Hell of an Office

I spend most of my review time on multiplayer and co-op, so a tight solo speedrunner landing in my queue is a genuine palate-cleanser, and Hell of an Office earned more of my attention than I expected. The pitch sounds like a one-liner: you are a new employee at HellO, a demonic corporate supply company run by a suspiciously satanic CEO, and your entire job is to not get incinerated by rising lava while stapling your way to freedom. That premise is thin, but the movement system underneath it is not. The stapler is the whole game. It fires like a rocket-jump tool, blasting you off walls and floors to gain height and speed. Combine that with a dash, a necktie-hook for pulling yourself toward anchor points, and a ground-slam that feeds back into your momentum chain, and you have a movement vocabulary that takes real time to master. The ten chapters each introduce a new wrinkle: wind tunnels, portals, disappearing platforms, office hazards that would be OSHA nightmares even without the hellfire. Early levels are breezy enough to click within a few attempts. Later ones, particularly around chapters seven through ten, start demanding that you sequence your dash, hook, and rocket-jump in tight chains, and the difficulty spike is real. One reviewer I tracked down noted that later stages require thinking strategically about how to chain movements together, which is accurate, and that is precisely where the game separates casual players from the leaderboard crowd. For solo players chasing times, the online leaderboards and Diamond Rank system give genuine reason to replay every level. A built-in level editor with Steam Workshop support means the content pipeline extends well past the hundred-plus base stages, and reviewers who put in around twenty hours noted that the Workshop has real potential given how many movement tools open up by the final chapter. The story spaces between platforming sections offer some world-building and jokes, though more than one reviewer found the writing loses steam after the first few chapters. Treat those sections as a breather between intense runs, not as a narrative draw. From a hardware standpoint: controller support is present, with an Xbox pad recommended, and the responsiveness held up well in coverage I read across multiple outlets. Mouse-and-keyboard players have flagged occasional input-drop issues with stapler clicks, so if you play on KB+M, worth checking the community forums before committing. There is no split-screen, no local co-op, no versus mode. This is strictly a solo experience. If you showed up hoping to crowbar this into a Saturday night couch session, it is not that game. But if one person at the table is a speedrun obsessive who wants something to speedrun between rounds of something else, this absolutely scratches that itch. Steam reviews sit at Very Positive territory, which for a small indie launch is a solid signal that the core loop delivers on its promise. The visual style leans into a blocky, slightly retro office aesthetic that works better in motion than in screenshots. Paired with an original soundtrack that reviewers consistently praised for matching the pace of the action, the audio-visual package punches above what you would expect from a small Barcelona studio's debut. The humour is hit-or-miss, the narrative is thin, and the difficulty curve in the back half will test patience. But the movement feels responsive, the level design rewards repetition, and the Workshop gives it legs well beyond the base game.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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