The Biggleboss Incident review

Business and pleasure go hand in hand in this lightweight but cheerfully amusing corporate comedy adventure

Some days, it can feel like everyone and everything is out to make your work life hell. Arbitrary rules, pointless busywork, and annoying co-workers can turn a simple day at the office into an administrative obstacle course. (Or is that just me?) Still, it's really only the Peter principle at work, right? For you and me, almost certainly. But when your company has a motto like "There is nothing sinister happening at Biggleboss Inc." it may be time to break out the tinfoil hats. Solo developer Adam Bunker's first outing blends Office Space's Kafka-on-acid vibe with lashings of British humour and rounds it all off with some gentle puzzles. Like its protagonist, The Biggleboss Incident is blessed with the kind of blithe optimism that comes from not thinking too hard about anything, which is a welcome relief in a world increasingly dominated by dark satires on the worst excesses of corporate culture.

Tom Baron is the perfect office drone, dodging and delegating his way to doing the bare minimum, somehow failing upward all the way to the C-suite. As Assistant Manager, he's Mr Biggleboss' number two, and he's currently late. Very, very late. And he's got to give a major presentation about Project AGER, whatever that is. Fortunately, the one thing he's incredibly qualified for is pulling fully formed presentations out of his butt at the last minute. Less fortunately, this would be the one day maintenance man Gunther spots him sneaking into the building. And naturally, it's also the day the office is installing keycard readers on all the elevators, something Tom would probably have known about if he'd ever actually bothered reading his email. Regardless, it means he's got a grumpy engineer blocking the way to his swanky office and the clock's a-ticking.

Now, it's just as well Tom knows about the lack of sinister happenings at Biggleboss Inc., because that means Gunther's shifty phone call to someone he swears isn't Biggleboss himself must have an innocent explanation, and the strong silent type in the lobby probably isn't a secret agent or anything. But how do you explain the voice of Mr Wiggles, the corporate “rat” in in the vents that Tom is stubbornly convinced is an actual rodent despite his "all is not as it seems" graffiti? He's very clear that Tom should just drop the Project AGER thing and leave right now. You'd think that Tom would jump at the chance to skip out on work, but it seems he must harbour a hitherto hidden stubborn streak: nothing is going to stop him getting to floor 19, his office, and writing his presentation.

Along the way, he'll have to deal with malfunctioning printers, erotica-obsessed HR staff, a mad scientist and his pet sharkaroo (a vicious shark-kangaroo hybrid), and even the buzzword-infested nightmare world of Marketing. It's almost as if everyone really is just there to put arbitrary administrative roadblocks in his path. And what, exactly, do they do here at Biggleboss Inc., anyway? And how can an entire office block full of staff not be quite sure?

Right from the off, The Biggleboss Incident bursts with gleefully oddball personality. Take the opening credits, which play out at the bottom of the screen as you're solving the first puzzle. They start out pretty normal, but then run out of people to mention and start very Britishly discussing the rain (torrential, isn't it?), asking you how you are, getting affronted at your imagined response, and finally inviting you to "enjoy the game, you big freak." The cartoon graphics are likewise weirdly endearing, blending clean and fairly realistic backgrounds with crisp but slightly wonky characters. The faces in particular feel like they were pulled from an enthusiastic high schooler's first comic book, with bulbous jaws, oddly aligned eyes and noses reduced to L-shaped lines. You can tell it's all the work of a dedicated amateur rather than a team of professional artists, and (in an age of smoothly perfect AI) the result is all the more human and relatable for it. The animation is also impressively smooth, and the rain that's constantly lashing against all the windows gives the offices some much-needed life.

Everything happens in the looming headquarters of Biggleboss Inc., so it's just as well that they're sprawling and varied, ranging from the beeping and booping machines of R&D to the zen-like calm of the library, via the charts and files of Finance and the Sustainability greenhouse. There's even a “cocktail” bar, with a sign so big each syllable gets its own board (think about it) and an enigmatic Irish barman. With only one or two rooms on each floor, the various lifts act as a handy quick travel system of sorts, even if it does mean suffering through some spectacularly and intentionally cheesy elevator music each time.

The Biggleboss Incident

Genre:	Comedy, Thriller
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Conspiracy, Corporate
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Stylized
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

That aside, the rest of the chill cafe-jazz soundtrack fits the mood perfectly. At first it seems to be hitting all the right corporate-approved notes, managing to be pleasantly bland and inoffensive. But then you notice the odd funky groove here, a little freaky fusion there, perky chiptunes in the gym and a tinkling Harry Potterish theme in the library. As with everything else at Biggleboss Inc., there's more to it than meets the eye (or the ear), and the score does a great job of keeping the tone light and energy levels up without tipping over into distraction or farce. The voice acting is another highlight, with Tom, in particular, bouncing between Ferris Bueller-esque smugness, bemusement, and curiosity, somehow making you root for him even as he (in classic point-and-click fashion) messes with everyone he meets to get ahead. The supporting cast are clearly having a great time too, from the tweedy-but-slightly-unhinged professor to Kev the stoner gardener and Clarissa the ditsy influencer.

The interface is pretty standard, though with (as you might be expecting by now) a few quirks of its own. There are hotspots aplenty to click on (some of them even useful rather than comic), an inventory that opens from a folder icon in the top-left corner, and the usual drag-to-combine item shenanigans. Less conventionally, you look at items you’ve acquired by dragging them to a special inventory slot, with the pop-up window itself split into "stuff" and "to-do" tabs, the latter keeping track of your current and completed tasks, handily organised by floor, with arrows and the odd love heart (thanks to Tom's unrequited crush on receptionist Amy). You're never juggling that many activities at once, but this could definitely be handy if you come back to the game after some time away.

Much of the humour comes from seemingly simple office chores spiralling out of control in an office packed with affectionate caricatures and stereotypes. Even something as mundane as riding an elevator up to Tom's office can’t happen without a fake work order (for that lazy engineer), and getting one of those from Amy means getting the printer working again. Which, obviously, will eventually involve the likes of Tom’s seafood lunch, an axe, and a crop of "special" tomatoes smuggled in from Amsterdam. And even that's not enough to make it all the way to the top! After that, just to show he's really serious about writing his presentation, Tom will have to build a companion robot, play marketing buzzword bingo, make the CFO cry, and wrangle that sharkaroo.

As you might expect of a lighthearted comedy, the puzzles, while wacky and varied, aren't that challenging to solve. They're even pretty logical, at least so long as you're used to adventure game thinking. Meaning, be ready to yoink everything that isn't nailed down and use anything that even loosely resembles what you're looking for, common sense (and occasionally good taste) be damned. There's no hint system as such, but paying even vague attention to the dialogue between Tom and his co-workers will help you along, the protagonist occasionally turning to camera to make sure you get the point. That, a handy hotspot highlighter, and the relatively cramped confines of the Biggleboss offices make it difficult to get really stuck.

The company staff is packed with a cheerful mix of wild eccentrics, from the levitating yogi librarian to the gym rat financial analyst. It's all broad brush strokes and there's literally no character development but, as it turns out, there's a reason for that. I can't say more than that without spoilers, but let's just say that a late game twist makes a valiant attempt to explain just why Tom's day has been as weird and frustratingly awkward as it has. Fittingly, it's the kind of ridiculous held-together-with-duct-tape-and-string concoction that Tom himself would have been proud of, but it's also just a tad startling.

After three hours of quietly bumbling along, becoming slowly more skeptical of the corporate motto, the last half hour feels like bumping into an evil jack-in-the-box and getting a faceful of story, with shades of Big Brother and AI overlords. Maybe that's just me wishing it wasn't over so soon (not that three to five hours of playtime is that short nowadays), but I'd have appreciated either a bit more of a build-up or more time to play in the world that suddenly opens up with a rush at the end.

Final Verdict

The Biggleboss Incident takes the everyday horrors of workplace life, cranks the conspiracy factor up to emergency overload, then decides life's too short for all that gloom and doom and blends it all into frothy farce instead. Crisp cartoon graphics, a perkily chill jazz soundtrack and some stellar voice acting are just the cherry on top. It's not deep, philosophical, or in any way challenging (sorry, puzzle fiends!) but it is a warm, quirky and gloriously off-kilter take on office life. If you need a break from everything that's going on right now, or just fancy slacking off for a few hours, I hear Biggleboss is hiring and there is nothing sinister happening there.

Peter played The Biggleboss Incident on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.