You know what we need more games about? Financial fraud. Spreadcheat is a game where you do just that by cooking the books. In the game, this means going into excel sheets and mucking around with the data till you get the numbers you want. In real life, it’s pretty much the same. I’m not really sure about that, though, I’ve never personally committed financial fraud. It’s a lifelong dream of mine, though.
I’m just kidding. That was a joke.
Do Robots Dream Of Microsoft Excel Sheets?
Spreadcheat’s official announcement trailer debuted at The Mix last week, where a Microsoft Excel-looking window flew across the screen while polygonal men in business suits danced around it. Soon after, a businessman in a suit skateboarded on a dolphin while the words “ASSET FLIP” rotated on the screen. There’s Word Art all over the place. You have a “personal genius co-pilot”, a pencil, obviously a stand-in for Clippy, the useless Microsoft Office assistant.
The pencil is just as useless as Clippy, but it isn’t really
trying
to be helpful, which makes it less pathetic.
The rest of the trailer is mostly polygonal businessmen dancing in various locations, which is awesome. The whole vibe is late ‘80s, early ‘90s corporate dystopia, and I downloaded the demo on Steam immediately.
There aren’t really any spreadsheets in Spreadcheat. At least, not in the way we know them now. The game’s puzzles are, appropriately, numbers-based, which I love, because I’m good at math. Each puzzle asks you to fiddle with the numbers in a sheet to get a final result, which corporate will dictate to you. The numbers you can enter into cells are limited to specific ones, forcing you to work backwards to figure out what’s meant to be entered where. You also have a limited number of attempts before you fail, but I’m so good at math that I didn’t make a single mistake, so I don’t know what happens if you get it wrong.
The puzzles start fairly simple. Your rows add up in the final column, and the cells in that column are totalled up in the results cell. Then subtraction gets involved, and multiplication. You’re introduced to ref commands, which replicate the contents of other cells and manipulate them. The last puzzle made me sit in silence while thinking for a little bit, which is a good sign: there’s some difficulty here.
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You’re The Layoff Guy Now
Every puzzle you complete increases your company’s efficiency. This often means that your successful book cooking leads to entire departments being laid off. You don’t benefit from this, but your boss does – he gets a bonus! He buys you a pizza as compensation. He eats most of it. He asks why you ate so much. Do you not have food at home? No worries, he’ll take the cost out of your salary.
In between each puzzle is a little bit of colour, reminding you how god awful corporate life is. Your boss tells you he was hoping you’d screw up so he could fire you and hire a hotter “broad”. He throws a party in the office, and forces you to clean up his leftover beer bottles, and somehow, a bra. There’s one bit where he allows you to upgrade your business card by changing the colour of the cardstock, and he compares different colours and what they say about you, in an unequivocal American Psycho homage.
I’ve never had to work in an environment like this. Instead of committing criminal acts in an office filled with detritus from my boss’ drug-fuelled escapades, I sit in front of my PC in my comfortable home, never having to make presentations filled with Word Art or animations. I do sometimes wish my job involved more math-based crime, though, so this game is a happy medium for me.
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