Sorry, We're Open is a horror RPG with Roguelike and Survival Horror elements, created by oates in RPG Maker MV. It was released on Steam
and itch on February 17, 2023.
Though a standalone game, it is a Spiritual Successor to his previous games No Delivery and One Night at the Steeze. The player controls the manager of a struggling megastore who has to hire employees, keep the shelves stocked, and discover the horrifying truths at the center of the corporation. Will you climb the Corporate Ladder, or will you be consumed by the company?
Sorry, We're Open contains examples of the following tropes:
- Action Bomb: One of the pop-ups in the Corporate location will count down how much break time you have left. After three turns, it blows up in your face.
- Afterlife Express: Possibly the case with the bus in the Omega Ending, though this might just be on a metaphorical level. On the bus, you meet every one of your employees, as well as the employee fired from the grocery store, who connects the idea of being on the lowest rung of the corporate ladder with being in Hell.
- Amplified Animal Aptitude: As in No Delivery, one of the potential employees is the Mascot, a dog in a baseball cap who can fight as well as the human employees.
- Big Bad: The Corporate Entity, an Anthropomorphic Personification of the company you work for. You can kill it in three of the endings. However, doing so results in your own death shortly therafter.
- The Blank: While initially it seems like the Manager is just a Featureless Protagonist, dialogue with Those Two Guys reveals that they really don't have eyes or a mouth. Apparently this is common to employees of the store, and is just an accepted fact of life.
- Body Horror: A truly faceless protagonist, skinned meat men, bleeding mannequins, human-shaped fruit that seems to breathe, and whatever the person in the basement of the Grocery Store has turned into.
- Capitalism Is Bad: The main theme of the game, with the struggle to manage a store becoming a literal life-or-death battle.
- Cast from Money: Essentially the main mechanic of the game. You get paid at the end of every successful shift, but virtually every attack your employees can perform costs money; the only major move that doesn't, "Goof Off," hurts the enemy but also causes damage directly to the Manager.
- Deliberate VHS Quality: As with oates' other games, much of the game has a retro-VHS aesthetic applied to it. There's a default VHS filter over the entire game, which can be altered or turned off.
- Developer's Room: Not a "room," exactly, but by obtaining a VHS player and the "Conditioning" tape, you can access an in-game webpage with oates' thoughts on some of the areas and enemies in the game.
- Early Game Hell: In your first few shifts, you have very few employees, not much money, and few ways to reliably heal. As you pick up bags of money, get paid for your shifts, and hire more employees, it becomes easier to survive and explore.
- Eldritch Location: Each store seems to connect via bizarre underground tunnels to the Mother Mall, the home of the Corporate Entity.
- Greater-Scope Villain: After killing the Corporate Entity, you then leave and head back through your own store, which is now more dark and sinister, with the lights failing and signs blocking other paths. Once you reach the main doors, you see a horde of people banging on the doors: the General Public. They're the last boss of one of the endings, and in a metaphorical sense they are the origin of all this horror—after all, a company can't exist unless they have someone to sell to.
- Heroic Mime: Your character never speaks. In fact, they ''can't'' speak.
- History Repeats: A secret item, the punch card for the "Riot of 199X", allows you to relive a particularly harrowing shift from years ago. You witness something very similar if you defeat the Corporate Entity and confront the General Public in the now-closed store.
- Improvised Weapon: The "Trash" items you pick up can be discarded for a few dollars, or used in combat. In a fight, they either damage the enemy for a small amount (and possibly Nauseate them), heal the Manager, or give you a few dollars.
- Non-Malicious Monster: Beneath the grocery store is something hiding in absolute darkness, which asks you for meat. Raw meat. If you give it to them, they give you "Human-shaped fruit" in exchange. The fruit is creepy and seems to breathe, but it also heals you with no side effects. Give them enough, and they simply disappear, satisfied.
- No OSHA Compliance: People dying on the job is treated as a normal consequence, rather than leading to the business being shut down.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Some of the monsters are never actually seen in the game, merely implied or spoken to.
- Omega Ending: After each of the "regular" endings, you earn a quarter. Earn five quarters, and you can ride the bus, which acts as the "final" ending.
- Remote Body: This is the case with the protagonist themselves, and every other Manager. When you go into your office, you see your own shriveled, motionless husk of a body behind the computer, just barely alive. The "Manager" you're controlling seems to be made out of something like plastic, possibly even one of the ubiquitous mannequins seen around the stores.
- Status Effects: Nausea (poisoned), Stunned, Marked, and Hidden (evade/vanish).
- Surreal Horror: Some of the problems dealt with at the store are rather abnormal, such as having to trade raw meat for human-shaped fruit.
- Those Two Guys: In the parking lot of the Plaza, you meet two people hanging out and talking about donuts. They then show up at the other stores as well, providing some commentary on you and the company you work for.
- Title Drop: After killing the Corporate Entity, you return through your now-closed store to face a horde of the General Public. When you confront them, you have two choices: tell them "Come in, we're open," in which case the customers take everything from you, including your very existence; or tell them "Sorry, we're closed," in which case they break into the store and trample you to death. Or, once you've regained your humanity, you can say "Sorry, We're Open," which causes you to fight them as the Final Boss.
- Toilet Humor: The Mascot's "Nature Calls" attack, which is accompanied by a fart sound effect and can cause Nausea to the enemy.
- Was Once a Man: The thing in the basement of the grocery store apparently used to be an employee like any other. Now it makes fruit. Human-shaped fruit.
- Workplace Horror: As with several of oates' previous games. You're a manager in a dilapidated store, trying to keep your employees alive in the face of strange things in the darkness.
