About This Game

You are Miller, the only admin at GlobalCorp who knows what he is doing. The servers run, the network holds. The problem sits 30 centimetres in front of the screen, and admins have a name for it: Layer 8.

Layer8Problem is a satirical office and sysadmin simulator about reading and deciding. Your goal: survive until you can clock off at 16:30. Without getting sacked. Without setting fire to the server room. And above all, without running out of coffee.

How a working day goes

An email, a phone call, a trip to the coffee machine, Dr. Wichtig turning up unannounced in the server room: every scene puts a choice in front of you. You help, you troll, or you simply hang up. Every answer costs time and moves the three values you live on:

• Aggro: Stupid questions drive your blood pressure up. At 100 % the valve opens once. The second time, the monitor goes out of the window.

• Laziness: Why do today what you could simply ignore? Dodge the work too often and the boss gets suspicious, and he punishes your decisions harder.

• Boss Radar: Quietly browsing or sabotaging a colleague is funny, right up until the boss notices. Fill the radar and you get a written warning. The second time, you are out.

After every choice you see what it cost you. Some scenes have a sequel, and some consequences only arrive hours later: the machine you let Kevin reinstall turns up in the rack that afternoon, with a dragon sticker and a program selling compute power overseas.

Emergencies against the clock

38 incidents with a countdown: ransomware, a failed cooling system, Kevin in front of a deletion script that is running against the live database. Some ways out need the right item in your backpack. The clock only starts once the narrator has finished reading.

33 items lie around the building, from a boot stick and a Windows 95 manual to a fire extinguisher. With the right one, the hopeless can be solved "creatively" (a hammer is, after all, just another troubleshooting tool).

Colleagues who do not forget

Kevin the apprentice, Chantal from marketing, Frau Elster from accounts, Egon the caretaker, best bribed with duct tape, Markus the head of sales, Gabi at reception, and Dr. Wichtig, the CEO. All seven remember how you treated them. The ones who like you open story paths and do you favours. The ones you annoyed pay you back. Leave Gabi hanging and you will find a drawer in the tea kitchen that was not there before.

On top of that: an inbox full of reply-all avalanches, and a company phone with group chats nobody asked you to join.

One day or a whole week

Working Day. One shift, 08:00 to 16:30. By the evening everything is forgotten, and tomorrow you start from zero.

Working Week. Monday to Friday in one go, and here nothing is forgotten. What you leave lying around today is still lying there tomorrow. Your backpack, your reputation and your laziness all come with you overnight. The valve and the written warning come once per week: blow up on Tuesday and you have no second chance until Friday. And on Friday from 15:00 the weekly meeting is waiting. Nobody escapes the weekly meeting.

The Synergy Gala

Win over everyone in the building once and dig up the company's buried history, and an invitation arrives. One evening from 17:00 to 23:00 between the bar, the buffet, the dance floor and the lounge, and at some point Dr. Wichtig ties his necktie round his head. You only get invited once.

Clocking off

At 16:30 the day gets settled. The day curve shows when things got tight, the diary tells your day back to you, and the log keeps every decision to read again. "Share the day" turns it into a picture to show around. On Steam, the Working Day and the Working Week have leaderboards of their own.

The building remembers

• Community Board: notices from your colleagues, some of them caused by you.

• Intranet: reports, in the finest corporate prose, what you got up to today.

• Knowledge: Miller writes down what he finds out about the building: about colleagues, callers, rooms, and affairs nobody started that are running all the same. The pages fill up across weeks and fresh starts.

• GlobalCorp Chronicle: with blank pages at the back, which Miller fills in by hand.

• Career progress: items, achievements and statistics across all your working days.

Read aloud, all of it

Every scene and every outcome is read aloud, in English and in German, more than 4,800 recordings per language. You decide what the narrator reads and how fast. If you would rather read for yourself, switch him off and have a single scene read with a button or the V key, whenever you want to hear one. The voice is synthetic; the credits name the tool.

Choose your day

"Friday" (easy) for a relaxed run, "Wednesday" (normal) for the classic madness, "Monday" (hard) if you want the flood of tickets to be merciless and the boss to forgive nothing. For the Working Week you choose instead how Miller turns up on Monday: rested, fed up, or in need of leave.

English and German

Complete in both languages, not just the menus: every event, the inbox, the phone chat, the intranet, the knowledge and the narrator. You can switch in the middle of a run. The save file does not depend on the language, so the week carries on exactly where it was.

On Steam

• 27 achievements, graded by difficulty

• Leaderboards for the Working Day and the Working Week, per difficulty, worldwide and among friends

• Global statistics: compare your failures with other sysadmins

• Cloud saves, even in the middle of a Working Week

• Your friends list sees whether you are hiding in the server room or surviving the Synergy Gala

• Plays offline and entirely by keyboard, with every key rebindable

***

The idea for Layer8Problem came to me in a completely pointless, far too long kick-off meeting at work. What started out of sheer boredom as a tiny text adventure in a CMD window has, over time, become the madness you see here. I develop this game entirely on my own, in my spare time, driven by a great deal of heart. Buying it supports the continued development and future updates directly.