Model Employee — Attuned with company values (Visual Novel Spotlight)

Are you a company-person? You should be. What’s life without work?

Turns out maintaining a livelihood can be quite costly. Food, shelter, fulfillment… It seems like our mortal carcasses and restless souls both need a ton of maintenance.

Far too many years ago, it was decided that the solution to this was working a job to keep being able to live. Far too many centuries or millennia later, we’re still debating if that’s even a good idea.

Of course it’s a good idea!, the big businesses say. Isn’t working all day in order to get a paycheck that you use to buy stuff such a fulfilling experience?

Verdict’s still out about it. I haven’t decided yet.

Tangentially, I recently played Model Employee, a visual novel made for the Spooktober VN Jam 2023 by Nth Circle, a group of developers I’m quite fond of and whose main work, of the Devil, I’ve reviewed for this website. They got first place!

It takes place in a dystopian future where an accident can leave you owing thousands in medical repairs and leave you consigned to working a menial job to repay it all.

Playing as Bailey, you get sent right into a big fulfillment warehouse to move boxes all day. You get to talk with coworkers, participate in an active environment, and, you know, try to keep your performance score high.

Such a riveting environment is only exacerbated by the presence of Penny, a digital assistant that monitors the warehouse and keeps everything tidy and running.

As the days pass and new opportunities arise, it becomes clear that Penny has quite an interest in Bailey. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that their technological implants allow them to see Bailey all the time without the need for a screen or projections.

Needless to say, this is a serious business simulator where you climb the corporate ladder. It also contains a cute anime girl. And it was made for a horror game jam.

You might be catching up to the fact that there’s more to the game than just the basic premise, and you’d be right! It all unravels in a great story about complacency, toxic work culture, and deeply inventive satire.

I’d be doing the game, which is free and lasts around two hours, a big disservice if I just spoiled all the little winks and commentary, but I’ll give you some general observations.

The use of a fictional “AI character” in the game might feel less enjoyable in the current climate. Model Employee gracefully avoids it by being quite honest about Penny’s nature: she’s a sort of processor that produces outputs, nothing more than that.

Despite demystifying Penny’s nature, there are still lots of wonderful interactions and dynamics that arise out of that. It’s precisely because we know this about her that the later incidents become so much more insidious.

The game confronts the reality of people resorting to chatbots for counsel and support head-on, and it gives it a dystopian, almost farcical spin.

The corporate environment commentary has some very clever moments, too. It’s more than happy to combine the musings of sci-fi with whatever dystopia we’re already having right now.

The result is a game that feels futuristic and out-there… while remaining very grounded in some everyday notions and quotidian societal discomforts. It’s a bizarre mix.

It feels cartoony and exaggerated, but… Is it really that much more cartoony than what we have today? Is it really that hard to believe?

Welcome, then, to Tethys. I hope you’ve paid for your employee manual already.

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You can download Model Employee for free here.

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