In a world stratified by horrible wealth inequality – no, not this one – Sintracorp is the company that reigns supreme. A guy out in the suburbs, Brian Pasternack, is faced with something horrifying… a j*b offer from Sintracorp. He heads on over to his new j*b to face a new layer of Hell… also I guess Brian has to hunt down a Witch.

Yuppie Psycho is a 2019 game by Baroque Decay, chronicling the story of the worst first day possible. It was also elevated into an Executive Edition in 2020, that adds a second route. While I didn’t play that route, I at least watched it to compare to the main game.

Brian “Parnsip” Pasternack’s j*b is like any standard sitcom workplace. You got a weird boss. You got an annoying co-worker. You got a new hire that thinks he’s hot shit. You got a fellow new hire to get along with. Brian tries to adjust to his new workplace and change in social status that feels like it doesn’t matter (more on that later), but most importantly, he has to figure out the job he was hired to do: killing a Witch.

Sintracorp is a workplace comedy-horror where every floor is a bizarre hell that everyone just has to work around. You hear about that story of a warehouse worker dying with employees supposedly being told to work around his death? In Yuppie Psycho, that’s an absolute. There are strange horrors like an HR department of walking mouths that love to spit on employees, a living printer that poisons the people around it, an employee that went postal and attacks people around them with a filing cabinet, and of course, the mundane horror of co-workers trying to get rid of potential competition for growth. And despite all that, people must work. Besides, it’s not as if the company cares, because it could easily find new hires desperate for money.

Allying with the computerized ally Sintra who would absolutely be portrayed as a weird fucked up AI thing if the game was made today, Brian works to uncover the Witch behind it all. Yuppie Psycho is a bit of a standard survival horror adventure, with a corporate brand of esoteric puzzles and limited resources that you need to scrounge up by examining everything. An important resource are Witch Papers, which saves Brian’s soul if he photocopies himself as the game’s save feature. It’s painful if you’re a compulsive saver (though not to the extent of something like Termina), but as long as you’re healthy with saves, you should be safe as long as you’re regularly searching for things.

Yuppie Psycho also plays around with light, as the company clearly hasn’t invested in good lighting. You can have a flashlight, though it sucks up batteries you have to collect. I’m a big stickler for saving things, so I just kept turning the flashlight on and off. You can also get glowsticks, which doesn’t have resource management tied to it but has the obvious downside of not projecting light too far; though, you can place extra glowsticks down on the floor which can be pretty helpful as markers or making large dark spaces easier to navigate. The game also plays around with flashing lights, but the game thankfully has a setting to turn that off if it bothers your eyes. I was real grateful for that. (There’s also apparently a lantern, but I neglected to find it. Fuck it, we ball.)

It was upsetting to sacrifice part of the game’s presentation for my own sake, but that’s just fine because the game’s overall presentation is pretty great. The game’s conveyed with pretty nice pixel art that embraces grimy detail hidden underneath the darkness. Dialogue portraits are anime as fuck (complimentary), and the cutscenes are nice animations that build out of that. Though honestly, my favorite bits of art are the contributions by Suguru Tanaka for an in-game art gallery that’s neat to behold and fits the vibes of a nightmare company flaunting opulence.

Another thing I really liked were the weird VHS tapes that show off short video clips that you analog-horror heads out there would love. The videos were made by an in-game club going by Videoclub Misterio, which was actually a real thing that one of the developers, Francisco Calvelo, was part of. The game contains a link to a YouTube run by in-game character Sosa that has mirrors of the original longer videos of the VHS tapes, which you can find over here because using he in-game link doesn’t work properly. Gotta love technology.

Now, if I had a criticism of Yuppie Psycho, it’s that the game goes all in on the horror of the Witch and the mystery surrounding her, while the corporate horror kinda falls to the side. The world suffers a horrible class divide that’s helped push Brian toward accepting a job with Sintracorp and keeps him from just quitting, but aside from establishing a background for another character that acts as a foil toward Brian, the divide may as well not exist. After a big moment in the story, Brian gets rescued by the union… and then the union just kinda disappears from the story. The disconnect between the plot of the Witch and the company that the Witch haunts is kinda emphasized by the union representative trying to help Brian on completely unrelated problems.

However, after some time away from the game and thinking on it, it makes sense. The economic horrors of Yuppie Psycho is completely detached to that of the Witch, so there’s nothing that Brian can realistically do about it. In fact, the Witch and her curse was arguably brought about because of child trafficking; in the end, the Witch is just a cold and bizarre continuation of what came before. While I think that Yuppie Psycho could have raised more questions about the setting or dialed it back to keep people from wishing for more, it’s sensible. You can’t win everything, so Brian may as well win what he can.

Still, I wish that everything was tied together better and that the stuff with the company didn’t feel completely incidental from the plot that actually matters. I watched footage of the alternate route, and honestly, it didn’t fight my view that much. At the very least, I do respect that the developers added an alternate route, those are always neat.

While the direction of the story could have been more solid, Yuppie Psycho was nice to play through. It’s enjoyable enough, and it surprisingly has a small modding scene to dig into. If you’re into short pixel horrors, this is definitely one to check out.