The first few hours of Brighton-based developer Canteen’s CorpoNation: The Sorting Process aren’t exactly a blast. The gameplay starts relatively simple, with your primary job as a lab technician consisting of sorting samples into specific tubes for use by Ringo CorpoNation, the corporation that is also, as the title implies, a country. (It’s not clear exactly what these samples are, though the words “low desirability phenotypic traits” that appear in your employee handbook next to one type are a horrifying initial clue.) This is broken up by mornings checking emails and evenings gaming, completing surveys, and texting with co-workers. Various roadblocks and annoyances, however, pop up constantly.
Complexity is added to your job with little warning and often unclear instructions. Threatening emails arrive in your inbox whenever Ringo decides you aren’t spending your “free time” to their liking, whether by answering survey questions inappropriately or neglecting to log into the state-approved gaming app. And if you find your mood turning from annoyance to anger, that’s clearly a part of the game’s effort to make its dystopia not just seen but also felt.
CorpoNation, though, is about more than just the severity of the discomfort imposed on you. It’s also about the ways the discomfort reminds you of real life. For one, the kind of half-engaged mental autopilot that the game has you reflexively slipping into during your sorting shifts will likely feel disquietingly familiar to anyone who’s worked a similarly repetitive and menial job.
As the game slowly introduces new elements into your daily routine, the uncomfortable similarities to the real world continue to pile up. For instance, the main state-approved game, Ultimate Ringo Fighters, that you have access to in your living pod functions as a rather scathing satire of modern live-service games, as this online fighting game boasts microtransactions, seasonal rewards, and a rather awful matchmaking mechanic.
As the days wear on, it becomes clear that the economy in Ultimate Ringo Fighters is also a mirror image of your day-to-day budgeting as a Ringo Corp. employee. Stubborn dedication to the game might get you a promotion, but you’ll always be a punching bag for someone more powerful. The only way to reliably survive is to clock in every day and take a pitifully small reward. Even if you do save up your currency, the only thing it’s good for is buying cosmetic novelties—from a plastic cacti to a desktop background of someone lounging beneath a palm tree—that are cheap recreations of things that exist in an outside world you’ll never see. It’s bad enough that your free time is just another job. Worse, though, is realizing that, despite the pointlessness of your daily drudgery, something about it remains satisfying, almost fun.
If the primary characteristic of Ringo’s dystopia is its all-encompassing grind, its secondary characteristic is how completely it isolates its employee-citizens from each other. Regular contact with other people is limited to text-only interactions. Primarily, this means reading emails from either your manager or the Enforcement Sector (Ringo’s name for its police force). You’ll never send any emails back, because you only exist to take orders.
Throughout CorpoNation, you’ll also spend some time messaging three other friends, all of whom were assigned to you by Ringo Corp. Since any of these people could report you to the Enforcement Sector at any time, every interaction is fraught with tension as you attempt to read any potential subtext into what would otherwise be mundane conversations.
The antidote to your lonely drudgery does arrive in the form of a dissident organization named Synthesis. Though you always have the option to report their secret recruitment attempts to the Enforcement Sector and continue with your usual company work, joining the group that offers an alternative to Ringo’s horrifying routine feels like a foregone conclusion.
Once you finally join, your primary method for contacting other Synthesis members is by using a pager dropped off in the elevator that takes you from your living pod to the lab in which you work. The warmer social environment of the device comes as an immediate relief. It’s not just that people here are more open and honest about their feelings toward Ringo, but also that the pager is set up to generate a broader sense of belonging. Instead of restricting you to one-on-one conversations akin to text messages, the pager’s main social app is a forum, allowing connections and relationships to form in a freer, more open way. There’s also an app dedicated to nothing more than donating credits to members going through a financial rough patch.
It’s not even particularly annoying that joining the group means your job will become more difficult, with more tasks to fulfill during your workday (and ones that will get you in trouble with your manager, no less). The extra work somehow feels enjoyable, despite the fact that Synthesis jobs involve completing sorting tasks that are mostly identical to what Ringo demands of you. This work is what will allow you to uncover the nature of the samples you’ve been sorting up to this point in the uniquely engrossing CorpoNation—the first step in unraveling the mysteries of Ringo’s wider operation. More importantly, though, there’s an unmissable sense that this work is all worth it because it’s not in service of a boss, but of your community.
This game was reviewed with code from Playtonic Games.
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