The Haunted Hoard: Yuppie Psycho: Executive Edition (PC)
Plenty of horror stories are set in run down mansions and eerie forests, but there’s one location many people dread going to that rarely gets explored in these tales: the workplace. A warped perspective on these familiar stomping grounds can cut close to home despite a corporate office literally being the opposite of a worker’s home, the setting ripe with ways to turn a place known for being soul-crushing into something that can be bone-chilling as well. Yuppie Psycho: Executive Edition taps into this barely explored vein of horror, but it doesn’t do so just because it can easily pull on familiar imagery, social commentary layered wonderfully over the disturbing sights and scenarios that arise when Brian Pasternack gets hired at a horrific workplace.
Sintracorp is the largest and most prestigious business in the world of Yuppie Psycho, but Brian’s humble life and skillset seem ill-equipped for a place of such renown. However, he soon learns that he’s no regular employee, as he has only one task he needs to perform at this new job: kill the Witch. With no sign of anything supernatural in his life before this day and confused as to why he is specifically being chosen for this task, this would-be Witch Hunter instead tries to slip into the corporate lifestyle, finding his office, cubicle, and fellow employees only for things to very quickly turn strange. Blood cakes the walls of certain areas, poison gas seeps through certain floors, creatures that are a mix between man and office supplies seek new victims, and perhaps the weirdest part of it all is… no one really bats an eye at it.
Yuppie Psycho’s horror may be taking the corporate atmosphere and making horrific monsters and chilling sights out of the usually sterile work environment, but there’s meaning behind how it twists this world into its dark reflection. The people at Sintracorp aren’t oblivious to the goings-on, workplace rumors even spreading about the Witch but yet people continue to work and turn a blind eye to the creature fused with a filing cabinet who drags people into the back to string them up. It is essentially the most extreme conclusion to the toxic types of workplace where people will avoid obvious harassment, illegal activities, and safety violations so long as they can keep their high-paying job and avoid making uncomfortable waves, and since Sintracorp is such a massive company in Yuppie Psycho, having it on your resume would open plenty of doors while quitting would seem suspicious to future employers. If an employee can tough it out and keep their head down they might be able to survive long enough to maybe one day live a comfortable life, but since Brian is entering this workplace with a much different aim than the regular employees, he can be the one who finally breaks through the complacency and willful ignorance… so long as he can muster the courage to face such awful creatures himself.
Brian is a very appropriate everyman who does freak out when he learns the situation at Sintracorp is so dire and wants out at first, but soon his investment grows in part because of those he comes to know while trying to find the Witch. Kate Hicks is his first and closest ally, the bright young woman a friendly face in a building where other workers look drained and can even be violent if you mess with their routine. A rock of normalcy in a setting where the whole idea is inverting normal office aspects into terrifying new forms, Kate is certainly a good way of making the regular workers sympathetic since she is on the path to potentially becoming one of these broken people if you don’t solve Sintracorp’s witch problem. Other workers come along and provide enjoyable angles as well, the eerie looking Sosa actually having fairly good knowledge of the supernatural side of the building and Doshi the IT guy and is able to help you with many of the company’s odd tech. Some characters fill the stereotypical role of the office gossip or flirt so that they can be later put to unusual use, but Hugo is perhaps one of the most intriguing of the employees because he acts like the overly friendly office worker who somehow found his way into the good graces of the company but hides much more under that familiar facade.
The characters help ground some of the surreal horror this office engages in, but a lot of dark comedy helps ease the edge of the biting critique of corporate work culture and supernatural monsters who want Brian dead. When you find office workers crawling on all fours and snarling like animals, Kate waves it off because she heard its the new yoga craze that increases productivity. One floor of the building has a bunch of people whose job is literally to walk around and look busy, and when the office printer is acting up, it is literally acting up by rampaging through the office on a murderous rampage. The art style also helps to soften the game’s sting a bit without completely compromising its horror elements, as the level of detail seems to be deliberately skewed. The human characters are all rendered simply, with dots for eyes, almost no facial features, and bodies made up of very few pixels. However, when the game wants to create a monstrous creature, there is much more detail put into the animation and detail of that object. On top of this, some scenes in the game completely forego in-game graphics and have gorgeously drawn scenes that only look like pixel art instead of hand drawn art because of their imperfect outlines. Character portraits for important characters also appear when they’re speaking, so the details to empathize with moments and characters are there and the moments meant to be scary are given more attention visually, but in a workplace where the entire idea is dehumanizing employees so they’re cogs in a machine that seems to run on blood and bone, then having its human character be rendered so simply does feel somewhat deliberate.
Your time in Yuppie Psycho will be spent exploring the different floors of Sintracorp as new leads take you to new areas, the building becoming stranger and more surreal the deeper into the mystery you get. There are areas in the building with vegetation, places where office supplies have been stacked up and turned into lairs, and areas like the security room and library are full of twists and dangers. Brian can’t truly defend himself most of the time, the player usually needing to find some way to alter or escape the situation if one of the monsters of the office is active in the area. This can involve things like sneaking under tables and hiding in cabinets to avoid people with flickering monitors for heads, toggling switches to make an escape route to avoid the rampaging printer, or timing your movements so the ladies in HR don’t spit poison gunk on you. You are given many tools for survival though, the player able to carry around food to restore health. Witch Paper is an invaluable resource, used to save your game at specific locations, but so long as you balance your usage of them a bit and make sure to scour containers in the office frequently you won’t run out. Similarly, Brain needs a light source fairly often to get around the office like glow sticks or battery-powered flashlights, but it’s not very likely you’ll be scrambling to keep these stocked up either unless you’re particularly wasteful.
Much of Yuppie Psycho is about moving through the office, finding out what aspect of office life has been twisted into something horrible, and learning the specific way you’ll be overcoming the latest roadblock. While some things like using screwdrivers to open air vents are repeated, most major objectives hit on different ideas for how you’ll handle the threats in the area and earn the required clues for your witch hunt, the puzzles guiding much of a floor’s challenges until you find the creatures that require a bit more action to successfully survive. It’s not perfect at always making what you can do in a moment clear such as the point where sickly workers will attack you if they see you head on but you can apparently push them around if you touch them from behind. The music actually does a pretty good job of jumping between the two halves of the game, relaxing urban music playing in the calmer parts of the office but tense and unsettling sounds cropping up as you step into the more dangerous places.
The main plot thread of Yuppie Psycho does a really good job of wrapping up its story in a satisfying manner provided you don’t slip into one of the suboptimal routes, and some details of getting the best ending can be a little difficult to come across naturally. However, being that this is the Executive Edition, there are also additional endings that completely break away from the normal path. The second main story route isn’t quite as well put together with its greater focus on domestic ideas and avoiding a constant pursuer, but it does dive into some of the questions about the witch and other people in the office that the main story didn’t have time to explore fully. The optional areas added that you can hit during any route also add some extra little minigames and character moments too, so the expanded version of Yuppie Psycho, while not always an even experience, is definitely one with plenty of entertaining ideas and gameplay shifts to make returning to it after completing the main story worth your time.
THE VERDICT: The twisted and sometimes darkly comedic lens that Yuppie Psycho: Executive Edition grants us to view its corporate world with builds a horror game with plenty more to love than the chilling sights and tense moments. With office work critiqued and parodied across the course of the adventure, you get a game that can balance its shift between deliberate dull realism and horrific caricature without wounding the other half of the experience. Some story paths aren’t as well crafted as others and the varied ways you explore the floors of the office can sometimes fail to communicate your capabilities or objectives properly, but Yuppie Psycho still delivers when it comes to a strong horror experience that takes place in a setting it tears apart in more ways than one.
And so, I give Yuppie Psycho: Executive Edition for PC…
A GREAT rating. Being a helpless hero can sometimes lead to gameplay that can be a bit awkward to engage with and optional story routes and collectibles can sometimes come up short or be a little underwhelming, but when it comes to its artistic direction Yuppie Psycho constantly impresses. The music is atmospheric, whether that be matching the kind of piped in sounds you’d expect of a typical office or putting you on edge with blood-pumping and twisted tracks for the moments of horror and action. The toxic work environments found in corporate culture are both parodied for laughs and tied into the terrors you experience at Sintracorp, the level of detail in the art evolving to better depict the horrific moments but remaining simplistic at other points touches wonderfully on the game’s themes.
Digging deeper into the mystery of the Witch and interacting with the small cast bring Yuppie Psycho: Executive Edition together into an engaging story that spreads itself across a few different tones quite well. Humor and horror mix together here surprisingly well as parody finds roots in making different elements of office life silly or scary. If the puzzle and action elements didn’t have quite as many awkward moments its performance review would be absolutely glowing, but it is definitely one of the better indie horror games out there because of how it was able to take its idea of corporate horror and get so much creative, varied, and meaningful material out of it.