If you’ve ever been to Japan or understand anything about modern Japanese culture, you’ll be familiar with the salaryman – a name for Japanese businessmen who are overcommitted to their white collar jobs. So committed in fact that they are notoriously known to experience breakdowns due to over-exhaustion. Their lives seem to be work, get drunk after work, sleep, repeat, a pattern that has “collapse” written all over it.

Laura Shigihara’s short narrative-driven adventure, Mr. Saitou, delves into the mind of one of these salarymen but through a very unique lens. The game begins with Mr. Saitou being hospitalised due to being overworked and therefore, “falling down” on the streets of Tokyo. The way the game uses ambiguous terminology for what has occurred to Saitou is symbolic of the shame associated with salarymen not being able to keep up with their debilitating work conditions. When Mr. Saitou wakes up in the hospital, he finds that a young boy, Brandon, who loves to make fellow patients friendship bracelets, has drawn him into a cartoon character as part of a fictional parallel Japanese world of mystical characters and customs. The form Brandon has drawn Mr. Saitou into is a Llamaworm, which is a thick worm-shaped creature that burrows underground and has a cartoon llama face.

When Mr. Saitou slips off to sleep in his hospital bed, he finds himself in the world Brandon has created for them. From then on, he is no longer represented in the game as a human salaryman but as a salaryLlamaworm surrounded by other Llamaworms who are called variations of the Saitou name, such as Bosstou (Saitou’s boss), Irriatou (the annoying co-worker), and Widetou (a bigger Llamaworm). The adventure begins in Mr. Saitou’s office workplace where he is tasked with simple activities to complete whilst he feels a combination of exhaustion and discontent. All he wants is to go home and relax, but Bosstou makes it mandatory for him to also attend after work drinks, where he has to painstakingly make conversation with each Llamaworm that he’s shared a space with for the past few hours. Showing that Saitou really doesn’t have much autonomy over his work life.

Shigihara does a great job of setting up this world that Mr. Saitou is a part of – a repetitious, strict, bland space that is slowly wearing him down. When the catalyst for Mr. Saitou’s adventure, the fictional world version of Brandon, comes into his life, it forms the perfect juxtaposition between the Saitou work world and the world of Brandon’s quest. Real-life Brandon’s personality has been transferred to a “Bud” creature, which is pretty much a pink walking tulip bulb with arms and legs. When he scares off a bunch of Minimori, creatures that are blue and owl-like and which Saitou is terrified of, Saitou decides to help Brandon experience his “lifelong dream” of experiencing the magic of the Flooded Gemstone Caverns. However, to get there, they will have to navigate through a number of underground caverns that include puzzles, a number of strange creatures, and of course, lots of Minimori.

The game becomes a “dungeon crawler” of sorts where you enter different caves and solve puzzles that once successfully completed reward you with a key to another area via a chest. The simplicity of completing these puzzles, set by a magical talking calculator, could sometimes get a bit boring as they were all extremely similar. Also, I encountered a few glitches whilst solving these puzzles that made progressing impossible, so I had to restart and replay sections a few times to move things along.