GAME PROFILE

Crappy Corp

Congratulations on your new position at Crappy Corp. You are a contractor for a company that should not legally be allowed to hold contracts. Somewhere out there is a warehouse whose entire night crew quit at once, a wall that is twenty percent finished, a substation that is completely dark and a bistro that opens on F…

Congratulations on your new position at Crappy Corp.

You are a contractor for a company that should not legally be allowed to hold contracts. Somewhere out there is a warehouse whose entire night crew quit at once, a wall that is twenty percent finished, a substation that is completely dark and a bistro that opens on Friday. All of them are your problem now.

The job

Crappy Corp is a third-person physics comedy for 1-4 players. Every contract is a small, dense, fully physical worksite and a checklist of things that have to be carried, bolted, smashed, cut and thrown into a skip. Nothing is a menu. If the objective says load ten crates, you are picking up ten crates.

The last item on every checklist is the same: everyone back to the van.

The comedy is emergent. The damages are itemised.

Everything on site has a value, and the company knows what it is. Throw a barrel hard enough into a wall and you will see the number. Blame sticks to whoever let go of it, for six full seconds, so the payout screen can tell the whole crew exactly whose idea that was.

Heavy things need two people. The pallet truck does not care about your back. The site crane will lift anything to any height, which is also the problem.

There is no forecast

Weather is not decoration and it is never announced in advance. Rain drops the friction on every loose prop to almost nothing. Wind shoves whatever it can move. Fog eats the site. A storm brings lightning, thunder and brownouts. You get eight seconds of warning before conditions get worse, and not a second more.

You are paid at the worst weather the shift saw. Surviving a storm is, technically, a raise.

Nine contracts. Nine clients who are not telling you everything.

A logistics firm whose night crew all quit on the same evening. A wall abandoned by a contractor who left with the deposit, about whom you should please stop asking. A flooded mine level with a roof that is described as settling. A quay with no railing on the seaward side, where the company considers the sea to be a railing.

Spend it before you break it

Steel-toe boots, grip gloves, a tool belt, and liability insurance that makes everything you destroy twenty-five percent cheaper. Then the equipment: a pallet truck, a nail gun that occasionally misfires, an angle grinder, and eventually a crane. Every upgrade adds a verb or removes a constraint. None of them make you careful.