Job Simulator: Human Relations Preview: You No Longer Need to Have VR on Your Resume to Play - IGN

If you’ve played VR, odds are you’ve played Job Simulator. It’s a staple of the VR space (pun intended), whimsically “simulating” an office environment to comedically overexaggerated effect. The problem, of course, is the “if you’ve played VR” part. It’s now been a full decade since Oculus Rift first released and attempted to bring virtual reality gaming to the mainstream, and despite advances on the hardware side – such as the raw power of the Valve Index or the wireless freedom of the Meta Quest – and killer-app quality games on the software side (I still have the sublime Half-Life: Alyx as my Game of the 2020s so far), VR has simply never gotten over the hump, adoption-wise. And so it was with plenty of excitement that I sat down recently to play Job Simulator: Human Relations, a non-VR version of the popular comedic multiplayer workplace sim that is played on a regular ol’ flat-screen monitor. Although ironically, your character is an anthropomorphized CRT monitor, walking around each floor of the company office building and trying to manage the increasingly more insane things happening around you. It’s good for up to four players, and as my four-player round began, we were in a pretty traditional office setting. Cubicles fill the center of the room, flanked by a kitchen on the left, a break room with a coffee maker on the right, and the boss’s office in the corner. At the top of the room/screen is a giant pneumatic tube that sucks things up into “the cloud.” Things started calmly enough, as one autonomous printer rolled around the office spitting out endless spam reports. You and your friends (er, coworkers) can grab vacuums to suck them all up. As you do this, you’ll be given new assignments, such as having to scan three things on three adjacent scanners and bring the paperwork to the boss to sign off on before you upload it to the aforementioned “cloud.” But things get out of hand in a hurry. On the next floor, you find yourself in a server room. A fire breaks out (um, I may or may not have channeled my inner Milton and put a red stapler in the microwave on purpose…), and as each server immolates and shuts down, you’ll need to not only extinguish all of the burgeoning infernos, but you’ll have to keep them all out so that all four servers become fully operational at the same time. It’s more or less an office-comedy version of whack-a-mole, and it is absolutely fun. Of course, you might be wondering how you put those fires out. Sure, you can pull the fire alarm and that helps, but that doesn’t last. You’ll need to float your CRT body over to the water cooler and fill up your Ghostbusters-like water backpack to spray the flames with. Job Simulator: Human Relations Screenshots You’ll progress through each floor of the office building, with new challenges awaiting you at each level. Different job objectives await at every turn, and you do get to put on different hats – literally, in this case – in order to gain different “job skills” such as a fireman’s hat that lets you shoot water from the backpack, a whirly-bird hat that lets you jump high – one item was up and out of reach, but when I had this hat, two teammates jumped on each other’s heads before allowing me to stand on both of their “shoulders” and utilize my leaping ability to get the high-up item. What work simulator makes pretending to do a job the most fun? Oh, and that progress I mentioned is of course couched in corpo-speak in Job Simulator. The progression is your “career” with a “corporate ladder” to climb. You get “paid” instead of earning XP, and you get “promoted” rather than level up. What to use your “salary” on, though? Well, you’ll unlock more of the ability-granting hats as well as cosmetic upgrades for your CRT bots. Based on what I’ve played so far, Job Simulator certainly hasn’t lost any of its whimsy in the pivot away from VR. If anything, Human Relations will introduce the series to a whole lot more players. It’s the kind of low-stakes, no-drama fun with friends that’s a step above the friendslop craze currently spreading through Steam these days, creatively speaking. And I’m eager to get back to work. Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.