Yuppie Psycho was on my radar for one main reason. The composer for the soundtrack, Michael “Garoad” Kelly, also composed for VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action, one of my favourite games of 2016. There’s also the fact that it’s a mishmash of many genres I enjoy. If you want survival horror, puzzles, riddles, or adventure, Yuppie Psycho has all of that waiting for you and more.
You take the role of Brian Pasternack, not to be confused with Harry Potter despite his tousled black hair and glasses (which aren’t on his in-game character sprite for some reason). He’s been brought in by Sintracorp with a lucky golden ticke- I mean job offer. Immediate and permanent promotion from class G to class A, alongside a generous salary of 10,000 credits a day are promised in return for one simple job responsibility. Kill the Witch.
I loved this concept as a driving force for the story. It’s shrouded in mystery and leads you on a winding tale through the history of the company and the family behind it. It also entirely explains the misshapen monsters hiding in the building’s many dimly lit hallways and ravaged office blocks. While in real life you’re unlikely to die on your first day, in Yuppie Psycho, you’ll be lucky to survive it. Brian is a weedy guy, and his health drops significantly when attacked by giant printer monstrosities or crazed men with filing cabinets strapped to their backs. Fortunately you can gather resources to make such delightful healing remedies as coffee or a cheese sandwich, much like Resident Evil‘s herb system.
Also like Resident Evil, you have a limited supply of save items. Scattered around are some handy photocopiers, which when activated with an ink cartridge will allow you to “photocopy your soul” onto a piece of witch paper (assuming you have one) to save your progress. This can be loaded from the pause menu or upon death so that you don’t have to start from scratch every time, and is the only method of saving your game. While it does add a nice element of resource management and tension to the game, it’s also a pain when you have to sit through the same cut-scene for the fifth time because you keep dying afterwards and being sent back to the photocopier. There was one instance where the game auto-saved after a major event, but that seemed to be the exception that proved the rule. I did find myself running extremely low on witch paper by the end of the game too which proved to be quite annoying as the game has multiple endings to find.
What wasn’t annoying though, was the puzzles. I loved them. They were clever, interesting, and fun to the last. Not once did I find myself brute-forcing my way through or floundering for a solution, as keen observation of your surroundings and a desire to explore everything will carry you through the game very easily. If you don’t check every drawer and every desk though, expect to run low on healing supplies or miss key items entirely. I’m lucky that I’m obsessive about seeing everything, cause otherwise I’m sure I would have ended up lost somewhere along the line. As an example, there’s one point where you need to sneak sedatives to an owl on the eighth floor (as you do). These sedatives are obtained in a room on the fifth floor that was locked earlier in the game, but is suddenly open now. If I didn’t have them already I’m not sure the game would have had a hint ready for me, cause unlike the owls in Zelda, this one wasn’t generous with directions. It’s a good job navigation is made easy by the elevator.
The only thing I’ve failed to cover so far is the horror part of Yuppie Psycho. I was relieved to find it quite tame as the pixel-art style, while extremely gorgeous, doesn’t lend itself that well to full-on immersion. Still, the use of darkness to build atmosphere was spot on, and the flashlight you obtain only lighting the direction you’re facing in a narrow beam was a stroke of genius. Not being able to light the corners of the screen is fine in the tight corridors, but it makes open-plan office spaces all the more terrifying. I almost wish that batteries weren’t so plentiful or that the torch drained faster to make it even more tense when you’re crawling through a dark room with only the torch to light the way.
And while the visuals don’t always work for the horror part, they work perfectly for the more comedic cut-scenes and office interactions. And my god, the pixel-art clips are amazing. It’s like anime, but pixels! I can only guess as to how many frames of pixel-art they had to draw for them, but it was so worth it cause they absolutely shine and I’m so glad you can re-watch them from the main menu at will.
Oh and of course, the soundtrack. I’m delighted to say that Garoad has hit it out the park again. The themes in the safe spaces of the game (of which there may be a few too many if I’m being honest) are jazzy and upbeat, and the intense drones of the horror tracks are, well, intense. There are undercurrents of VA-11 Hall-A in there for sure, but with the corporate elevator music vibe dialled up to 11. I’m not a musician so I can’t deliver an in-depth technical analysis, but I can say that I think it’s a really, really good soundtrack.
Honestly, there’s not much else I can say about Yuppie Psycho without spoiling things. I was entirely engrossed by it the whole time I played and quickly fell in love with its sense of humour, its bizarre setting, and its cast of semi-believable characters. There were a few teething issues with the CPU usage steadily rising till the music cut out in longer play sessions, but I hope that bug will be addressed in a patch soon cause I’m absolutely going to be searching for the achievements I missed. I’ve not had my fill of Yuppie Psycho just yet, and I’m more than happy to recommend that others give it a whirl themselves.
A digital copy of Yuppie Psycho for Steam was provided by the developer.
Check out Yuppie Psycho on Steam here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/597760/Yuppie_Psycho/