I shouldn’t feel this at home in the nightmare office world of Pager

Is it bad that I find the office labyrinth of Pager rather cosy? Is it a sign that I have finally gone full 9-to-5 zombie? Or have I simply been mugged on Memory Lane by a composite of 90s aesthetics and technologies – pebbly Macintosh wallpaper patterns, mock-Bauhaus prints and yes, pagers, though I never owned one of those as a kid.

I even like the background whine of the omnipresent CCTV cameras, which grows abruptly piercing as I walk beneath them. These are very much the wrong emotions for anything that bills itself as influenced by Kafka. If I have accidentally invented the cosy Kafka genre, I am sorry.

Created by the evidently self-deprecating “bilge”, and available in full now on Itch.io with a browser demo, Pager is 60 floors worth of laidback 1-bit dread. You are some kind of office worker. Your boss sends you instructions via pager. The instructions tend to be things like “take this box to room 4”. You go to room 4 and it’s full of fish swimming by the light of distant stars. The next instruction is to jump three times. Pager does not have a jump button.

It’s a gentle spoof of corporate ladder-climbing, a send-up of arbitrary and unknowable bosses and bureaucracies. It mixes humour with horror with a surprising sleepiness. There are a couple of soft jump-scares in the demo, but I was more unnerved by the crackling noise emitted by the butterfly you occasionally find perched on a coffee cup. Butterflies should not crackle. Still, even the butterflies can’t wholly undermine the peace I glean from these mostly dark rooms full of dotcom memorabilia. Kafka aside, Pager’s inspirations include Severance, Lynch, The Stanley Parable, Serial Experiments Lain and Sonny Boy. If I have accidentally invented the cosy Lain-alike, I am sorry.

I’m not as bowled over by the demo (which includes the first 10 floors) as I thought I might be, after cooing over the screens. I think the scenarios could be longer, and perhaps wittier. They have a certain dad joke energy, at times – a touch of WarioWare minigame, but couched in a way that leads you to expect something more fiendish.

The developer comments on the Itch.io page that Pager “shouldn’t give you any satisfaction”, and do you know, I feel like I might ultimately be dissatisfied by a game that declines to give me any satisfaction. But perhaps it’s a wind-up – the trailer includes a few scenarios that seem more elaborate and chilling, and the individual puzzles appear to follow a larger story. At the very least, I think it’s worth you firing up the demo, especially if you think human art peaked with the launch of Kid Pix. Pager is also available on Steam.