Just when you thought you’d escaped the office…

I don’t even know where I should begin telling you about Coffee Break, but I can’t get into the depths of the review without first pointing out the hilarious and suspiciously upbeat press release that accompanied the game’s announcement on gamesindustry.biz. Branded as a “corporate simulation with attitude” (boo ya!) the release sounds like it was written by a nineteen year old blonde girl on a sugar high, and doesn’t so much flat out lie as manipulate the truth as cack-handedly as any White House press monkey. To be fair, the game concept is a tough sell (a lot of us work in an office all day, so why the hell would we want to simulate one when we get home?) but I was bemused by some of the touted features of the game:

“The life sim genre: the number one genre in the world with over 35 million copies sold…” An obvious and brazen attempt to piggy back on the success of The Sims? Never!

“Story = Over 14 full missions to complete your goal: not to be fired.” For one, when you consider one mission involves issuing a handful of invites and nicking a bottle of wine it doesn’t sound like much of a story and, second, shouldn’t that really be a pitfall to avoid, rather than the ultimate reward?

“Fun, fun, fun is the key word…” Err…

In short, it does a bad job of talking up what is, unsurprisingly, a very bad game. It’s hard to imagine how this was pitched in development, but I’m pretty sure the presentation touched on the likes of The Office and Office Space. You can play as one of two characters (Johnny or some fat bloke who reminded me of Leisure Suit Larry. The difference is irrelevant), both equally foul-mouthed and poorly animated and apparently stereotypical takes on the average British office worker. In Coffee Break you go to work, play the game of office politics while avoiding any real tasks and keeping yourself one step ahead of the company and your colleagues. You can gossip, bribe, cajole and play pranks on most of them while you go about accomplishing your daily “goals”.

Atrocious voice acting

Broken dialogue trees (often mistranslated, with some still in the original French)

Ugly, lifeless graphics

Rubbish sound and the same piece of music repeated over and over again.

Sluggish camera and primitive controls

A working day that inexplicably lasts from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

And that’s only the start of it. The minimum of recorded dialogue is a blessing considering the acting, but some of the text-based interaction is so bad as to be plain bizarre. Consider this exchange: “Hello Annie!” “Shit I’m not pleased Johnny!” Or the equally perplexing “My bleeding noise tells me you are not friendly with me, John.” How about the frankly frightening “An otter into shit!”? I wish I was joking, honestly I do. And these snippets only crop up in the first couple of missions.

Ah the missions, lets talk about them. These are the only attempts Coffee Break makes at being a proper game. Everyday sees another problem for your plucky office worker to avoid and it usually involves getting yourself out of a mess you’ve created. By way of a poorly dubbed cutscene the game tries to explain what’s going on but then gives you no clue as to how, when or where you should go about accomplishing your task or in some cases even what it is. Any direction is minimal and obtuse, the developers presuming I would automatically wander around asking random co-workers random questions in the hope of striking lucky. Which I eventually did, but as it was the end of the working day by then the opportunity to do anything with my new information had long since passed. The tasks (when you figure out what they are) are broken in many cases, critical objects not being where they’re supposed to be or hidden in an unmarked cupboard to lie for all eternity.

I never even got around to playing the odd office prank or stitching up a colleague because, cheekily, the game gives you real work to do. Yes, at the start of each day you are given a list of actual jobs to perform ranging from photocopying to calling clients, each taking up blocks of thirty or sixty minutes. Constantly neglect them and you will receive warnings, and eventually the sack. Find the relevant spot to do these tasks and the game fades to black while a clock shows the relevant time tick by, and then it’s fade up and you’re back in the office again. Their inclusion beyond lending some attempted air of office authenticity is utterly pointless, being as they are irrelevant to the game’s pacing (the clock is speeded up anyway) and amount (again) to nothing more than a couple of mouse clicks.

I suspect Coffee Break also incorporates a form of subliminal torture too. Every time you confirm an instruction to your character a short, high-pitched tone plays at low volume in the background, while mousing over an icon on screen causes your speakers to emit a brief crackle that sounds like little more than a quiet burst of static. You don’t notice either of these initially, but playing for anything more than half an hour at a time I found myself physically cringing whenever it happened.

The experience of playing Coffee Break is neither fun, fun or even fun. It’s a gruelling, unrewarding, un-amusing and possibly soul-destroying exercise. In that respect, and only that respect, it perfectly nails the experience of working in an office full time. Everything else is sub-standard tat. If it’s a proper life-sim game you fancy then pick up a copy of The Sims as it does things approximately two grillion times better than this. If it’s the life and trials of the average office dreg you’re looking to experience and laugh at then for heaven’s sake watch The Office. There is absolutely no reason for you to buy this and, pointless as it is, no reason for me to give it a proper score.