Yuppie Psycho Review

Kill the Witch, Survive the Office

Set aside your Silent Hills and your Spencer Mansions, we’ve got scarier places to be; real world places, where humanity dies, the pure are condemned, and the weak serve the devil with grovels and gratitude. Welcome, all ye damned, to the corporate office.

Yuppie Psycho revels in this alienating world, exaggerating those disenfranchised feelings to twisted effect. Our protagonist, Brian Pasternack, is a baby-faced newcomer to the world of work, his confusion heightened by his baffling new role of ‘Witch Hunter’ - a position he doesn’t recall applying for. It seems his new employer, Sintracorp, is cursed by a malevolent force that keeps employees prisoner, and while his colleagues bleakly accept the fact with a defeatist shrug and a sip of coffee, it’s his job to seek out and destroy her.

Yuppie Psycho’s weirdness is effortless, and to pigeonhole it as a survival horror simply feels diminutive. It is by turns funny, disturbing, surreal and heartwarming, flitting between each with baffling frequency and success. It’s here that the simplistic pixel art pulls a surprising amount of weight, providing equal parts visual humour and provocative chills. Meanwhile, the writing favours character over comic-book melodrama, your attachment to this diverse cast of colleagues keeping stakes effectively raised.

In gameplay, however, those stakes are surprisingly subdued. This is not a game where ammo management is a concern, with environmental puzzle-solving presenting the bulk of the challenge, and moral dilemmas determining the game’s conclusion. It’s not without threat, with chase sequences and stealth sections surviving the cull of traditionalism, but for the most part Yuppie Psycho would have you live in, rather than outlive, the moment.

It’s a game that gives itself license to be what it wants, when it wants to, and the fact that it captivates rather than alienates means it earns that confidence. Sacrificing blunt-force scares for its own incomparable vision, Yuppie Psycho is nothing less than a cult masterpiece.

Learn more about Yuppie Psycho by visiting the official Baroque Decay website. Yuppie Psycho: Executive Edition is available on PC (Steam, GoG, Epic Games Store) Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, and Xbox One. iOS and Android versions are also available.

DEVELOPED BY:

Baroque Decay

PUBLISHED BY:

Neon Doctrine

*This review was originally published in Issue #1 of Fearzine Magazine which was distributed in June 2024.

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