Flat Eye Review

Flat Eye, from the start I can tell you, is a strange game. But weird in a good way

Flat Eye, I describe it this way, is a post-apocalyptic store management sim where you obey every whim of a corporate AI to run a state-of-the-art store in Iceland.

It’s a game full of politics, mostly as a kind of socio-political musings, anti-consumer themes and a very strong opinion and without any kind of subtlety about the world we live in now. However, it is not something as intelligent or forceful as its developer thinks it is.

There’s an air from the moment you start the game that someone set out to make a brave, cutting-edge study of the horrors of the Great Corporation. Flat Eye tells us that we are all just commodities and those in power don’t really care about us, etc. It’s certainly a worthy goal, but it’s not exactly lifting the curtain on something we didn’t know about. A warning suggests some troubling revelations await us, and there’s talk of potentially disturbing topics like suicide, climate change, and gender politics, but, truth be told, there’s little truly shocking in this game.

A story accompanies your first days as the manager of the Icelandic store, but it will take some time to piece together, and once you do, it’s a bit absurd. It may or may not involve time travel and shady behind-the-scenes goings-on at EyeLife, the global store that controls your life now.

This is a game that minute by minute is somehow incredibly busy and strangely relaxing. You see customers come and go, you need to instruct the store clerk to work the register, maintain and repair modules and power supplies, restock shelves and dispensaries, and deal with “Premium Customers”. As you progress through the game, you unlock new modules and machinery that can automate aspects of the job. There are mirrors that take biometric readings from customers, smart cash registers with artificial intelligence, a host of technological features.

Every new installation requires power, a network connection, or both, while some provide these as well. It will be entirely up to you to manage the electrical network and keep everything operational.

Without a doubt, this is where Flat Eye stands out. The store management element is hectic enough to keep you focused, but has relaxing breaks from time to time where you can get things done.

Yes, you will need to manage your employee’s time, at the level of break time, among other things, this will directly affect their happiness and therefore their productivity. They will also need training to avoid workplace accidents that end their day early and reduce their important income.

If they die or quit, which happens from time to time, you have to hire a replacement and start over. Each day it offers two or three random challenges, which gives it a touch of originality and makes it less predictable.

Before each work day, you can use your desktop to browse various corporate websites, assign training or pay raises for your employees. These conversations are always overloaded with subtext, none of which is subtle enough to be fully effective. Those are the extremely boring moments of the game.

There’s an underperforming worker who asks for advice and bemoans his lack of success, a cocky supervisor who doesn’t respect workers, and so you get caught up in a whole host of problems/situations. They do nothing but annoy.

And finally, there we have this AI, which appears to be using EyeLife as a way to analyze, study, and ultimately control humanity.

Communication is quite rare: no one talks like human beings talk. Once again, these are reflections on the human condition, and you will have to choose the correct answers.

The different characters you interact with. few of these characters are likable, relatable, or believable. The only one that really comes close to any of these is a mascot from a rival store dressed as a pink hippo.

Either way, talking to them is the only way to progress the story and discover the sinister truths behind EyeLife.

Flat Eye’s deliberately sterile aesthetic is striking, invoking the feeling that the people wandering through his store are really just faceless consumers. The detail to the graphical effects is quite limited, as it definitely does not seem to interest the developer.

In conclusion

Flat Eye is not without its ideas or occasional charms, but in trying so blatantly to be defiant and provocative, the developers may have gone overboard. It’s best when it comes to a store management sim, but it often stumbles with its clumsy attempts at social commentary.

This review was made thanks to a copy for Steam provided by Raw Fury