Saito -Anai T: Vi-de Juegos

Mr. Sailor Develop: Laura Shikhar // Pubic: Laura Shikhar Launch: March 23, 2023, In fiction, the figure of Japanese Salary man is used to represent the alienation that low-rank workers experience in large companies. The visual codes associated with this image, such as the interchangeable and wrinkled gray costumes or the cheap haircut, bind to a characterization based on the shyness and abuse of alcohol and tobacco to tell us about a man of medium-sized age, with Bad health and overwhelmed by the weight of absurd responsibilities that, in addition, has totally lost contact with his family. But in video games there is another characteristic commonly associated with Salary man: pixelated art as a reference to the time when this figure jumped to popular culture. In the demo Mr. Sailor we find all these ideas and particularities, without being very clear to where they want to take.

The advance points to a fantasy world, but this differs too little from the oppressive office that the protagonist wants to leave behind. Mr. Sailor's demo allows us to play the first minutes of the title. After seeing how the protagonist is unconscious because of alcohol after what seems to be a normal work day, we woke up in a hospital where our young roommate draws us turned into a flame-gusano, an adorable hairy animal that It moves through tunnels under the subsoil.

We then enter a dream world in which all the workers of our company are almost identical calls-Gusanians mostly called Sailor (let's talk here about the loss of individuality) and in which we receive the commission to find some metrics so that our boss can make some kind of decision about something. It is easy to compare this Mr. Sailor with the Spanish Yuppie Psycho, another gender game that also had the pixelate figure of a Salary man as the protagonist. But if the intentions in Yuppie Psycho were clear from the beginning; Talking about the horrors of work in an office and describing how managers suck the life and energy of all its workers, this little advance of Mr. Sailor does not explain too much about their intentions, beyond reflecting the absurdity of business jargon or The annoying of having colleagues who do not know how to respect social limits. And perhaps the problem is not so much the evidence of the dialogues but the way in which the same idea is repeated without stopping during these first minutes. According to his description, Mr. Sailor wants to be a role-playing game that avoids fighting in favor of more ingenious solutions. Its trailer colorful samples dungeons and the occasional mini-game that does not seem to fit too much with what this advance wants to show us. He also points out that making friends and impressing our boss will be two of the possibilities that we will have over his brief history. In the absence of knowing a little more about the way in which Laura Shikhar plans to unite all these concepts, Mr. Sailor's demo ends leaving us in a position very similar to what we had when entering. We know that this is about the evils of work; We do not know if Shikhar will limit yourself to doing toilets or, in the end, it does have something interesting to contribute.