Good Job! Turns Office Nepotism Into Something More Fun

I haven’t been into the office in weeks. If your job can be done from home, and your employer isn’t a heartless monster, you probably haven’t either. Good Job!’s workplace carnage is a perfect substitute. I only wish every office was this much fun.

Developed by Dutch game studio Paladin and published by Nintendo, Good Job! was announced during the company’s surprise mini-Direct earlier today and it immediately stealth-launched on the Switch’s eShop. That abrupt bit of fanfare combined with Good Job!’s unassuming aesthetic—silhouetted characters and commonplace office interiors—make it easy to overlook. So I’m here to tell you you shouldn’t. Sending a Powerpoint projector crashing through three cubicle walls into a conference room on the other side of the accounting floor is one of the most satisfying things I’ve done all week.

You play as the child of a CEO who for all intents and purposes is useless but gets a job at their parent’s firm anyway because capitalism. To work your way up from the bottom floor, you must take on random tasks to prove your value. Somebody needs some boxes broken down in the storage room? Sure thing. Somebody else missing too many people to get that totally productive midweek check-in meeting going? No sweat. You’re basically Succession’s cousin Greg, except instead of tidying up after the neurotic excesses of one percenters you’re destroying desks and knocking over expensive decorations while trying to accomplish the most mundane parts of “bullshit jobs.”

Exhibit A: the projector I lovingly mentioned above. I needed to get it from one corner of the office to another for a boardroom meeting. It was trapped in a storage closet though. Some of the doors I had to open to get over there were electric-powered and needed to be plugged in, but the cords wouldn’t reach. So instead I used the cords like slingshots to break down the walls.

Once I finally got my hands on the projector, I didn’t actually mean to slingshot it, but it happened by accident anyway. Thankfully no one in the boardroom cared. On my personal evaluation I got a B for timing and a C for damages. “Good job!” the game told me, likely because as the CEO’s kid I can do no wrong and also it’s more fun that way.

The later levels get much more advanced. The game has nine floors and each floor has a handful of rooms to solve, followed by a special room that unlocks and serves as a much more complex proving ground for all of the tricks and mini-puzzle solutions you’ve been picking up along the way. The thing I love about Good Job!’s obstacles is there’s more than one way to get around them. Since they’re physics-based there’s wiggle room to play with. Collecting colleagues for a meeting might mean putting them on a conveyor belt to take them to the assembly line. Alternatively you can pick up connected rows of seats to ferry coworkers around like a personal ride-share.

Each piece of every isometric level feels tangible and layered, full of little objects that can fly around and shatter when your best-laid plans blow up in your face. I think you actually get more points the more stuff you destroy. And even if not, it’s the most satisfying way to fumble through each new corporate labyrinth. People who break shit while trying to get the job done shouldn’t be rewarded. Anyone who’s had a job knows that’s not always the case. These days you can even found a company on that motto and then be basically immune from the consequences of it while others pay the price.

Thankfully Good Job! doesn’t get weighed down by these moral outrages. Instead it’s a nice escape from them. Finally you get to be the oblivious idiot who can do no wrong and have a lot of fun doing it.


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