Worming From Home PC review — Analyse this

Games intentionally being a pain to control dates back to QWOP, although they became a bigger business due to Getting Over It. Worming From Home is kind of like this since you play as a worm that has to do things that a worm would, understandably, have a huge amount of trouble doing. The game is very short and gets a little too annoying during its final task, but it’s mostly a success in terms of humour and creativity.

Worming From Home puts you in the role of a literal worm that works as a financial analyst. The game’s goal is simple: impress the boss and get a promotion that doesn’t actually increase your salary. It’s very clearly a takedown of corporate culture (your trusty digital helper informs you that you can’t get a meaningful promotion unless you’re the child of a CEO), and its playful tone and silly concepts work well in tandem with one another.

Since you’re a worm who is “worming from home,” the game’s play space consists of your desk, which has everything you’ll need to do your job. The main points of interest are your keyboard and mouse. Worms obviously don’t have hands, so you’ll need to crawl onto the keyboard and hit each key individually. Similarly, you have to grab the mouse and push it with your tiny worm body before moving to the front and clicking. It takes incredibly simple tasks and makes them an ordeal.

The game is separated into days that all pass in real-time. Going to bed (in a potted plant) early each night will give you slight buffs, but you’re meant to do tasks during the day to work up to that sweet promotion. The main one is that you go into spreadsheets and fulfil extremely simple tasks, such as bolding or italicising the contents of certain cells, or filling others in by adding, subtracting, or multiplying the contents of others. It’s very clearly meant to take a potshot at the nature of the work.

Each spreadsheet task counts as a file that you get paid for on the spot. You can then use that cash to purchase upgrades, such as new training equipment, which includes buying and upgrading spots to read and lift weights. Reading is accompanied by a mini-game that’s clearly a takeoff of the classic phone game, Snake. Lifting weights, on the other hand, is a takeoff of Breakout. Playing for just a bit will net you a perk point you’ll need to progress, such as moving more quickly or being able to make more cash.

There’s a focused series of tasks that need to be completed to net the promotion, and these have no time limit. Conversely, smaller tasks usually give you a day or two to complete them, although these mostly just exist as a tutorial to certain aspects of the game, such as messaging co-workers or drinking water. There’s also a smartphone that gives you new equippable outfit pieces and rewards you with cash for reaching certain milestones.

It’s honestly quite fun for the most part, although much of what you can do is completely optional. At one point, you can even enter a wormhole and do a tough platforming challenge that’s much like any number of Getting Over It-likes. Beating it lets you try a harder version without checkpoints, which is extremely tough due to how the jumping works. Again, this is entirely optional.

The main story beats in Worming From Home can easily be completed in just three hours, although you can play as long as you want if you’d like to make more and more money (and hire all 100 interns). The final challenge consists of doing a video call with your boss and throws some pretty surprising curveballs at you. However, there’s an incredibly annoying feature that requires you to input sentences on a soundboard, which caused me to have to retry this section four times.

It’s the only “hard” mandatory thing in the game, and it’s only that way because of how easy it is for the worm to hit the wrong button. If you make one mistake, you have to start typing the sentence again. It really sticks out like a sore thumb, and I wish the dev had done something different here. Beating the game unlocks a hard mode where milestones need to be completed on shorter timetables. Missing one of these gets you fired, which is a great reason to jump back in, considering how quickly the upgrades run out in the normal mode.

I quite like Worming From Home, although it’s not as funny as it could have been, plus I wish there was more to it. Considering the nature of it, though, a few hours seems like a perfectly serviceable amount of content, especially since you can easily more than double that if you want to complete all the challenges and go through the harder difficulty. If you like games about doing difficult things with less-than-ideal controls, this will likely tickle your fancy.