CorpoNation review – will you betray the 1990s Orwellian megacorp?

Canteen/Playtonic Friends; PC
From working in your lifelong role of sample sorting' to playing mandatory video games when you clock off, this sinister, retro-futuristic game will have you questioning your freedom

As a lab technician at the Orwellian megacorp Ringo, your job is to sort strangely unspecific genetic samples into four different tubes - all day, every day. Each sample is identified by a specific shape or pattern or some other rudimentary icon, but whatever it is, you need to make sure the right ones go in the correct tubes or your pay is docked. Oh, and the exact shapes and patterns, as well as other bewildering requirements, are altered on a daily basis by your faceless masters. Welcome to the world of CorpoNation.

Those spotting a similarity to the award-winning Papers, Please are not mistaken. But while that game dealt with the cruel vagaries of immigration, this is all about the dehumanisation of workers within a systemised corporate environment where the staff are quite literally prisoners in the capitalist machine. But sorting stuff isn't all you do. Each night you get to crawl back to your pod apartment and log in to your 1990s-style computer to read banal Ringo news stories, swap bants with other workers via instant messaging and play state-sanctioned video games. There's a catalogue to buy customisations for your room, and regular emails encourage you to put all your pay back into the economy. The vintage Mac OS-style interface and glib humour work really well to establish the sinister retro-futuristic atmosphere of the game, and, as with last year's excellent Videoverse, discovering snippets of narrative through chats with fellow workers is a pleasing exercise in techno-nostalgia.