This Game is Nightmare Fuel for Office Workers

I feel overwhelmed a lot. I don't think I'm unique in this, but that doesn't really help when I have a thousand things to do in what seems like very little time. Like a lot of people, I turn to games to help calm me down and manage my feelings. Sometimes, in a fit of irony, I like to simulate my daily problems with more work. I can become a theme park manager, or an army commander, or a truck driver. Doing work that I don't do normally helps me slip away from work I am supposed to be doing.

Paperlanche is another form of work simulator. It's a simple game in the "runner" genre where you, a little animated person, are running away from a paperlanche. There's not a lot of lore here, but Paperlanche is really leaning into the Dark Souls mode of storytelling where you just sort of figure things out from context. In this world, things are slowly being consumed by a Terry Gilliam-esque avalanche of papers. Where did it come from? Probably the Chaos Regions, but it's impossible to know.

Lore aside, Paperlanche is a great little jam game that you can lose yourself in for a few minutes. It scratches the same itch as Flappy Bird or Maverick Bird, and that's something that we're weirdly missing right now. The game has a really delayed and finicky jump button that winds up in a strange way, and that's the exact kind of friction that makes a game like this sink or swim. I'm definitely interested in these devs continuing work on this thing. However, it's really missing a restart button, and you have to manually quit after every game. It's a real bummer. Devs, please fix this.

You can download and play Paperlanch for Windows here at itch.io.