Welcome back to GreenSpace! 

We are so          to have you back.

• It's a new year at GreenSpace, the company that you work at.
• You are a Performance Optimizer, in charge of Optimizing Performance.

Controls and Features:

This video game has controls and features, which feature prominently in the game and you can use to control the game. Important information is listed below:

• Work your 8-7!
• Drive to work! Steer with A and D on your company-authorized keyboard.  Everything else can be controlled with your company-authorized mouse.
• Shift paradigms and drive to work using the left and right arrow keys instead!
• Fill, stamp, staple, and drop off optimization potentialities for future actualization!
  
• Check your email and perform Tasks to hit your quota!
• Design innovative, resilient presentations to integrate our culture with the maximization of shareholder value!
• Authorize optimization potentialities for actualization! 
• Manage synergy, optimization and efficiency to synergistically and efficiently   optimize your performance!
• Talk to your coworkers!
• Work your 8-7!

Credits:

All art, code, and sound assets are originally drawn, programmed and recorded.

Fonts: 

digital-7 by Sizenko Alexander, Style-7 -- http://www.styleseven.com -

Moirest -- https://www.fontspace.com/moirest-font-f117641

NOTE: It is highly recommended by Upper Management that the rest of this is not read until employees are authorized, veteran Performance Actualizers (have beaten the game). This behavior is in line with our core competencies and ensures a resilient risk-management strategy that is forward-thinking and future-focused, yet also prepared for the path ahead. However, we can not verify authorized clearance. Act at your own discretion. Scroll to the very bottom quickly to download the game with no risk of redacted content.

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GreenSpace, LLC (All Rights Reserved) is an anti-cozy game, an Uncomfortable Game. We focused on the ideals of a cozy game:

• Connection to people
• Connection to nature
• Relaxed pace, low stakes
• A feeling of control
• Progress feels good, learning more about the game feels good, power feels good
• Hints of drama and tension to resolve into greater coziness
• Simplicity to understand, a clear feeling of cause-effect in your labor (you know why you're doing what you're doing at both a micro and macro level. Cutting a tree removes an obstacle, making it easier to build things. This is intuitive and satisfying)
• No harsh consequences, nothing that can be reversed, no "failure"

We sought to make a game that reverses as many of these as possible, narratively and mechanically.

• Disconnection from people: You lose friendships over time, conversations regress from natural and flowing to awkward icebreakers
• Disconnection from nature: there is almost no nature to see in the entire game, and the narrative is about the conquering of nature, not coexistence
• Manic feeling, high stakes: Some days, it's impossible to complete all your tasks. You are getting a constant performance review every day, and people are getting laid off all around you... will you, too?
• A lack of control: Tasks are not quantitatively or qualitatively clear, ever. It is not explained how to optimize Synergy, Efficiency and Optimization at any point on purpose, as the player is intended to be in constant fear of metrics they don't understand.
• Progress feels bad, learning more feels bad, power feels bad: Your promotion, when you understand the gravity of your work, has dire consequences. Information you're given early in the game gets contextualized into much direr circumstances
• Hints of coziness to later reinforce the unease: The writing is humorous, the satire sharp. There are elements of the audio and art that are intended to be funny in their absurdity (or overwhelming mundanity).
• Arcane, with a lack of cause-effect: For most of the game, you do not know why you are doing what you're doing, in-narrative and out-of-narrative. Our text at the top is intended to be unhelpful outside of the most fundamental pieces of information for the game, specifically to stand out and make you uncomfortable. 
• Harsh consequences, nothing is reversible, failure: People are suffering, projects are being undertaken narratively that cannot be changed. You cannot edit your slides once you've designed them, you cannot un-mark your grids. Everything is final, and your judgment will be rendered as such.

In terms of art assets, there is a clear distinction between people you know and strangers. Slowly, friends disappear and only more Corporate Memphis-style losers are left (until there are barely any of them, either).

In terms of audio, as people disappear from the office, so too do the sounds, with only mechanical hums and grating lighting remaining. NPC sounds are inhuman, nonsensical in the way cozy games often are, except less comforting.

In terms of mechanics, you repeat tasks constantly. You have to drive to work almost every day. Your responsibilities do not dramatically shift most days. You are beholden to the routine, the world is not beholden to you.

REDACTED GAME SECRETS BELOW 

(VIEW AT YOUR OWN RISK, DEFINITELY DO NOT VIEW BEFORE COMPLETING GAME)

• The performance metrics are literally borderline arbitrary and do not matter. The score you get at the end of each day is random within ranges depending on how "well" you do.

• You cannot lose, your performance is irrelevant. Dialogue choices in water cooler conversations also result in the same answer every time. You do not have agency.
  • This is to the point that the driving "minigame" literally doesn't matter outside of storytelling. You can't crash, nothing can happen. The internal codename for this section was "Desert Bus."

• We almost named our energy company "GreenMountain" before discovering that that exists already, actually. We make no claims about if they are evil or not, but it is a genuine coincidence that they prominently feature newly-constructed solar panels on their website. That wasn't discovered until this page was written near the end of development.
• The "Lithuanian Prince" being named "Woraso" is a reference to John Warosa, from the iconic Atomic Shrimp scambaiting series.
• The suburban houses only being white farmhouses with black trim is in "tribute" to the current trend in Chicagoland suburbia mass-abode-production.
• One of the team members is in a relationship with someone whose job is "Performance Optimizer," getting paid real American dollars to Optimize Performance.

^ Safety Space for no spoilers ^