ULTRA-INDIE DAILY: 9PM, Unlimited Workplace Incidents
Hello, you glorious gluttons for all things indie horror! Are you just starving for the newest of the new, the most unknownest of the unknown? If so, you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to the Ultra-Indie Daily Dose! In this series, we’re going to pick a new game every day from an indie horror creator you’ve probably never heard of. No million-dollar budgets or factory productions. This is the space for the little guy with not but a developer toolkit and a dream. So if you’re down to roll the dice on something different, then stick around and check it out!
9PM is a demo of a charming visual novel by Fulmen of a handful of office staff finding themselves at the closing hour and at the bottom end of a Zombie outbreak. Made originally for a 1-week game-jam, the game is not feature-heavy but that is to its benefit. By focusing on writing and story pathing the small segment of two characters in the demo is very fruitful to replay and full of flavorful character writing. Where corporate culture satire is a star of the show in other stories this leans more into parody, that being good-spirited archetypes of different workplace personalities trying to balance their modern inclinations with the reality of brain chomping undead.
If zombies in the office space are meant to hold a symbolic meaning it’s amusingly unspecific. The characters often get caught up in office politics as they encounter colleagues slack-jawed and slobbering. They internally recount the times a person made their jobs more difficult or used them to step up their own ego as the character is wrestling away from their infected mandible. If anything it helps to remind us that office culture is a constructed farce and pales in comparison to the essential needs of humans. But then again it’s not like we’ll ever need to prepare for an overnight collapse of civilization when indebted workers are so lucrative for the upper class.
If you’d like to try your stapler survival skills you can play 9PM in the browser or download it at itch.io. Or for a different type of office hell check out our review of Redtape.
Check out more coverage of all things indie, horror, and otherwise here at Dread XP.
