Corporate Slave

YOUR BADGE WORKS. THAT'S THE GOOD NEWS.

Corporate Slave is a satirical single-player RPG about surviving a modern tech job. You walk a

side-scrolling open floor plan in real time, from 9:00 to 18:00, and every hour is a decision: ship the

ticket, dodge the meeting, refill the coffee, or use the company laptop to apply for a different life.

Then you go home, spend your handful of evening hours, and do it again tomorrow.

There is a win condition. It is money. It is a long way away.

THE OFFICE DAY

Nine hours, one floor, a clock that does not care about your plans.

• Actual work — feature tickets play out as SHIP IT, a coding QTE against the build timer, 

  or BUG HUNT, where you swat bugs before they escape into PROD. Escapees become "known issues".

Known issues are immortal.

• Meetings — standups, syncs, and the ones that appear mid-sentence. Stay awake, answer with the

correct buzzword, and decide every time whether joining is worth the hour. Leaving early is noted.

Everything is noted.

• The floor — printer duels (PC LOAD LETTER), coffee timing, water-cooler gossip that leaks real

intel, and a window you can stare out of. Staring helps.

• Micro-events — SEV-2 incidents, fire drills, cake for a stranger named Craig, mandatory IT

restarts at 1:47 PM, and the VP walkthrough: a 2.6-second ALT-TAB reflex test.

• Job-hunting on the clock — check mail or Easy-Apply at your desk and roll the dice on someone

seeing your screen.

THE EVENINGS ARE YOURS (ALL THREE HOURS OF THEM)

Rest, side hustle, BeetCode prep, doomscroll — you get a few slots and never enough. Take a therapy

session on the commute. Get shaken down by a dentist. Pay $10 a week for an app you don't remember

subscribing to. And run the job hunt properly: a fake email client where recruiter invites, offers and

rejections land overnight between the spam, and a satirical professional network where applications

percolate for days before fate arrives by mail.

Interviews are full multi-round gauntlets. Skill rounds, a rapid-fire question stage that escalates

from normal to unhinged, and a culture-fit finale — taken over video from your couch if you're still

employed, or in person inside the target company's own rendered interview room, under their values poster.

Offers expire in four days, because urgency is a core value. You can negotiate. They might rescind.

THE AI AGENT

Your new colleague was plugged in overnight. They roam the floors of different companies and absorbs your tasks, and the tasks count for them now. A five-act story runs the length of your career and it goes somewhere specific —

and when you finally learn what those agents actually are, you get to decide what to do about it. There is a seat

being offered. There is also a door.

CLIMB, TRANSFER, OR RUN

Perform well enough and the ladder forks: +15% pay and your IDE license revoked within the hour. As a

manager you hire your own team through a proper hiring minigame, run 1:1s for your reports, keep morale

above the resignation line, and watch your performance become a function of someone else's output.

Congratulations. You are the calendar now.

Or take an internal transfer. Or hand in your notice, serve the week, and sit through the exit interview.

THE MACHINERY

• Six parody employers, each with its own office, CEO caricature, salary bands, stability and

mission statement — and their own all-hands announcements about the betaverse, the AGI timeline, or the

Year of Efficiency (#4).

• Probation, performance reviews, PIPs, reorgs and layoffs — rumored at the water cooler, delivered

as a calendar invite titled "Quick Sync". Survive on performance and visibility, or take the box and do the

walk of shame.

• RSUs that vest just slowly enough to keep you here. Rent, bills, salary, and a rival whose career

advances whether you log in or not.

• Hackathons, mandatory HR seminars, employee surveys, remote all-hands, CEO floor visits, overtime

— and a side hustle you can run at your desk, at escalating risk of being caught.

• Stats with teeth — energy, stress, performance, visibility and money all push back. Max out stress

and you break down. Do it three times and the run is over.

It's just a job. You can leave any time. Prove it.