Thank You For Your Application: a depressing, poignant look at a future that isn’t far off

Few phenomena in video games are more curious than the advent of the “work simulator” — games where you do a job that is rather tedious, and which you would probably complain about if you were doing in real life.

However, I can’t deny that there’s something quite comforting in games like this — and moreover, many jobs are eminently “gamifiable”, with clear criteria for success and failure, metrics to track your performance and the opportunity to explore an unfolding story as a backdrop to the repetitive core mechanics.

Thank You For Your Application, developed by IceLemonTea Studio and published by No More Robots, is a game like this. It’s a game that casts you in the role of an interviewer at a big corporation in an exceedingly dystopian near-future setting — one that doesn’t feel like it’s a long way away from life in 2026. Join me after the jump, and let’s talk about that.

In Thank You For Your Application, you take on the role of an individual known only as “C86”. In the city of Aeropolis, most people are referred to by their social number like this; the letter grade supposedly indicates your inherent potential, while the number represents your ranking within that tier of individuals. In other words, C86 is a person who has the potential to go places in this society, but things are by no means guaranteed.

C86 is also regarded as a “non-local”, having come from the nearby Minato District. Having passed through 15 rounds of interviews and ultimately been unsuccessful in securing a position, C86 finds themselves reassigned through a scheme that puts them in the unenviable position of being the one doing all these tedious interviews. What then follows is up to a month’s worth of virtual working days, during which you must successfully screen the never-ending stream of candidates according to whether or not they match the ever-changing requirements set by Aeropolis Lab, your employer.

Essentially the way this unfolds is that at the start of a day, you’re given the requirements for successful recruitment, and when a candidate that matches these requirements comes for interview, you pop them in the green “accepted” folder. When they don’t, you deliver them a “thanks letter” based on the criterion they didn’t meet — which also gives them the opportunity to correct the problem if they, for example, just forgot to show you a document — and subsequently, if they still don’t make the grade, pop them in the red “rejected” folder.

Initially, this is very simple and straightforward, but as the days progress, you are given a variety of peculiar conditions to pay attention to, including psychological profiles, restrictions on the types of visas and residence permits you’ll accept and even set criteria for exhibiting a “professional appearance”. Some days there will be new conditions added to your list; others there will be conditions relaxed; on others still, the list will change completely, according to the “needs of the business”, so you will always need to stay on your toes.

There’s also the constant possibility that someone will try and sneak forged documents past you; these can be spotted by mismatched names, university faculties that don’t exist, dates that are wrong or company and educational institution logos that are incorrect. All of these are grounds for instant rejection (or, later in the game, electrocution if you’re feeling sadistic or feel like you might be able to “correct” the candidates’ responses); if you make too many mistakes, your pay for the day will be docked.

A short distance into the game, you also have to start managing your own “Breakdown Index” — essentially your stress level. Between shifts at your job, you can buy things such as cups of coffee and pills to lower your Breakdown level, and you can also buy permanent items for your apartment that confer an immediate improvement to your mental state when you return home. Conversely, making mistakes at work or working overtime will increase your Breakdown level significantly, and at higher levels, your vision will become distorted as the stress makes it difficult for you to concentrate on things.

By itself, all this would provide some interesting gameplay, but where Thank You For Your Application really starts to shine is once its various background storylines start to unfold. There are a variety of these, each on a different scale. At the less “important” end of things, there’s the saga of a worker who fell in love with his mentor, got laid off and ends up wanting to work at your company; meanwhile, one of the main plots of the game concerns a shadowy organisation known as the “Minato Residents’ Association”, who attempt to recruit you as a person on the inside at Aeropolis Lab for reasons that might not be immediately apparent.

You also get regular email messages from your mother and sister, who each have their own little plots to follow up on; you can even end up recruiting your own sister under certain circumstances. All this unfolds in the background while you continue to do your job; attempting to find a balance between performing it effectively enough to be able to survive in the miserable society that is Aeropolis, and doing the things that you think, for whatever reason, are “right”.

Survival can be a bit of a challenge. At regular intervals throughout the month over which the game unfolds, you are presented with bills, and non-payment of these bills usually causes an immediate Game Over. Thus, you are somewhat obliged to perform as well as possible during the working day — and perhaps take on overtime if you’re really struggling for cash. Thankfully, there is the option to play in “subsidised” mode, which is effectively an easy difficulty that guarantees you an income and makes it a lot more straightforward to survive; there are no penalties for playing in this mode, so if you just want to explore the stories, this is a perfectly acceptable means of doing so, and justified in-universe.

The real weight of Thank You For Your Application is how depressingly plausible its vision of the workplace in the year 2066 is. People are encouraged to live for work, and discouraged from going outside when they are not working. Their only form of expression is posting online, and this is heavily monitored, leading to, as you might expect, a fair number of corporate bootlickers. Dissent is not tolerated; anyone who does not fall in line with societal expectations is, at best, exiled, and at worst has something truly terrible happen to them.

At the same time, there is no real “reward” waiting at the top for those who excel in their field — only the opportunity to become a “permanent employee”, a status which certainly does provide job security in some respects, but which in others is utterly horrifying. I will leave the specific details of this for you to discover for yourself. And the alternative outcomes, of which there are several depending on your actions (or inaction) throughout the game, unsurprisingly aren’t much better.

The interview process will be frustratingly familiar to anyone who has attempted to get a job at any point in the last 10-15 years. A significant portion of people are rejected immediately, without them having any opportunity to state their case as to why they would be a worthwhile addition to “The Team”. Those who are recruited are quickly forgotten about at best, regarded as completely disposable at worst — cast aside the moment money needs to be saved or an example needs to be made of people.

At the heart of it all is the feeling that people just aren’t important any more — a potent message as we live through the era of the generative AI bubble. All that matters in Aeropolis is the amorphous concept of “productivity”, whether or not all the “work” people are supposedly doing actually produces anything that is of any use to society. While playing the game, I found myself thinking about the miserable existence of the people who brag about how many Claude Code agents they have running at once, churning out code that no-one needs for projects no-one will use, and how we are truly living through some utterly absurd times — times that don’t feel all that far off what is depicted in Thank You For Your Application.

We may not have quite got to the stage of assigning people’s supposed “worth” to society as their main means of identification, but there are a number of ways that one can see how today’s society could very easily head down a path that leads to Aeropolis.

It’s a cautionary tale, then, and one that works as a good, compelling piece of interactive sci-fi that is all the more powerful for the participant role you play in proceedings. Here’s hoping that we’re able to correct our own course before we end up in a world much like the one depicted in the game — because life in Aeropolis sure doesn’t look like much fun.

Don’t take this to mean the game isn’t fun, however; on the contrary, its straightforward, easy to understand and evolving mechanics make it enjoyable and satisfying to engage with — and the fact that it actually makes you think about what it is you’re doing and what that means makes it all the more effective as a piece of interactive art.

This is the “work simulator” done right; it nails the gameplay and has something worthwhile to say. Highly recommended.

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More about Thank You For Your Application

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Want more Pete? Check my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, and my YouTube channel ThisIsPete. If you enjoy what you read here, please consider buying me a coffee.

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