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With DreamHack and gamescom LAN, LAN parties are back in full force, but a decent job simulator has sorely being missing – until now.
Stranger Things meets LAN-Party
LAN Party Adventures was just announced at Future Games Show and game director Sebastian Lulli, producer Gabriel Shimabuko, and lead programmer Pierre Ruiz gave us an early look at the game. It’s in development at the 20-person Leap Game Studios, based in Lima, Peru. The team has previously worked on titles such as Dicefolk, Tunche, Arrog, and Square Remastered. Last year, the studio received the Google Play Indie Games Fund for Dicefolk, and in 2023, it also received an Epic MegaGrant and financial support from the Peruvian government.
This nostalgic job simulator transports you to the late 90s and early 2000s as a LAN technician tasked with organizing parties and solving tech puzzles. In escape room style, you must use your skills to uncover the truth. In addition to a good dose of nostalgia and challenging puzzles, the game is also said to offer some surprising twists.
Unlike in the upcoming game LAN Party, this is a single-player game, for now at least as the developers stated. Your friend Pedro has apparently disappeared, and you must find him within the seven-hour campaign. As the game progresses, it’ll become somewhat darker, and an alternate ending is planned. That’s all we got to go on regarding the campaign so far. The heart of the game, however, is setting up the LAN party itself. In sandbox mode, which the developers showed us, you can create your very own LAN party and dive right into the CRT nostalgia. After setting up your sleeky grey machine and the heavy monitor, you make use of your cables which are arranged along the bottom bar and assigned to your numerical keys, like skills in an RPG. Your tools are PS/2 cables for mice, VGA cables for monitors, and ethernet as well as phone cables. True to the original, you have to screw in the VGA cables using your mouse wheel, although in reality we probably skipped most of this step.
Mini-games like arranging eight differently colored ethernet cables and an antivirus program liven up the gameplay. To access the internet, you use a floppy disk and have to enter commands in the terminal which fortunately lists all available commands. The operating system and the available programs such as the browser in which we can browse and solve puzzles evoke Windows 95/98 nostalgia. In our bedroom, which we can decorate as we please in sandbox mode using furniture, VHS tapes, stickers, early 64-bit consoles, and stickers, in the Peruvian school that the creators themselves attended, and in the video store, we find numerous references to contemporary pop culture such as Counter-Strike, StarCraft, Tomb Raider, Spyro the Dragon and Doom. The idea of the developers of ​​being able to create your own content and even puzzles and share them with other players is quite interesting and could significantly increase play time.
Final thoughts
Without having played LAN Party Adventures and even without having much experience with the subject matter, what we’ve seen already made us want to jump right in to play. The controls already seem quite intuitive and contemporary, the charming look fits the era the game sets out to portray faithfully and the story already sounds considerably more interesting than in comparable job simulators. It remains to be seen how long the story will actually keep us glued to our CRT screens and how long sandbox mode keeps us engaged. We’re looking forward to hopefully getting our hands soon on rolling-ball mouse and 56k modem to find our missing friend.
The screenshots were provided to us by Leap Game Studios.
