There’s a Gun in the Office

Genre: First-Person Graphic Adventure / Horror

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Death Kid + There’s a Gun in the Office Bundle, along with Death Kid. It is also included in Fig. + There’s a Gun in the Office Bundle, along with Fig.)

There’s a Gun in the Office, released in 2025 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, is a First-Person Graphic Adventure game with Horror elements that presents a simple, tantalizing concept: You’re a kidnapping victim, being held in a stranger’s apartment. You’re being kept in a locked room and starved, but you’ve had a sudden stroke of luck – you’ve managed to squirrel away the key to your room and hide it from your kidnapper. What’s more, the kidnapper leaves the apartment for a short while each day. During that time, you can escape your room and explore the apartment, much of which is locked and inaccessible. However, each day you learn more, can gain access to more. Only… well, your kidnapper will come back, and if you leave any sign that you’ve been outside of your room, you’ll be caught and face a terrible end.

The implication, then, is that you’ll be doing everything you can during the brief window of time to try to explore the place, unlock what doors you can, learn keycodes, and hopefully get to the titular gun in the apartment’s office so you can make good your final escape. But each time, before your kidnapper returns, you’ll need to reverse each step you’ve taken, close doors you’ve opened, return keys to where you found them, and so on. As such, there’s an element of memory at play here, making you retrace your steps, and seeing you get more and more of these steps each day as you make more progress, only to have to undo that progress when you’re almost out of time.

In practice, the execution leaves something to be desired here. First, your first-person controls are sluggish and clunky, making movement and interacting with objects somewhat frustrating. Also, the way the game gives you directives each in-game day runs counter to the idea that you’re exploring the place you’re trapped in, with the game instead playing like you’re just doing what you’re told. There’s also issues borne out of the presentation.

When you start the game, you’re given the option to change the brightness level of the game, but even at the brightest level, the game still feels too dark, and on top of this the cursor and interactive text can be obscured if what you’re looking at is white. In a game where you’re primarily trying to search for information and things to interact with, the inability to actually see what you’re working with really hinders playability.

As for the overall presentation, the game’s 3D visuals are decent but nothing special, and the sound design doesn’t have much to offer here either. Apart from the brightness and interface issues, there’s nothing terrible here, but nothing noteworthy either.

Overall, I really like the premise of There’s a Gun in the Office, but I think the execution fails to deliver on that premise. The idea of being a kidnapping victim frantically searching for a way to escape each day while their kidnapper is out, all while being careful not to tip them off, is an excellent one. It’s just a shame that this ultimately amounts to being given instructions to look for something and being frustrated by the visuals and interface making that search unnecessarily difficult.

tl;dr – There’s a Gun in the Office is a First-Person Graphic Adventure with Horror elements where players take the role of a kidnapping victim trying to explore the apartment they’re trapped in while their kidnapper is out, only to put everything back where it was each day when they return. It’s a great premise with a terrible execution, with the game telling players what to do and with an interface and visuals that make this task unnecessarily difficult. The result is a game that does not live up to its potential.

Grade: C-

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