Created by Mario von Rickenbach, based on an idea by Maja Gehrig, with sound by Luc Gut, Pocket Boss tasks you, a remote employee, with swiping away losses and bending bar charts to satisfy a demanding boss. What may appear as a casual puzzle game, is a sharp piece of digital satire, transforming the most cynical aspects of corporate life into a darkly comical exercise. This isn’t just about fun; it’s a critical commentary on the pressures of performance culture, the tyranny of capital, data abstraction, and the rising tide of algorithmic oversight in the age of AI.

Pocket Boss is a delightfully odd fusion of work and play. You’re a remote employee working with business data to make your boss happy. And the boss needs so much done! Increase productivity, boost customer satisfaction, make losses disappear, erase competitors – all with just a swipe of your finger. As you solve ever-funkier data puzzles, your boss watches your progress closely, wondering if you’ve got what it takes to earn that promotion. Well, have you?

Mario von Rickenbach

In Pocket Boss, your job is not to generate actual value, but to manipulate the visual representation of it. With a pinch of a finger, you increase productivity, boost customer satisfaction, or erase competitors. This simple act is a brilliant distillation of the absurdity of modern work, where immense, complex realities are reduced to metrics on a screen, often mediated by chat windows and data dashboards. The game acknowledges that the real value of the contemporary employee often isn’t in competence, but in the skill of performing for your boss—making the numbers look right, with the promise of a promotion as the ultimate reward for this ethical compromise. Pocket Pocket underscores how professional advancement is often granted not for integrity, but for complicity in the corporate charade.

Created with Unity, custom vector renderer and softbody physics engine.

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