Office Fight is the debut game by Sydney, Australia developer Fenix Studios. It’s a simple concept that is very cathartic and goes a long way: having been laid off from Mega Corp, you must avenge yourself and your fellow employee underlings by wreaking as much property damage as possible and sticking it to the corporate overlords.
There are ten worlds in Office Fight, where you’re working through the different departments, engaging in little vignettes of office spaces, and strategising how best you can manipulate and fling an object of interest in a room to cause the most damage. There are employees, signified as zombies, populating these vignettes that you must liberate by flinging an object at them or having them attacked by another aggravated employee.
Quickly, the game becomes a domino effect where you’re working out how to cause a Rube Goldberg machine of chaos, devastating everything in your path. Levels remain fresh by having each department’s floor themed differently and introducing more mechanics; marketing is home to many pinks and introduces the mechanic of employees having the almost impenetrable defence of not being interacted with until you destroy the object they’re enamoured with, causing more puzzle steps in a given vignette level. This, fittingly is often computers and other everyday objects they’d commonly use.
Scoring affects how much currency you earn in-game to unlock cosmetics that employees can wear, modifier ‘runes’ such as giving people big heads or even different takedown animations that an employee can perform on another. I quickly opted to invest in the latter of this bunch, opening potentials for more devastating sweeping attacks to knock more things about in the background. Shout out to the anime-style beat-ups, they can cause some real mischief.
Concluding a world is a boss fight where you control your ghost self, flinging yourself around an arena to damage the big bad and any additional enemies that stand in your way. It’s here that Fenix Studios get fun with it with the designs. The very first fight you take on at the end of the customer service branch is called Karon, a hybrid of the stereotypical ‘Karen’ with ugly fringe and all, meshed with Charon, the undead boat traveller in Greek Mythology.
Combine this with the fact that you’re chasing scores, crossing medal thresholds and the like… and suddenly Office Fight is a highly replayable game. It’s incredibly easy to pick up and with each level being short, sessions can be as long or brief as you like. It’s a breeze and a hell of a lot of fun.
Office Fight is available now on PC. It’s more Aussie gaming goodness in 2024, something we’re already spoilt for. What more could you ask for?
About the Author
Charlie Kelly
She/Her, They/Them
Charlie loves her video games as much as she loves dumb, charming JRPG protagonists: probably way too much. You can often catch her spending too much time being emotional over LGBT stories in games. She also thinks Yakuza 6 is the best one.
