Worming from Home is out, and Excel becomes a boss fight when your employee is a worm

Worming from Home launched on Steam on September 4 for Windows and macOS. Developers Zach Northrop and Mason Sabharwal started with an immediately understandable joke — a worm working remotely in finance — and then built the controls around refusing to make that situation convenient.

The keyboard is a physical object. So is the mouse. If the phone rings, somebody still has to reach it.

Typing a number suddenly requires actual movement

The worm uses physics-driven movement to navigate the desk. Spreadsheet assignments and office messages are completed by physically reaching the keyboard and hitting individual keys with its body.

That makes scale part of the comedy. A task that would take a human employee a few seconds becomes a small traversal challenge when individual keys are enormous relative to the character.

The mouse gets the same treatment. Rather than abstracting computer control into a normal interface, the game asks the worm to crawl over to the device and move it around the desk.

That choice is what stops the premise from being purely cosmetic. The protagonist is not simply a human controller model replaced with a funny animal. Being a worm is the mechanical problem.

Corporate ambition survives the lack of limbs

The player begins as a junior financial analyst, dealing with spreadsheets, messages, phone calls and the usual assortment of work that sounds impressively dull until every button becomes an obstacle.

There is also a stock market. Players can invest their earnings and exploit insider information in ways that would presumably trigger a rather different kind of career progression outside the game.

Money can be spent on upgrades, while skills and equipment gradually make the worm more capable. The ultimate objective is wonderfully conventional: earn a promotion.

There is life after the spreadsheet

Free time brings additional activities. The worm can exercise, read self-help books, shop, interact with coworkers and explore the environment surrounding its workstation.

The tiny scale turns an ordinary desk into a surprisingly useful playground. Movement, jumping and object manipulation use the same deliberately cumbersome physics that make office work difficult.

A major demo update during June's Steam Next Fest had already introduced the Wormhole, a platforming challenge in an alternate dimension, along with a smartphone used to unlock cosmetics. The full game expands the idea beyond repeating office assignments.

The demo had already built momentum

Worming from Home had attracted a sizeable audience before launch. Northrop said the January demo passed 10,000 players, and the project reached 25,000 Steam wishlists by early April.

The initial release response has also been strong. Two days after launch, Steam categorizes the user reviews as Very Positive, with 98 percent positive feedback at the time checked.

That percentage is still based on an early and rapidly changing pool of reviews. It is nevertheless a decent indication that the joke survived contact with the complete game.

A stupid little joke got promoted into a complete game

Northrop has described the project as something that grew from a silly joke into a much larger game. Worming from Home still wears that origin proudly.

It keeps asking how much can be built around the same ridiculous premise: work, invest, improve your skills, exercise, buy unnecessary things and pursue corporate success while controlling an animal better suited to compost than financial analysis.

The Steam launch currently includes a 25 percent introductory discount through September 18. French interface text and subtitles are also supported.

Remote work was complicated enough already.