Level 22

There are several games doing their rounds in popularity at the moment. Level 22 was one I noticed some of my friends playing and thought I would jump in too after reading a review.

The game follows the story of Gary, a really bad office worker who is on the verge of getting fired. He goes on a bender for his birthday and wakes up with a hangover and late for work. Knowing he’s in the last chance saloon, he gets his friend to help him to sneak into work without being spotted by his colleagues.

As a premise it’s a bit out there, but the game play is fairly solid. You have to sneak up through the various floors of the office using tools such as newspapers, boxes and donuts to hide or distract other office workers from noticing you. There are a couple of forth-wall breaking moments too and it was genuinely quite funny in places. Like security guards can be distracted by donuts and you can knock them out by putting the donuts in nuclear waste... that’s not a joke.

Graphically, it is set as a 2D cartoon where you roam in a 3D plane so can’t really go wrong within its own context. It’s not very long and can be ran through it about three and a half hours. This meant that the background music didn’t have a chance to get too annoying although I could sense that it would have if I had been require to spend too long playing it.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 23 Achievements

The first achievement you will get it simply for starting up the game. You get another for finishing it too but outside of these, the remaining achievements are 100% collectible based.

There are figurines in each of the floors you explore, not including the boss levels, and for the most part these are quite easy to find. What isn’t easy are the achievements linked to opening all the safes within the levels. These safes contain jigsaw pieces and you have to complete the four jigsaws by opening four safes in each floor. This is fine in principle but some of the clues to find out the safe combinations are so fucking obscure that it was probably add ten hours to the game just looking for them. And that doesn’t even include interpreting the clues once you find them.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Level 22 is a fairly solid, enjoyable, quick romp through an office block. Gary is a weirdly likeable guy and you want him to succeed which highlights the strength of what the game set out to do.

 Achievement wise, with a guide it’s really straightforward so everyone is a winner. Unless you like arduous grinds in which case, this isn’t for you.