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Factsheet

• Developer: Cauldron Games
• Release Date: 8 Jun, 2026
• Platforms: Steam
• Socials: Newsletter X YouTube

Description

A narrative, dystopian office survival game.

Take on the role of Job Cyphus, a freshly graduated programmer eager to deliver value.

Your hurdles are high: line of code quotas, an out-of-touch CEO, and a soulless HR department.

Your tools: caffeine, overtime compensation, and a boundless capacity for dissociation.

Survive, get promoted, and maybe escape the rat race.

Features

• Short playthroughs
• Dynamic dialogues based on your actions
• An HR director coming straight from the 9th circle of hell.
• Multiple endings
• KPI-driven career ladder progression
• Nootropics, and antidepressants to help you cope

Vision

“There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.”

wageslave was born out of my frustrations with working life. Like many people of my generation, I found that the standard professional path provided little in the way of personal fulfilment. It was merely a way to pay the bills. Not much else.

In wageslave, I wanted to translate the dilemmas of employment into a survival game. If you don't work, you'll starve, but working slowly saps you of meaning and purpose. This core tension defines the game.

wageslave leans heavily into satire and dark humour to bring this tension to life, with many nods to programmer culture. Chat messages and pings, reminiscent of office communication software, are used to convey the game's world and story.

Visually, the limited colour palette reflects a disenchanted world where optimisation, efficiency, and the bottom line trump everything else.

Retirement is framed as the end goal. It is the carrot that keeps you working. Reaching the true ending, however, requires the player to actively walk away from the system and to reject it entirely.

In many ways, wageslave mirrored my own decision to leave the corporate world and pursue game development.

I might not be able to make rent yet, but at least I'm doing something I find personally meaningful.

About the Studio

Cauldron Games is a solo indie game studio based in Zurich.

It was founded in 2026 by Pedro Caldeira, a software engineer tired of the corporate grind.

Cauldron Games strives to build games that nudge you into seeing things differently.

Contact

For press and business inquiries, feel free to contact me here.