Table of Contents
Everything in a Good Job is designed to prevent you from achieving what the title means. Even simple tasks like delivering parcels or mopping the floor are comically complicated with unpredictable physics and ridiculous office tools at your disposal. Good Job isn’t so much about finding a way to achieve your goals in the cleanest way possible but instead is a fun playground for you and a few friends to wander around in. It’s best if it gives you the freedom to create solutions using puzzles using the chaos you orchestrate, only stuttering in a handful of scenarios. This is our Good Job Review.
Good Job Review: About
- Platform: Nintendo Switch
- Developer: Paladin Studios
- Publisher: Nintendo
- Genres: Puzzle video game, Action game
- Release Date: March 26, 2020
Good Job Review: Official Trailer Video
Good Job Review: Gameplay
Good Job puts you in the work shoes of the ill-equipped and miserably unqualified child of the CEO of a mega-company, and you get every possible job when you climb the corporate ladder. The first floors are simple: you sweep brightly colored clutter off the floor, deliver packages to color-coded desks, and courier projectors to meeting rooms in need. As unimportant as it sounds, the chaotic layout of the offices combined with the loose, QWOP-like control scheme gives moving objects the feeling of spring cleaning after a rough night out in a bar.
For example, dragging a projector is humorously tricky. It slides around easily as you drag it, knocking over decorative artwork and crushing the glass walls of meeting rooms. Good Job is not concerned with how well you complete a task, but instead whether you can do it in a certain period. Leaving a mess of memos, foam for fire extinguishers, and distressed colleagues make it more fun.
Every object in a Good Job is physically reactive, giving every little bump the potential to cause a chain reaction of destruction. Each level has been designed with this in mind, forcing you to navigate doors that are just too small to pull objects through, around winding corridors full of dangerously placed vases and paintings, and over electrical cables that can catch everything that you carry with you. These are presented not only as obstacles but also as fun opportunities to create chaos that makes your job a little easier.
For example, electrical cables can be used as slingshots for office chairs or useless copiers, allowing you to break through walls to create shorter routes or large doorways. You can divert cables to move other workers who are also hindering your progress, unplug the distracting television they’re fixed on and force them back to work. Motorized floor cleaners can spill in an instant, but can also act as a barely maneuverable vehicle that moves almost everything in front of it. Most Good Job office tools and equipment work as you expect, but have the flexibility to turn them into ridiculous means to achieve your goals.
These objectives change with each level and match the themes of each of the nine different floors. These are rapidly evolving from predictable workplaces to colorful biomes filled with small ponds and overcrowded vegetation and pristine laboratories with automated robots and a variety of chemical equipment. The theme of each floor is a welcome change, and the handful of levels within each level are vibrant and avoid surpassing their welcome.
Each floor also introduces new mechanics, and Good Job consistently combines them with new types of targets and smart spins on repeating. The mess clearing process is expanded at a later level, navigating a lab with an expandable, gelatinous pink cube that absorbs all the moisture around it as it grows. It’s functionally the same mechanic – you move through space and clean up a liquid mess – but the way of doing this changes enough to make it feel new. Looking at the cube turning its shape into narrow doorways created by overhead wires gives the goal its unique feel, making it stand out rather than merging into similar stages.
This is one of many examples where Good Job combines the different office applications to create your puzzle solutions. There are distinct ways to achieve your goals, and there were no puzzles that made me think about a solution for more than a moment. Figuring out how to complete a level differently has always been satisfying, thanks to the unpredictable responses you have to discover to find a solution.
It’s worth tripping over actions you might not have considered – in my case, how an overloaded vacuum cleaner can be used as a mobile explosive to destroy restrictive-level layouts – that lead to a ton of joyful discoveries. You can play Good Job solo or with friends in cooperative play, and the flexible puzzle solutions allowed me to complete them comfortably no matter how many other people I played with.
On some occasions, Good Job gets too complicated with his puzzles to support his style of gameplay. Some solutions require a degree of precision that is both frustrating and unsatisfying. In one case, I had to roll three large boulders to a zen garden and place each in a specific hole. Rolling them in a particular direction was hard enough, but removing them from their marked spot with just the slightest touch made getting five close together annoying.
In another phase, I was given the task of thoroughly cleaning up a lab floor, which forced me to hunt for small paint pixels on a floor littered with toppled objects and destructive collateral. In either case, Good Job leaves the freedom that encourages finding solutions to his puzzles, losing most of his fun doing so.
Conclusion
These moments are fleeting and don’t happen often enough to knock out Good Job’s most charming and compelling puzzles. It finds a middle ground between being a destructive playground and an inventive puzzler, with enough variety everywhere to make the short playtime feel balanced. You’re certainly not the best person for any of the jobs you’re put into, but it’s still a lot of fun that you all stumble through it and even get the job done at the end of the day. That’s it for our Good Job Review.