Downer Management

Upper Management Is A Real Downer

DOWNER MANAGEMENT is a 3-vs-3 autobattler set inside a corporate purgatory where every conflict is resolved through positional politics. Your three employees occupy three desks—Upper, Middle, and Entry—and fight other three-employee departments by exchanging memos, motions, and clipboards. You don’t control the fight; you control where they sit.

Promote a struggling employee upward, demote your top performer to soak hits, tag a benched coworker in to the action, and file grievances. Stamp paperwork, watch your authority pool drain as the room fills with mid-level managers who cite policy at one another until someone liquidates their pants!!!!!! 

 KEY FEATURES

• THREE-DESK COMBAT: The Upper, Middle, and Entry positions each get different damage and resilience modifiers. Promote an exhausted middle-manager up to take a hit. Demote your hero to soak one. Position is the entire game.

• SIX DEPARTMENTS. HR’s Coffee Run heals your row. IT’s Phishing Hooks silences them. Marketing flags them. Each benched employee projects their department’s aura onto the active row in the same position. Bench composition becomes a strategy puzzle. Unlike reality, every employee is useful. 

• THE FORMS. Skills aren’t fireballs. They’re Memos, Audits, Cold Calls, Performance Improvement Plans, Hostile Takeovers, and the occasional Wrench Smash. Every attack is a piece of paperwork that generates more paperwork. Weaponize tedium!

• STATUS EFFECTS WITH HR APPROVAL. Flagged, silenced, on probation, delayed, fast-tracked. Every effect has been audited and approved by the Bureau of Personnel Standards, Form S-2.

• PROCEDURAL PERSONNEL. Hire from a shifting applicant pool. Each employee has a department, a role, a skill loadout, and a small, exhausted personality. They will die be terminated, and you will replace them. The new ones will also ... you get it. 

• THE THEME MACHINE. Before you take a building, you file a Department Theme—a procedural 80s-corporate aesthetic generator that produces certified bops, no musical skill needed. Your themesong, and its variants, play everywhere, including battle. Beatdowns on beat. 

• NO MICROTRANSACTIONS, NO LIVE SERVICE. This game is a complete game in one filing. All departments, decorations and content unlockable in-game. The only currency you need is pain-tolerance and maybe endless patience. 

THIS GAME IS FOR YOU IF…

- You have ever been in a meeting that should have been an email.

- You have ever been in an email that should have been a meeting.

THIS GAME IS NOT FOR YOU IF…

- You expected a happy ending.

- You expected to leave on time.