Aperture Desk Job

“Take Your Desk With You”
2022 PC Played on Steam Deck for review.

Valve doesn't make many games anymore, so when one turns up for free, you play it. Aperture Desk Job is a short, free game set in the world of Portal, released to show off what the Steam Deck can do. You don't need a Steam Deck to play it, though. Anyone with a Steam account and 30 minutes can download it today, and at the price of nothing, there's no reason not to.

The premise is simple. You work in an Aperture Science factory that makes toilets. Your job is to inspect them. A chatty robot appears and starts making creative additions to the toilet, each one more ridiculous than the last, until the two of you have built a toilet you're both proud of. You take your great invention up to the head of the company to show it off, and I'll leave the rest for you to discover.

The game opens as a work simulator. You perform a task, then perform it again, then a third time, and you think, "I get it, this is work." Three more times and you still get it. By the tenth repetition it isn't fun anymore. It's bloody work. The joke lands, and then it overstays its welcome. Indika, which I've also been playing, uses the same trick with much better judgement about when to stop.

Everything else is polished. The writing is sharp, the audio direction is excellent, and the gameplay is tight, with not a minute wasted. Judging by the credits, it was made by a small team, and it shows in the best way: it feels like a handful of people with a clear idea rather than a committee.

What makes Aperture Desk Job worth writing about, though, is something my co-host Tom pointed out, and it hadn't occurred to me until he said it. This game is about Valve.

Consider the evidence. A worker on a production line is stuck doing the same job over and over. A creative spark arrives and starts improving the product, getting more and more ambitious. Everywhere you go, the robot reminds you to take your desk with you, and anyone who knows anything about Valve knows its desks famously have wheels, so staff can roll them to whatever project they want to work on. And at the end you present your great creation to the boss: a giant, monolithic, Easter Island-style head, and it all comes to nothing.

Read that way, it's a cry for help, like the hostage who scratches "get me out of here" into his shirt while reading a statement praising his captors. Valve fans aren't the only ones crying out for a new Valve game. Perhaps some of the developers are too.

There's a more cynical reading. Maybe a couple of smart people at Valve thought, "everyone knows about the desks, everyone knows we don't ship games, everyone knows the man at the top is a bit of a monolith, so let's make something the fans will get." Even if that's true, they made something with meaning in it by accident, and that counts.

That's what sets this apart from Valve's other games. Portal is an exceptional puzzle game, and its puzzles hold up to replaying, but its humour has been polished until it means very little. Half-Life has an interesting setting it never really explores. Aperture Desk Job has a personal touch, which is something those games lack, and that personal touch is what I'll remember long after the toilet jokes have faded.

Is it Valve's best game? I said it was the best indication of what Valve is still capable of. Tom says I said it was their best game ever. Having thought about the desks, I'm inclined to agree with the misrepresentation of myself. It's short, it's free, and it's the most honest thing Valve has made in years.

Phil Fogg

7/10

Listen to our thoughts on these podcasts:
Game Under Podcast 155 - My Impressions

Game Under Podcast 156 - Tom’s Impressions