A former Homeworld dev has made a free browser game that plays like an ultraviolent Office Space sequel
You can play Rising Up in about fifteen minutes, possibly during company time
Rising Up is a free, sub-fifteen minute browser game that’s a bit like Streets of Rage, where you play a balding office worker and beat a giant scanner to death within the first 30 seconds. This, I believe, should be enough to tempt you into dunking it enthusiastically into your next break coffee, but if you need more convincing, let’s do it.
Created by E.H Jørgensen, whose credits include Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, Rising Up is a relatively simple 3 button side scroller that has you make your way up an office building, destroying everything in your path. First, irate co-workers wield swivel chairs. Then, security join the fray. Then some sort of G-men get involved. You can punch, block, jump, and air-kick. The brawling is simple but satisfying enough, and the way office equipment violently degrades when hit is better, but this isn’t why I’m recommending the game.
I was going to write that Rising Up had ‘really good pixel art’ but after thinking about it for a while, I realised this wasn’t what I was trying to say. What the game actually made me feel was closer to: ‘This is a really good piece of art delivered through the medium of pixels’. Punching aside, I’d say Rising Up hits more like an experimental short film. The sense of escalating chaos as you progress, alongside the camera trickery and details, culminates in a wonderfully bizarre ending that at once makes me want a full release but also need this exact tempo to be preserved in perpetuity.
Two weeks into the only proper office job I’ve ever held - a call centre - I sat down at my desk one morning, started work, and was soon interrupted by various manager type people asking me to empty my pockets and give them access to my locker. I didn’t have a locker at the time, and I don’t think I had anything in my pockets either. They chilled out and walked off after a bit, and I didn’t really think much of it. Later I went to the loo and realised a small white dot of toothpaste had dried and stuck to my inner left nostril, which I imagine they assumed was cocaine.
It did feel vaguely violating and dystopian in a ‘surrendering of bodily autonomy upon entering a designated space kind of way’, but I mainly found it quite funny. I quit after a few months, but if I’d stayed there for years, I’d probably want to punch a scanner to death too. You can find Rising Up on Itch here.