy coworker who literally can't speak in anything besides innuendo, or realize that your guiding partner character has completely bailed on you after an hour? But again, like Earthbound, Yuppie Psycho acknowledges that the humor should stem less from wackiness and more from how people react to said wackiness. The game's story revolves around tracking down an actual, literal, broom-riding, cauldron-stirring witch who's supposedly corrupting the corporation you were hired by from the inside, but the crushing stupidity of this premise is downplayed by the player character, who is instead more concerned about concealing the fact that he's a witch hunter from the people he works with. The end result is a genuinely refreshing experience compared to the current landscape of indie game writing, which is paired with a surprisingly deep pool of secrets and optional content that never diminishes in quality from the rest of the game's sense of pure creativity. Unfortunately, however, by the end of the game it becomes clear that this stuff is there to set up the good endings, which require doing really specific actions at specific points, a design pattern that's, as a general rule, not my cup of coffee. But this inclusion doesn't revoke Yuppie Psycho's status in my mind as a bona fide hidden gem.