Tiny Desks review
3

The demo is okay, but it's a very early prototype. Let’s talk about the core gameplay.

I’m not a fan of the drag and drop on PC. It might work well on mobile, but on PC the room doesn’t scale, so the papers are very tiny on a high resolution monitor, which makes it very finicky to drag tiny papers and drop them onto specific desks (and a bit unnerving to be honest). Maybe after beta testing it so many times you’ve become very comfortable with it, but for me it feels stressful, especially when playing against the clock.

I don’t really understand why this is labeled as an incremental game. It doesn’t feel like one. You just play levels and buy upgrades. The definition of “incremental” seems very loose nowadays. I never had that “this is awesome!” moment that good incremental games usually deliver, like those moments where you have a lot of things earning you cash and upgrades exponentially grow into billions and trillions. It felt more like doing chores and getting basic upgrades through a nodebuster-like tree.

I can’t say I had fun. I never felt like I was accomplishing anything meaningful. There’s no clear objective, just a loop of doing chores to earn money to do more chores. I only kept playing to see what else the game had to offer, not because I was enjoying it.

There’s also no automation. I’m not sure how it would fit into this design, but its absence makes the game feel too manual.

The dark tasks are hard to see when they’re about to expire. Also, when I hover over a task, it darkens in the same way as when it’s expiring. In the heat of the moment, especially when racing against time, this is confusing. I can’t tell whether it’s expiring or just reacting to my cursor. I end up second-guessing and losing time. A progress bar on each task would be much clearer than a flashing animation.

At this point, I don’t want to be assigning tasks manually. I’d rather feel like a manager, where employees automatically pick up tasks and I focus on monitoring their stress, maybe assigning breaks or giving them small perks. Things like buying a coffee machine so they can work faster or for longer, and so on.

You need to find the “fun factor.” It’s not fun or engaging gameplay to manually drag papers from point A to point B over and over again. It would probably be better to focus on making the player feel like a manager who oversees operations and makes macro decisions, like strategically assigning certain employees to handle only difficult tasks, instead of wasting time on micro decisions like assigning tasks one by one.

Hope it helps!

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