You’re Welcome
Jesse Norris
5 hours ago
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Aeropolis City, your home of the future! Come work every day and every night. Prove your worth for our benevolent corporation after sitting through dozens of job interviews! Match our arbitrary requirements or be shuffled back into despair at a moment’s notice. Serve, obey, never step out of line, and above all else, love your job.
This is Thank You For Your Application, a Paper’s Please-style game that sees you approving or rejecting applicants to the Aeropolis Lab Corporation. In this dystopian future of 2066, the world is in chaos, work is everything, and you will become the arbiter of who goes on to the next round of interviews and who is rejected.
It is a mentally taxing game in which it is too easy to accidentally fail the quests. Still, by the end of my first playthrough, I was left satisfied and itching for another.
Thank You For Your Application sees you take on the role of a new interviewer at the Aeropolis Lab. The job requires you to match applicants’ resumes and paperwork to that day’s set of parameters.
Things start easily enough. Make sure they come from the right school or city, and you’re off. Quickly, the number of items you need to pay attention to skyrockets. 5 hours in, I had a list of 8 different requirements that must be met alongside things like matching social numbers and making sure dates were valid.
It can be a LOT, to the point that this is definitely not a podcast-listening cozy game at all. As you progress through candidates at a roughly 8 to 10 per day clip, you’ll start to build relationships with some that can turn into quests.
These quests are incredibly easy to fail if you do not properly interact with the game’s systems. After each work day, you’ll head home to your corporate-mandated apartment and have the option of buying items. Stress is a big part of the game, and messing up applicants can make your character lose it.
As this is a corporate dystopia, you’ll have a never-ending avalanche of incoming bills as well. Balancing your meager salary with bill payments, items to lower stress, and trying to keep your mother and sister safe is not easy. I had to use multiple saves to try and make sure I didn’t permanently mess up a quest on any given day.
Those quests would come in a few ways. Your mother and sister live in the ‘bad’ city, and require money and items to stay alive and healthy. Failing to get them anything they need can lead to immediate, negative consequences.
I didn’t realize this at first, and after realizing I wasn’t hearing from them anymore, I used a save file from a full 5 days prior, losing hours of progress, but saving them. Other quests come in the form of an organization looking to fight back against the corporations.
One day I failed their assignment, figuring I could try again the next. Nope! I had to reload my save and go back, making sure I completed it; otherwise, I was immediately put into a permanent fail state with them.
This goes on top of your daily routine. In a set of tutorials, you will be tasked with calling in interview applicants. Each one will present you with a variety of documents. It is your job to sift through them and make sure they match that day’s requirements.
If a candidate hits all the requirements and has proper stamps and dates on their paperwork, you can pass them. If they do not, you will need to mark down why they are being rejected. Sometimes that leads to the candidate providing you with missing information. The game also allows you to shock them into the right answer if they say “people suck” when asked if they enjoy teamwork, for example.
It is a fun, intense bit of paperwork that is interspersed with story beats. I never felt the game become too routine, as long as I didn’t fail quests. Whenever I did, the next few days became more tedious. You need to make sure you never fail a quest if you want the best experience.
At its heart, Thank You For Your Application is a game about submission. Will you give in to this oppressive society’s demands or fight? My first ending was the latter, and it felt incredibly rewarding. There appeared to be at least three endings in total.
While I am not a huge fan of the ease at which you can seemingly permanently fail, it did add to my overall satisfaction. The game features a classic pixel-art style and ran well as I reviewed it on PC via Steam.
The music is a big thing in a title like this. There is no voice acting, and you are looking at the same menus non-stop for 10+ hours. Thankfully, it was great, especially the BGM for your daily work routine.
The light meta-progression of adorning your apartment with furnishings that help stabilize your mood worked well. Without it, the only reason to earn money would be to pay bills or send it to your family. The mystery around the corporations and their ‘new AI tech’ is interesting, and I found the conclusion thoroughly engaging.
Thank You For Your Application is stressful fun. It will demand your attention at all times, despite its seemingly cozy nature. Quest-frustration aside, it is easy to recommend for those who love games that make ‘work’ fun.
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PlayDayOne © | June 19, 2026
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