The Dream Office is the latest cut, copy and paste simulation game to throw atop the already gigantic pile. Developed by Nesalis Games and published in collaboration with Free Minds SA, this latest offering to the gods of job simulators does, in fact, go a little beyond the seemingly limited bounds of such games and offers a few nice surprises along the way.

The Dream Office Gameplay

Without much backstory, The Dream Office throws you straight into the genre-mandatory cleaning up stages. During this portion of the game, I was treated to around five minutes of cleaning up any rubbish left by the previous (and quite messy) owners and demolishing their clearly dated office furniture with my trusty sledgehammer.

After this obligatory introduction, I got to work by plastering the walls; cleaning up some suspicious looking stains with a power washer and installing a new floor; bizarrely, by hitting the existing floor with a hammer. Once the office was looking nice and fresh, I was tasked with choosing a color scheme for my new base of operations and selecting some more up-to-date furniture from the extensive catalog of wares.

It has to be said that, at this point, The Dream Office felt like a reskinned, rehashed copy of another hundred plus games that have appeared in recent times. There is a vague business side to what I saw in the demo, but this seems limited to just renting out offices from your office block.

The few surprises that I before mentioned, come in the guise of a business management aspect. Yes, other games of this ilk have some sort of business-building premise, but I particularly enjoyed this in The Dream Office.

A Day in the Life of an Office-Renting Entrepreneur

It turns out that owning a block of offices isn’t as much about the glitz and the glamor as I would have otherwise thought (read sarcasm). You start each day by cleaning up other people’s mess and cleaning the forever appearing dark smudges, before you even have had a chance to have that all-important first coffee of the day.

Once all of the garbage bags have been disposed of, you can finally settle into some work in your life as an office block owner. Make deals with companies and be sure to get the best offer you can on your coveted office spaces. The Dream Office does offer a little more diversity than usually seen in such games. Aside from your bread and butter, the office spaces, you have to shrewdly manage other departments of the every day office building. Fitness facilities, restrooms and even utility rooms offer up their own unique sets of challenges and some real opportunities to make it in the dog-eat-dog world of office space management.

The Dream Office – Graphics

The graphics in The Dream Office are of a similar quality as I have come to expect from the many job simulation games that have come before this. They aren’t of the highest of standards but at least I could tell what was what. The animations seen when completing tasks such as plastering, laying floors and painting are pretty neat but oftentimes they don’t really correlate with what’s actually happening. To give my best example: the plastering animation looks far more like you’re trying to stab the wall with your trowel, as opposed to actually smoothing over the actual plaster, which would have at least been mildly satisfying.

Summary

The Dream Office doesn’t really offer anything in terms of any real innovation or ambition. We have seen the same game regurgitated with a vaguely new skin time and time again. The saddest thing is that it wouldn’t take all that much to make one of these games shine. As it stands, however, The Dream Office doesn’t necessarily mean the dream game. Maybe one day…