Think outside the box to escape your worst day at the office in TEST TEST TEST

Megan Bidmead, 29 April 2025

The words 'Welcome Tester' ominously greet you when you boot up TEST TEST TEST for the first time. Playing as an average office employee, you wake up on the floor of your apartment, your phone blaring next to you. It's the mysterious Director. 'It's 11.45, and you just woke up?' they say. It turns out the deadline for the test is today, and you need to bring them three test reports by 12 PM. Or you're fired.

While this sounds like a nightmare many of us have had at some point (or worse, experienced in real life), things quickly turn surreal in TEST TEST TEST. This job comes with a few rules: testers must complete the test, maintain confidentiality, and conduct themselves professionally.

What follows is a series of 15-minute loops, in which you need to leave your apartment, get on the train, arrive at the office, and find all three reports before the deadline. If you're looking for a short-but-sweet headscratcher of a puzzle game, you should give it a try. It's free, after all, and it's a great way to exercise your lateral thinking skills.

'Happy Testing :)'

Of course, it's not possible to do all this within the time frame. Getting to the office takes five minutes on the train, draining your precious time, leaving you with little time to investigate. You can expect to be fired a few times as you run around trying to work out where the reports might be. The office is large and, on the surface, very unhelpful: you have a desk with a computer, but it's locked with a passcode. Some papers in the shredder may be illuminating, but that's about all you'll find at first glance. You'll need to have a proper rummage around, investigating everything from your phone to handwritten notes scattered throughout the game.

If the time runs out, depending on your location, you'll either fall through the world and end up on the floor of your apartment again, get fired, or both. Approaching your bosses without the reports always feels like a daunting experience (which is something of an understatement) even after the fifth, sixth, seventh time. For the sake of the protagonist, it's your job to find these reports and break free from this haunting, oppressive Groundhog Day.

And while we're talking about Groundhog Day, time is a crucial element to watch out for here. You can choose to skip some of it; the chair in your apartment, the train, and the elevator will all offer opportunities for you to fast-forward and watch the clock tick by quicker. You will need to time your actions to progress, listening carefully to any messages left by strangers to point you in the right direction. A notepad and pen will be useful, too. I had a page of scribbled notes by the time I finished my playthrough, with anagrams and decoded passwords and strings of numbers and letters that felt, at first, totally incomprehensible.

Mojiken and Toge Productions are responsible for some incredible games, including A Space for the Unbound (one of my personal favourites). They have a talent for telling incredibly emotional and human stories in their games, and TEST TEST TEST has a bare-bones but interesting message. It's a neat little look at the drudgery of working life, and the message isn't subtle, but it doesn't need to be. Repeating the same working day again and again is, in itself, a bit of a real-life nightmare that most of us have experienced at some point. It starts to feel suffocating, to keep awakening, confused and disoriented, on the protagonist's bedroom floor. Another day, another tiny bit of progress toward a goal you're not sure you even have a personal stake in reaching. 

The length, in this case, feels just right. If you're stuck, it can start to feel maddening having to play the same day again and again, and if the game ticked on any longer, the story elements would need a boost to keep it interesting enough to fire up another day.

TEST TEST TEST incorporates ARG elements into the gameplay, which makes the whole thing feel a little more experimental; for a free game, it has some decent puzzles, and you'll need to use a cipher to find passwords, do some anagrams, and think a little outside of the box. Switching to tabletop games for a second, if you've ever played escape room games by EXIT Games, you'll know what I'm talking about. Sometimes, the box itself is the clue. Sometimes, elements of the game itself are clues. It genuinely stumped me at times, which felt strangely refreshing. Everything you need is there if you look hard enough.