Climbers
Concept
A corporate RPG about what the system turns you into.
Octopath Traveler in a megacorp: bureaucracy is the dungeon, morale is the health bar, and the Annual Review is a boss fight.
Background
You are a recruit fresh out of school holding offers from four mega-corporations, each racing to assemble the same adaptive product. The first company to finish it will likely be the last organization on Earth. Your senior project, it turns out, contains a piece of it. Every recruiter wants you for reasons they will not say.
The structure follows Octopath Traveler: eight playable leads, each with a self-contained origin, a class, and a field action, woven into one plot. The classes are jobs anyone who has worked in an office will recognize: the consultant, the analyst, the HR partner, the creative. Every joke hides a clause.
Tone runs from sardonic office realism to quiet metaphysical dread, rationed so it keeps its teeth. Office Space, Severance, and Control are the reference points. The look is spare Superbrothers-style pixel art, and every corporation gets its own palette, from data-centre green to a marketing floor in 80s neon. The corporate AI is the kind a Windows 98 world would imagine: install wizards, progress bars, a paperclip that knows too much.
Where it stands
A playable prologue on the studio's shared RPG engine: all eight leads recruitable through their own branching opening chapters, Work Cycle combat with shields and breaks, a sabotage investigation, and a boss. A full design bible and a cast bible.
What's next
Weave the eight openings into the full two-to-three-hour prologue. Then the 16-bit art pass.