While I suppose I can understand why developers use simulation-style environments and mechanics for their games, giving them more of a realistic feel of sorts, I wish they were generally implemented more effectively. In the case of walking simulators, where there’s more limited interactivity with the environment and objects in it, you can get away with less precise and usable controls, but if you plan to have people needing to interact with things it’s easy for frustrations to set in more often than not.

Conceptually, There's a Gun in the Office has a decent hook, with you being held captive in a relatively small space, and trying to do what it takes to escape. Every day your captors will need to leave for a brief window of time, giving you the opportunity to work through a variety of problems and puzzles in order to continue to gain access to new rooms and tools that can help you. The challenge is that before your kidnappers return you’ll need to very carefully be sure to put everything you’ve picked up and used, or simply interacted with, back in the place and the state it started in… and that’s where the game’s sense of urgency and sometimes panic will set in, hopefully providing the motivation to keep coming back.

The problem is that doing all of this with a controller can be fumbly at best, and when you pair that with a few other quirks it can make for an aggravating time. While I appreciate that the precise placement of key objects will typically vary each day, and for each run you attempt, keeping you observant, I do wish that the controls were more consistently up to the task. Even if the quality of controls when working with the joysticks was hard to improve, it feels like more care could have been put into ensuring that key items and areas you need to interact with, had sufficiently big hit boxes. Yes, as you begin to panic, having a relatively small area that will work to grab or interact with something makes some sense, but the analog stick simply feels poorly utilized, making everything overly sensitive and clumsy. If you’re willing to deal with control frustrations, the format of play and the feeling of your blood pressure rising as you hear your captors returning may still be worth it, but otherwise you’ll likely want to pass on this one.