Developer: 11Sheep
Publisher: 11Sheep
Platform: PC, iOS, Android
Tested on: PC
The Office Quest – Review
The Office Quest is a surreal looking point n click puzzle game. It’s originally developed for mobile platforms, but it has now been ported to Steam. It’s a short game, but it has a great variety of fun puzzles, and a ton of quirky characters and hilarious situations. This game has been published and developed by 11Sheep.
Story
It’s a normal day in the office, until the flower on your desk suddenly takes off and zooms away. Not the flower in itself, but whatever it was which gave the flower its color. You’ve been busy at work, of course, but your interest is piqued and you decide to investigate. However, your colleagues do not agree, and keep insisting you’ll do your work instead of pursuing the strange, colorful speck of light. You’ll have to devise some clever tricks in order to distract your colleagues, so you can keep following that curious glowing phenomenon.
Your journey takes you out of the office building, into the surrounding forest, towards a strange island made out of televisions, and to a desert where you’ll eventually find a beautiful cactus forest full of colorful flowers. The game is a rather surrealist experience: all human characters wear animal suits or are dressed up like fruits or vegetables, and there are fish and other sea creatures which solely live inside televisions. You’ll encounter many hilarious characters along your journey, which perfectly represent modern society.
Graphics
The graphics are cartoonish, which fit the game really well. Most of the graphics are monochromatic: black graphics on a light yellow base, in a simple cartoon style which lends itself well for caricature-like faces. The only exception to the yellow-and-black color scheme, is the strange firefly you are pursuing.
The color scheme and graphics style works really well for the game. The characters look funny and their facial expressions are done really well on the cartoonish faces. The fact that you are following a colorful creature through a monochrome world, makes your quest all the more meaningful.
Sound
There are different background music tracks for the many different areas you’ll be visiting. The music is nice and relaxed. The characters don’t speak: what they would say is illustrated in a speech bubble. However, they all do have sounds when they are speaking, or when they react to something. The sounds are fitting and often pretty funny. All actions you do have fitting sounds as well.
Gameplay
The Office Quest is a point ‘n click puzzle adventure. You’ll walk around in a certain area you’ll have to puzzle your way out of, and collect objects to help you achieve your goal. There are several mini-games, puzzles and riddles you’ll have to complete in order to progress, but most of the time you’ll be collecting objects and use them in novel ways to either distract or to help the other characters you’ll encounter.
The bizarre tricks you’ll need to envision to distract your co-workers are often hilarious! Most of the time it’s pretty clear what you’ll need to do even if you have no clue what your actions will eventually lead to, simply because an area only has a limited amount of objects you can interact with. After you explored a new area for a bit, you’ll usually have a pretty good idea of which problem needs to be solved, and where you’ll need to think of a clever trick to make things help you out. Just working with the objects you can collect at that moment and combining them with the most logical thing in the environment will usually guide you to the right answer: it’s simply a process of checking all available options, and usually all of them will help you out in some way or another. The bonus is that all interactions, even if they are the ‘wrong’ action, will have a funny result which is worth watching and will often point you to the right answer.
There’s a great variety of small puzzles to enjoy as well, most of which you’ve probably seen before as mini-games in other games. Things like completing sequences of symbols, or remembering the position of images. Usually you’ll only have just a few tries to get the right answer, so make sure you’ll pay attention, or you need to start the puzzle all over again! Some of these puzzles can be rather frustrating, since the ‘right’ answers sometimes seem to make no sense. However, after a few tries you’ll know what the game thinks is the right answer, so you’ll just choose that one.
The game consists of three chapters, and will only save your progress at the end of the chapter. This can be a bit annoying you you’re stuck at a puzzle somewhere in the middle of a chapter, but usually it’s easier to just retry the puzzle a few times until you’ve completed it, and just finish the chapter. The game itself is pretty short; you can easily complete it within two to three hours.
Conclusion
The Office Quest is a fun game to play through in one or two sittings. The story is funny, the characters are quirky, and the puzzles are fun. The graphics and sounds fit the game very well and are really well done. Some of the puzzles can be annoying, but since there’s such a great variety of puzzles, it’s not much of an annoyance because all other puzzles will be different. There’s even a small platform game hidden within this game! This game is recommended for everyone who likes puzzles and a fun and bizarre journey through a surrealistic world, where you’ll be able to escape your office in pursue of a colorful speck of light.
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