Approaching the NZ Code booth at PAX Aus, my eyes were immediately drawn to the bright white and pink, cute yet subtle colour scheme of the Middle Management booth. I’d never heard of Middle Management before that Friday morning, but many days after, it became a permanent fixture in the rolodex in my brain.
Middle Management by Headplug Games is a single-player satirical office building and management game where you take on the role of a blob monster, known as “The Manager”, with one overarching goal: please your boss.
The game begins with you, the blob monster, stationed in the middle of an empty office. Your task is simple: please your boss by building healthy relationships with your clients. The only way to do this is to hire new employees who have varying levels of productivity at a base level, which then can be influenced by placing certain items or other employees in the same room or by attaching your tentacle to their brain.
At the beginning of each day, I was prompted to select one of three clients, each who offer different rewards for reaching a quota, as well as bonus rewards for overachieving. But it’s not as simple as choosing the client with the best rewards; a client’s trust level with you can deteriorate if you don’t work with them regularly. There’s a delicate balance I felt like I needed to achieve to push my office building to its full potential.
Upon achieving your quota for the day, rewards can range from additional employees, office furniture, rooms in your office building, tentacles to attach to your workers, and even brain pieces to alter how your employee functions at work. There is a lot to manage here, but it never felt overwhelming to the point where I wanted my brain to be altered by the blob monster.
Placement matters – employees and furniture can come with dynamic effects which can maximise productivity or do the complete opposite. For example, an employee may have an effect called “Hands On”, which will double productivity if the employee is attached to a tentacle, whereas another may have a trait that takes away 1 distraction point from all of the workers in the same room as them. Motivational posters can be placed, which increases the productivity of employees within range. It’s all about managing the office to make it the most productive, ensuring you can maximise output to satisfy your clients.
Lining up to play Middle Management, I saw a handful of different approaches players took to the game. Our friends at GameNight.nz (shoutout to Jayden!), took an approach where less employees and more furniture seemed to work for them. I, on the other hand, decided to build an almost cubicle-like setup where I had many employees within range of a smaller amount of furniture. While the PAX Aus demo is only a slice of the game, I can only imagine how much replayability and how large-scale your office can eventually grow to.
Middle Management is my game of show at PAX Aus 2025. I played it at the very beginning of PAX Aus, and my time with it was stuck with me for the entire weekend.. or maybe that’s just the pink tentacle coming out of my head.
You can wishlist Middle Management on Steam here.
