We recently saw fun new trivia app DESIGNerd, and there's good news if you're after more design-related fun. The latest offering is Scope Creep, a choose your own adventure game about what happens when you get, well, scope creep, at work.
Created by Wondermake, this interactive game is a pretty dark comedy. It puts you in the shoes of a project manager, trying to navigate what turns out to be a cursed brief. The game starts off by telling you that "you feel normal", as it outlines a range of scenarios including impossible deadlines, betrayals and horror of horrors, a broken coffee machine.
After each scenario, you are given three possible reactions to it. Which will you choose? Whatever you pick leads you onto a different strand of the next adventure.
As you progress through sprints, you become, the game tells you, increasingly upset. I made it to "stressed" and then "erratic".
In terms of aesthetics, the game has an '80s horror, Stranger Things, type vibe. It comes complete with atmospheric sound and fun animations that challenge your decisions.
There are 40 highly relatable creative scenarios to contend with, and the choice of options mean you get over 160 possible encounters and eight possible endings. Every decision shapes the tone of your journey and the ending consists of a final tarot reading that reveals the cause of your downfall (mine was to do with my soul).
"Scope Creep started as a joke between deadlines and slowly became something much darker. It’s a satire of creative work that got a little too real," says Jonny Gibson, creative director.
"We wanted to turn the shared trauma of project management into something playful, to make people laugh at the madness rather than be consumed by it. It’s a cautionary tale about how good ideas can die by a thousand amends, and how the process itself can start to feel haunted. Ultimately, the result is so often out of your hands."
Part of the reason the game works so well is its relatable scenarios. "We wanted The Scope Creep to feel fearfully familiar," says design director, Josh Gowen. "The way a client email can read so politely, but cause a rising existential dread.
"Every line is something you've either written, read, or had nightmares about. So much of creative work is about control, but this experience takes that away from you. It forces you to surrender to the chaos, which might be the most accurate simulation of a creative project ever made."
The project was created in-house by Wondermake and is the studio's most ambitious self-initiated release so far. Additional tarot artwork and a limited-edition launch poster were created by illustrator Ollie Hoff.
Inevitably, during the making of the project, elements of it crept into real life. “Ironically, the project became the very thing we were parodying," admits Sam Bedingfield, technical director.
“We rebuilt it twice and rewrote it three times as the ideas and features kept piling up. It got so cursed we actually put it down for six months. In the end, we stripped it back to the MVP version you see today and finally launched it simply just to lift the hex.”
To play the game, visit the Scope Creep website.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
