The Firm

The Firm, released on AND, iOS and WP, is an arcade game in which, as a regular employee of a corporation, we are forced to make rapid investment decisions that affect the future of the whole company. The title, which is a kind of satire on contemporary corporate reality, was developed by a small, independent Swiss studio Sunnyside Games.

Mechanics

In The Firm, we play the role of a regular employee of a powerful company, who can either get a promotion or get fired at any minute. A stack of papers is placed on a desk and our task is to approve or reject them efficiently, depending on the benefits they may bring to our corporation. Green papers (meaning profitable investments) are accepted by moving to the left-hand side of the screen, if the graph shown on them grows, and rejected if it decreases. With red (unprofitable) papers we act the other way round: we buy when the chart goes down, and sell when it is the opposite.

The aim of the game is, of course, to earn as much money as possible for our company, and our main opponent in the game is the time. A heap of papers grows with every second, and being too slow or making too many bad decisions can get us fired at any time. As is often the case with corporations, there is a queue of people waiting for our place. Fortunately, we can also use black market bonuses, such as a money multiplier, time slowdown or an automatic remote control.

The gameplay mechanics could be described as a combination of Papers, Please and Timberman. Both are independent productions, which managed to achieve considerable success. Another similar aspect is the retro-style graphics composed of pixeled sceneries and characters.

Last updated on 16 April 2015