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This was a neat experiment on the anomaly hunt genre. Though I have to admit I'm not sure if it was successful for me.

I like the idea, I've watched several playthrough videos of the I'm on Observation Duty games, and I think expanding that concept out to a map you can physically explore is interesting.

But I think "normal" difficulty is WAAAAAAAY too subtle. I played for about 40 minutes on normal and got reset to Monday so many times I lost count. I explored every room, every cubicle, and looked in all the bathroom stalls and out the windows. I even looked into the managers room and around the front desk. Saw nothing, walked into the elevator, and then got reset to Monday.

Speaking of the manager, I actually thought he was totally bugged out because I missed the line on the game page about how instant movement somehow locks the manager in place. I didn't know this during play, so I was VERY confused about the warnings about the manager. To the point I intentionally avoided looking in his office for a while because I didn't want to aggro him. If I had read that line going in I think the experience would've been much better, as it was I was just bored after a certain point.

I only saw the minigame once, when I intentionally walked into the manager to see what would happen. I thought it was cool and the graphics looked neat. I died fairly quickly though, I wasn't quick enough on the dash lol.

I will say, there were some genuinely cool anomalies, especially a couple that scared the hell out of me. But that was 2-3 days out of several dozens of attempted days.

The combination of not much happening and repeatedly missing anomalies led me to at one point just immediately running for the fire exit as soon as the day started. Which actually managed to get me up to Thursday once.

After a couple minutes of that, I realized I could change the difficulty. After about 15-20 minutes on Forgiving I eventually made it out of the office on Sunday.

There's some great stuff in this game, I like the art style, some of the anomalies were very well done, and the movement was decent enough (I only played  on instant mode). But god the RNG is just absolutely brutal to the point it felt frustrating, tedious and boring on Normal.  And I think it would've been even worse if the manager was out roaming around looking to promote me to customer. I honestly think Forgiving should be the normal mode, and Normal should be "Hardcore".

I think this game would be much better after a post-jam patch, but I definitely still applaud the attempt to experiment with the dungeon crawler control and movement with the anomaly hunt game loop.

Good work!

Thanks for the detailed feedback.

It’d be a bit interesting to know what anomalies you were struggling to find. Which of course is hard for you to say, but if you are up for it, the save is located in AppData under Unknown Incubator/Escape Work/GameSave_0.json and has a field “anomalies” under which there’s a list of “missedAnomalies”. It’d be a massive spoiler so DM me on discord if you feel like digging it up / if you didn’t start a new game that overwrote the save.

I’ll probably remove most instructions on the itch page and hope that the updated version with a slideshow in game is sufficient information, but it’s a good point that it is very bad if people don’t check the manager’s office. You’d also get a voice-line in the post-jam version if you forgot to check some room before leaving.

I’m a bit hesitant about setting the forgiving mode as default, to be honest. I’ll have take a think about it. I’ve added anomaly difficulty setting, but as there are only 13 or so of them, it’s not that many “easy” and the game will prioritize novel over solved anomalies. But I think I rather add more easier and obvious ones for the next release after the post-jam version.