You can’t remember the last time you left the Ringo CorpoNation building. There’s no need, not when everything — your office, your apartment pod, your stateapproved gaming PC [1] — is right there.
You spend your days sorting mysterious genetic samples and your nights putting money back into the economy. Life is adequate — until a chance encounter with a shadowy group of disgruntled employees with a lot of hard questions.
The core gameplay of CorpoNation is very reminiscent of Papers, Please — pay your bills by performing a mundane task that gets steadily more complex while dealing with petty crises and offers from dubious figures. In this case, that mundane task involves putting samples into the right tubes [2] while minding the rules that change on a near-daily basis. Do well, and you can earn promotions and bonuses that can be sunk into decorations or a gamewithin-a-game back in your apartment.
While the sorting mini-game is suitably challenging, CorpoNation is a narrative-driven game and the story is the primary draw. The narrative leans heavily into satire [3], making jabs at corporate culture, toxic positivity, surveillance, and the excesses of the video game industry. The sudden appearance of disgruntled employees is a real shock to the system, and the slow trickle of revelations is enough to keep the game compelling.
