Office Lunch Mystery

About the game

Your birthday lunch was a creamy tofu sandwich on a crusty baguette, topped with cashew nuts, and somebody at the office has eaten it. Office Lunch Mystery is a short detective game about finding out who, and it is played entirely inside a fake workplace chat program called Extreme Spreadsheets.

After you sign in (the password is on a sticky note on the screen), you read the company's channels and direct messages, and you open the Snoop app to start a case. The coworkers are Delores, Elle, Luis, Jamie and Barbara, and each one has a bio, a mood and a way of talking. As you read, little clues appear: who is allergic to what, who was on vacation, who is a notorious liar, who does not care for spice. Your job is to decide, for every suspect, whether the evidence is for or against them, and then to make an accusation. A narrator reacts aloud to your decisions, and you do get to be wrong.

It was made by Wandering Door Games for Mini Jam 188, whose theme was "Mystery" with the limitation "All in a box", and the whole game does live in one box: the computer screen. It is funny, text-heavy and short.

Playing it here

Click Play and wait a moment while the game loads (about 13 MB, downloaded only when you press the button). Click inside the game once so that it receives the keyboard and the mouse. There is a Skip Intro button in the corner of the opening. On the login screen type any name you like and the password 1234, then press Sign In or Enter. The game is played mostly with the mouse; the keyboard is only for typing your name. It reads a lot, so give it a few quiet minutes.

There are no save slots. Voices play at the key moments, so check your volume.

Controls

Tips

Read everything, then read the bios. Every clue lives in a message or in a person's bio, and the same fact can clear one coworker and point at another.

Think about the sandwich. What it was made of tells you a lot about who would never have wanted it, and who could not have eaten it.

Rule people out first. The last suspect can only be accused once you have added evidence against the other four, so the game is a process of elimination.

Keep notes. A pen and paper help; the chat scrolls quickly.

FAQ

Is there a solution I can look up? Yes, but the fun is the chase. The game tells you when you are being careless.

Does it work on a phone? It can be clicked with a finger, but a keyboard is needed to sign in, so it is best on a computer.

Is it free to share? Yes. The code is under the GNU Affero GPL, the artwork under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, and the sound, music and font are credited below.

Credits and licence

Office Lunch Mystery was made by Wandering Door Games for Mini Jam 188. The code is under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 or later and the original artwork under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The game runs on Godot Engine 4.5.1 (MIT).

• Sound "focus" (from "Menu Selection Click") by NenadSimic, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Source: OpenGameArt.
• Music "Elevator Music" by Alex McCulloch and sound "notification" (from the Botton Sound Pack) by Listener, CC0.
• Font "DynaPuff SemiCondensed" by Toshi Omagari, SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Changes in this version: exported for the web, under a neutral name (the authors reserve the original one) with the title drawn as text, without the studio's logo and icons (the authors reserve those), and with the renderer set to the one the web supports. The licence texts, the complete source and the build script are linked from this page.