Review | CorpoNation: The Sorting Process – Lift Goes Up, Lift Goes Down
Society's supposed descent into a neoliberal hellscape certainly isn’t the cheeriest of subjects, but at least there’s been plenty of sharp satire to make light of it. This has classically come in the form of novels, plays, and films, but CorpoNation: The Sorting Process attempts to add to what is a small assortment of video games hoping to highlight societal decay via an interactive approach. As I sat playing my 30th round of a state-sponsored fighting game – one of the banal activities comprising the other half of my day that wasn’t sorting ambiguously labelled test tubes – I was satisfied it had achieved its goal of simulating the drudgery…
Max, the game’s protagonist, exists to give every fibre of his being to the Ringo CorpoNation. His daily shift consists of arranging four variants of samples into their corresponding pneumatic tubes, before returning to a sparse blue cell within the same building he works in. He has no contact with the outside world besides his company-assigned chat buddies, and during his downtime, his liberties revolve around his desktop computer: browsing propagandist news articles, purchasing Ringo merchandise from an online store, and playing one of two Ringo-brand computer games. Interfacing with the above will feel very familiar if you’ve played Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please, with the three-tone pixel art aesthetic lending itself to a similarly claustrophobic experience.
Over roughly nine hours, you’ll progress through ten weeks of clicking through the same routine day in, day out, shuffling from the bedroom to the elevator, to work, and back again in something akin to a feverish dream. The sorting job defines the main gameplay element, to which there’s fun to be had in memorizing the escalatingly more complicated shapes, patterns, and numbers and then executing the job as quickly as possible – a process helped along by appealing sound design and the inclusion of a new piece of equipment for your workstation every now and then. The job has the meditative allure of one of those Flash-based cooking games you might have played as a kid (albeit with a dystopic sheen).
It wasn’t long before that novelty wore off, however. The task quickly becomes too complicated for its own good, and by week three, gone was the thrill of speed and replaced instead with a necessity for meticulous data checking. I couldn’t be bothered in the end. Having correctly estimated I had enough credits to take me through the rest of the game, I no longer had to worry about performing well and paying bills anyway. There was more enjoyment in reading the scathing comments from my manager at the end of each week for purposefully messing things up; between the constant pestering emails to do overtime, the expectation of buying your managers gifts to appease them, and the Brass Eye-esque news articles delivered to you each day, I was never a few minutes away from a chuckle during my daily reading, at least.
Nevertheless, the main element overstaying its welcome is never a good sign, no matter how thematically relevant. There’s an inherent juxtaposition in gamifying mind-numbing work that doesn’t in turn make the game itself the mind-numbing work it seeks to satirise, and CorpoNation has trouble pulling off this balancing act on numerous occasions.
As well as being spent on bills, the credits you earn can be used to buy Ringo-themed products for your room like posters, bedding, and rugs, but I found it difficult to care about any of that stuff. Similarly, you could opt to exchange credits for gems to progress in the state-sponsored computer games, but even if the idea of progranda-fueled Street Fighter is amusing, they weren’t fun to play in the first place. In not bothering with these elements at all after the fifth week, I became rich enough for bills to become a non-issue, and to laugh off any penalties I got for performing badly at work. This kind of shattered the idea of an oppressive corporate regime.
Things did take a turn for the better around the midpoint when Max becomes embroiled in the plotting of an anti-Ringo group known as Synthesis. Initially, you’re given specific sabotage tasks to mess up the samples at work, but because these took me back to engaging with the now very laborious sorting game, I mostly ignored them.
Luckily, as a new member of Synthesis, I’d been given a new toy to pass my shift with - a phone that gave me access to a secret forum, hidden from the prying eyes of Ringo, where users would pose their most burning questions – “Where do the test tubes go, and what do the samples contain?”; “Have any of you ever been outside?”; “Don’t you think it’s strange we can’t remember our training period?”.
Anyone who’s read 1984 and Brave New World will have a sneaky suspicion about how this is going to play out, but the game does enough new with its characters in this familiar setting to keep you engaged for a while. Whether it be the various personalities you meet through the company's official chat or the realistic forum threads on the dissidence channel, the devs did a good job of making people you never see feel real. My interest in the game became solely seeing new user comments on whatever hot talking point had emerged that day, and if it wasn’t that, I was jumping onto my computer to bear witness to the tentative mutiny growing in one of my officially assigned buddies.
Throwing a big rusty spanner into that sentiment was the construction of the ‘Nexus’ module. Just as things were getting a bit spicy, I found myself haphazardly putting together finicky hacking components that Synthesis had delivered to my room toward some unknown end goal. Fitting these antennas, dials, and switches together made me actually lament my time in the sorting room: pieces are supposed to slot together like Lego, but they kept attaching to the wrong parts and getting permanently stuck there. Making matters worse, you can’t exit out of this building mode while you’re in it, so I went through several resets with unsaved progress, to then have to repeat a day in the dreaded sorting shop.
I found the game to grind to a halt from here onwards. The initially intriguing threads in the forum never resolved into anything exciting to sweeten the bitter taste left by building the Nexus, and so Max and I limped along to what was a predictable and unoriginal ending – a Frankensteinian amalgamation of the classic works referenced above with no original spin.
There’s some well-written dialogue, an interesting aesthetic, and some cool sound design to be found in CorpoNation, but these elements alone aren’t enough to redeem an experience that feels half-baked in almost all aspects. Games can be an excellent medium for exploring ideas in a more personal and intimate way than books, film, or other art can, but gamifying something boring to tell a story already told just isn’t it.
