Have you ever wondered what it feels like to work for a shady megacorporation? Look no further than corporate simulation CorpoNation: The Sorting Process. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
CorpoNation The Sorting Process Review Overview
What is CorpoNation The Sorting Process?
CorpoNation: The Sorting Process is a dystopian simulation game where you live the life of Max, a newly employed probationary lab technician for the giant conglomerate CorpoNation. You will spend your days working in CorpoNation’s facility, where you can shop for items to customize your room, play games to unwind, read the news, and most importantly, work hard and give it 110%. There will be others that will attempt to recruit you to go rogue, but CorpoNation trusts you to work diligently and put your money back into the economy. Remember, "Work is Dignity," and you’ve only just begun.
CorpoNation The Sorting Process features:
⚫︎ Pixel shaded aesthetic with big, contrasting visuals
⚫︎ Dystopian corporate setting that talks about exploiting workers
⚫︎ Gameplay consists of memorizing and sorting images, patterns, etc.
⚫︎ Player customization in the form of room customization, avatar customization, and more.
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about CorpoNation The Sorting Process's gameplay and story.
 CorpoNation The Sorting Process |
|||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Steam |
 Xbox |
 Switch |
|||
CorpoNation The Sorting Process Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Decent Visuals Interesting Narrative and World Building "Pointless" Thematic Progression |
Story Moves at a Snail’s Pace Awkward Control Scheme Difficulty Ramps Up Quickly Gameplay Becomes "Pointless" |
CorpoNation The Sorting Process Overall - 70/100
With a linear dystopian narrative of living the life of a low-level employee, the game drives home the reality of working for a company that’s designed to give you the illusion of having a work-life balance. It’s a slow-burn narrative that wears you out with the routine of working day in and day out, which eventually comes to a head with an anticlimactic ending. It’s an amazing story paired with decent eye-catching visuals and mind-numbing music that all work together to showcase a dystopian future.
CorpoNation The Sorting Process Story - 9/10
It’s a slow moving narrative that crawls when introducing you to the different characters and factions in the game. Because of the slow pace, it may be said that the other aspects could suffer, as you would want to get through the days faster. Whether it was intended to make the narrative move at a snail’s pace or not, the game moves too slowly to keep you interested in keeping your perfect performance. Regardless, the narrative and the theme is the main reason of why you would want to play the game, as the other core elements lend itself into making a great overall story.
CorpoNation The Sorting Process Gameplay - 6/10
The game is similar to simulation games like Papers, Please, Lil’ Guardsman, Death and Taxes, and more. It’s a simple memorization sorting game that gradually ramps up in difficulty as there’ll be more variants of images, patterns, and numbers to memorize and sort through while dealing with different conditions depending on what the manager says. After a few hours, it becomes clear that a lot of what you're doing is pointless and unrewarding, which is good thematically, but not good for the player. Also, the control scheme, especially for the Switch joycons, makes it harder than it has to be.
CorpoNation The Sorting Process Visuals - 7/10
The pixelated visuals are nothing new, but the use of contrasting colors with a limited color palette makes the game decent to look at. It looks right at home in the Nintendo Switch, and it may honestly be its intended platform to be on for a simulation game like this.
CorpoNation The Sorting Process Audio - 7/10
The music is certainly interesting; it’s both catchy and eerie at the same time. Slowly, the music starts to become mind-numbingly repetitive, and even the jingles in the elevator start to become annoying because of the game’s slow pace. If it was intentional to make it that way, then the devs have definitely succeeded, as the music is still something that’s in my head even after this review.
CorpoNation The Sorting Process Value for Money - 6/10
For $14.99, the game’s linear narrative gives you around 10 hours worth of content, depending on your willingness to maximize every day in a playthrough. It’s a decent purchase, but the pacing and lack of replayability might turn you off more than what makes the game interesting.
CorpoNation The Sorting Process Review: What Work-Life Balance?
With eye-catching pixels, an interesting premise, and the promise of the perfect corporate lifestyle, the game definitely caught my attention. While I’m not the biggest fan of simulation games, I do enjoy a fair share of them with Lil’ Guardsman and Papers, Please. To be perfectly honest, CorpoNation could very well be a capitalist version of the latter, and it does a pretty damn good job at it. The main thoughts that I encountered during my experience were that persistence wears down resistance and the satirical portrayal of corporate greed.
We’ll talk about the gameplay later, but we’ll first address both the visuals and the audio of the game. The game’s visuals are pretty good, and the pixel art style mixed with high contrast colors is decent enough to keep me interested. If anything, it’s kind of unnerving that the mascot, Ringo the Raccoon, is animated so well. The music is catchy, then becomes very mind numbing after a few hours in the game. This leads us to how the game’s theme bleeds into everything.
So for most of the aspects, like the visuals, gameplay, and audio, you will see everything through Max’s eyes. The colors, the work, and the music are all foreign at the start, and when you start getting used to it, it becomes dull and boring. The whole thing about Max being in the company is that little by little, you are exposed to the reality of what CorpoNation truly is. They don’t really dissuade this message either, as from the trailers alone, you already know something is wrong with the company.
Thematically speaking, the game is perfect. It succeeds in making the routine monotonous and boring while keeping you interested in the story. Everything lends itself to the dystopian narrative that the game is showing you, in a fictional setting where a corporation succeeds in creating mindless workers that they are able to exploit and profit from. The game will give you subtle ideas of what CorpoNation does little by little, and you’ll start to get ideas of what really happens behind the scenes.
This is why I liked the game, mostly because of the narrative and the theme that they adamantly show off. It’s an unforgiving company that "rewards" hard work by giving you more to spend on THEIR products. I don’t know if it was intentional to make the player feel like the work was "pointless" by the time you get to the halfway point of the game, you feel as if the routine will be tiring and that doing the daily amount of work even outside of work (pertaining to reading the newsletters, the co-worker messages, and the gaming) is not worth doing.
This is where I don’t like the game. Everything just leads to portraying the narrative, and it becomes unfun. The game offers you different ways to spend your hard-earned money, which are paying the bills, buying new furniture and decorations for your living space, and getting a high rank in the company game which is pay-to-win. While these are good offerings, reading into the theme makes the gameplay pointless. It may as well have been a visual novel, as the gameplay doesn’t reward the player, similar to how CorpoNation doesn’t really reward its workers.
All in all, CorpoNation: The Sorting Process is more of a narrative experience than a game that you’d like to play continuously. The routine starts to get to you, and the gameplay starts to feel pointless, similar to how the narrative is structured. It’s perfect in how it honors the theme and story that it wants to tell, but the gameplay starts to suffer, especially when there’s no point in playing the game. If this was intentional by the dev team to make you feel like a corporate slave that slowly realizes the futility of it all, then they have completely succeeded and deserve their flowers for making me feel the same feelings I had when I was working a job that I didn't want to do a few years back.
Pros of CorpoNation The Sorting Process
| Things CorpoNation The Sorting Process Got Right |
|---|
|
Decent Visuals Interesting Narrative and World Building "Pointless" Thematic Progression |
Decent Visuals
Using a pixelated aesthetic paired with a monochromatic color palette isn’t necessarily groundbreaking, but the way the game uses blue and red primarily is definitely eye-catching. Most of the company-related things are colored blue with the rogue organization being a stark contrast to the image of the company. The contrast will be a welcome addition when you start getting used to the company’s dark and dreary colors, as it could be tiring to look at the same blue screens after a few in-game weeks at work.
Interesting Narrative and World Building
With the use of the corporate setting and based on the game’s premise alone, it’s expected that the company is evil. However, it goes even deeper than that. It’s not just that they exploit the workers in the company, but they’ve successfully taken over as the greatest corporate nation for 100+ years. It’s all in bits and pieces, but the way the game constantly reminds you to look at their own news blog, "unwind" using their company-licensed games where your choices are either a pay-to-win fighter or a game of solitaire that’s repurposed to be like your everyday work.
Moreover, the use of the different co-workers you’ll be chatting with after every shift is amazing. You get to see their priorities and you can’t help but feel like it’s familiar because you could be encountering the same people. For some, you get to see their descent into the dreary lifestyle, where they ultimately get "reassigned" after violating certain rules. In the late run of your playthrough, you even get to see the main character’s behavior changing as well due to the events of the game. It’s a great use of the bleak reality that they’re living, and you get to experience it through the eyes of a low-level employee who starts to doubt whatever it is he’s been doing for days.
"Pointless" Thematic Progression
CorpoNation controls every aspect of your life. You’re constantly being reminded to give back to the economy by spending your hard-earned credits in the company’s online store and to unwind by playing the company’s games. Maybe you’ll start buying items to liven up the mood in your room by buying decorations, bedding, or maybe a radio to be able to listen to something else. Keep in mind that even the living amenities are something that you pay for; you’re paying for your cubicle, food, and even maintenance. It’ll soon start to appear that you’re merely giving the money you earn from the company straight back to them, and to be honest, the way this was done by slowly drip-feeding you bits and pieces about the company is done well.
Cons of CorpoNation The Sorting Process
| Things That CorpoNation The Sorting Process Can Improve |
|---|
|
Story Moves at a Snail’s Pace Awkward Control Scheme Difficulty Ramps Up Quickly Gameplay Becomes "Pointless" |
Story Moves at a Snail’s Pace
The story is paced by five working days, totaling up to ten weeks to end the quarter. There are times when the game just moves too slowly to progress, making each day going through work agonizing. While it could be said that the drip-feeding of story segments and chats is intentional, there are some days where nothing happens at all, even at the height of where the story starts to become exciting. It’s a case where the tale starts to overstay its welcome and the gameplay becomes a little too mundane to bear.
Awkward Control Scheme
Playing this game on the Switch joycons is definitely not a good way to play it. It’s awkward to say the least, maybe even going so far as to say that it’s unplayable. Luckily, the Switch allows for touch controls which makes it better, but it seems like the consideration to play it on a controller wasn’t really considered as much when it was ported.
Difficulty Ramps Up Quickly
By the third week, you’ll have more things to memorize, and the weeks after that, the sorting only gets harder from then on. The number of conditions and things to remember becomes overwhelming, and you will start to either make mistakes or slow down. If you care enough about the amount of credits you earn as well as the performance review to really give it your all, then this may become an issue. However, the longer you go through the game, the more you’ll realize the game really isn’t made for you to get perfect marks across the board.
Gameplay Becomes "Pointless"
Connecting the ramping difficulty and the thematic progression, the gameplay becomes pointless, as the sole purpose of being interested is only the slow-moving narrative. The other aspects in the game start to serve no purpose, like the state-approved games, work, customizing your room, and more. I appreciate the theme of making it pointless to do anything as it just contributes to the company’s greed, but as a game, it becomes pointless to play it other than beelining it to the end.
Is CorpoNation The Sorting Process Worth It?
Wait for a Sale Before Signing Your Life Away
CorpoNation: The Sorting Process is definitely a good game, but it’s not for everyone. The gameplay isn’t overly interesting, as it’s basically just you sorting different things in the right order to earn currency to waste on pointless things. We recommend waiting for a sale before signing on the dotted line, as this might mean you’d be wasting your life in an inescapable work situation.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam |
Xbox |
Switch |
|||
| $12.99 | $14.59 | $14.99 | |||
CorpoNation The Sorting Process FAQ
Can I Play CorpoNation: The Sorting Process with a Controller?
Yes. However, the control scheme isn’t very convenient, and it’s not exactly responsive to certain commands. It would be better to play this game on a mouse and keyboard.
You may also like...
CorpoNation The Sorting Process Product Information
| |
| Title | CORPONATION: THE SORTING PROCESS |
|---|---|
| Release Date | February 22, 2024(PC) May 9 (Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch) |
| Developer | Canteen |
| Publisher | Playtonic Friends |
| Supported Platforms | PC(Steam), Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch |
| Genre | Simulation |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| Rating | ESRB T |
| Official Website | CorpNation: The Sorting Process Official Website |
