A Day in a Hell Corp (Hex)
Played on: 3rd October
How I played it: On the IFComp ballot via Firefox
How long I spent: 40 mins for one playthrough
I do not think A Day in a Hell Corp is a very good game. I try to avoid writing very negative reviews as I find it too easy to be cruel rather than critical, and I apologise if I’ve crossed that line in what follows, but I have to be honest here. There are fundamental issues with the writing of A Day in a Hell Corp that make it really difficult for me to enjoy or appreciate the game.
It’s a classic premise – it’s Hell, but it’s a bureaucracy. You’re playing as one of the demons in charge of torturing souls, Chuck Wagon (okay, I do at least find that name kinda funny), and you’re competing to be Employee of the Month by torturing the souls even more. Your great nemesis: office politics. It’s not the newest idea under the sun, but you can see the potential for good gags and interesting scenarios. And indeed, there are a couple of neat little ideas here. Hell Corp turns out to be styled after a hospital, with the damned souls kept in wards themed after some of the Seven Deadly Sins; that’s a nice way to play with classic horror imagery and distinguish your Hell from the classic fire-and-brimstone imagery or Dante’s Circles.
Right, but there are those issues with the writing – it’s poor throughout, but it’s poor in several different ways. First, there are obvious technical errors throughout. The prose flips from second-person to third-person a few times (not counting the dialogue scenes, which are laid out like scripts, which is fine as a stylistic choice). It’s extremely repetitive in its use of adjectives, describing almost everything as “hellish” or “nightmarish” or some combination thereof. One dialogue scene has the protagonist repeat the same line of dialogue twice in succession. A few passages end with doubled punctuation marks, as if the passage has been copied in from elsewhere and the existing punctuation hasn’t been cleaned up. A lot of these flaws are on the solution path, suggesting that not even the author has proof-read their work.
There are problems with the narrative voice too. It flips from descriptive adjective-heavy prose to stoner dude talk between passages, which is extremely distracting. For some reason, on the way to the endgame scene it flips to a third mode, clipped staccato descriptions like if a caveman was suddenly narrating. (“Light tubes shake like scared bird. Red floor blanket saw big food fight, did not win. Every step, you hear funny sound, like spirit cats cry soft.” Oddly enough, this is the best writing in the game – it feels tense and distracted, which fits the scene during which we read this.) But the bigger problem with the voice is that, whatever mode it’s in, it’s trying very very hard to sell the comedy, but overeggs it massively, thus ruining the jokes. Mike Russo already highlighted this as a sample passage of poor joke-telling but it’s a good early example to analyse. The player-character wakes up to the sound of their alarm clock, and if the player chooses to smash it:
The moment you grab that hammer and smack the alarm clock, everything goes kaboom in a total mess. But the alarm clock? It’s still there, perfectly fine, like nothing ever happened. Oh, the irony! And just then, the hellish door opens up, ready to take you to work. Good day, huh?
The idea of smashing an alarm clock so hard you destroy the furniture yet somehow leave the clock standing is not a bad slapstick gag. But “everything goes kaboom” is relying on pure zaniness rather than anything you can visualise concretely, and the “Oh, the irony!” flubs the joke, almost begging you to laugh, as does the “Good day, huh?” Many of the jokes are like this, and so are many of the descriptions; one area is “a real spectacle of chaos and the grotesque […] An atmosphere of total disorder, where every step is an adventure into the bizarre.” The voice really needs to pull back and let the actual events breathe, rather than telling you how funny or strange you should think everything is. (And I can’t quite explain why but that emoji is driving me up the wall. Maybe I’m just a snob.)
Now, let’s talk about women. The female characters in A Day in a Hell Corp are all evaluated based on their looks first and foremost. Two women are primarily objects of workplace romance, and the other two are roasted based on their looks. That’s bad enough, but then your stomach plummets when you realise you’re going to have to do a lust-based puzzle. Here it is, and I’ll spoiler it in case you want to play: the Lust ward is getting a Bang Bus full of cheerleaders, and you have to swap it with the pharmacist’s ugly sister in order to torment the souls more. Agh. It’s hard not to feel like you’re doing a very cruel thing to the sister there.
One more thing that made me cross: There’s a ward for the avaricious, known as the Stingy here. What that means is that the souls have unionised and are demanding to be paid. As the walkthrough says, “There’s a union strike here. All the greedy folks want more money and less torture.” (Well, who doesn’t?) So we have an equivalence drawn here between being miserly and wanting to be paid more, and we have trade unions cast as inherently greedy organisations. Now, here I am continuing to throw stones while my glass house lies around me in shards – with five years of experience and hindsight, I will admit that the protestor in my game Vampire Ltd was not a good representation of workplace disputes. But I will at least give myself credit that my protestor was correct in the context of the game, and not depicted as just being money-grubbing. Speaking as a union member currently involved in a dispute to stop many of my co-workers being made redundant due to poor management decisions, this part of A Day in a Hell Corp really annoyed me. It’s a fundamentally conservative, sycophantic way of looking at workplace disputes. I don’t care for it.
I’m sorry to put the boot into the writing so much, but there are just so many issues with it, so many poor decisions and obvious errors, that it’s really hard to appreciate what A Day in a Hell Corp does right. I do think there are some good points here. Like I said earlier, the premise and the setting aren’t bad at all. I think some of the puzzles (not the Lust puzzle) are worth something, too. They’re generally easy, which is the right decision for a madcap comedy, allowing a bit of interaction and pacing without sacrificing momentum by getting any player completely stuck. I think they might be a bit too easy, though. That video tape puzzle would be a banger if it was at all subtle, if there was some element of translation or lateral thinking to matching the tapes with the players rather than just comparing copy-pasted descriptions. (Oh, and if the solution didn’t just resolve to 1234 and if there wasn’t the hack mother-in-law joke in the middle of it.)
So no, I don’t like this game very much. There are ways it could be better, and I want it to be better. I think it’s absolutely possible to take the same zany premise and make it work (off the top of my head, The Wizard Sniffer and Adventurer’s Consumer Guide are two similarly madcap games which orchestrate and tell their jokes really well). But sorry, this isn’t doing it for me.