ROHRPOST
A game about quitting.
You want to quit your job. The institution won’t let you.
ROHRPOST is a puzzle game about pneumatic mail in a vast, Kafkaesque bureaucracy. The only way out is doing the job you are trying to leave. Perfectly.
Do your job. Perfectly.
The reply comes by tube. Resignation rejected. File Form R-7 with Human Resources by end of day. You file it. Finances writes back: this isn’t HR.
The only way out of the building runs through the pipes. The pipes are your job.
The work order.
Every level opens with one. Five personnel files to the archive, stamped RECEIVED, with a signature on the way. Complaints in red ink to the shredder.
The build.
Draw the tubes on the grid; they connect by themselves. Along them sit the desks that stamp, sign, copy, shred and incinerate, and the sorting desks that read what a capsule carries. The puzzle is where the pipes go.
The inspection.
Test capsules trickle through while you build, so you see where things end up. When you are ready, you submit. The institution runs a fixed sequence of deliveries, and every item has to arrive.
The review.
Pass, and your cycles, cost and footprint come back as a performance review. The office chart of the most efficient employee is the last title you want. Fail, and a memo arrives. Refiling is permitted.
Memo
Rejected: Item 7 arrived at: Incinerator.
Refiling is permitted.
RejectedFloor by floor, HR asks for one more document. You never work on your own case, only on the side-quests of the side-quests. Somewhere in the building an elevator has been oscillating between floors 3 and 5 for years. That, too, is now your problem.
Late in the game, the institution starts routing employees by tube.
Some thirty levels, then an endless mode: the trial that never ends.
Inspired by Kafka’s The Trial, Brazil and Severance. For players of Opus Magnum, 7 Billion Humans and Papers, Please.
Your resignation is being processed.