Accounting+ review: LOL-filled and Rick and Morty-esque

This brief but amusing interactive experience triggers location changes via a familiar concept: we don a VR headset at various points, taking us further down the rabbit hole of simulations inside simulations. Like in Virtual Virtual Reality, this narratively justifies our relocation into random worlds populated by zany characters, who are often upset about our intrusion into their realm. These characters in Accounting+ aren’t afraid to express their feelings, director William Pugh extracting considerable comedic mileage from having them berate the player for actions the game forces us to do.

We embody an accountant recently hired for a firm called Smith & Smitherson, and on our first day discover a VR headset has been placed on our desk. Two yabbering superiors over the telephone compel us to wear it—but these muttonheads have loaded the wrong software and we’re spat out into bizarre virtual worlds.

In the first, soothing massage parlor music and a pleasant forest setting is interrupted by an angry slug-like creature protruding from a tree, who screams at us when we interact with objects in his space. If we pick up a VR headset resting on a rock he yells: “don’t touch those goggles, those are my goggles!” And if we open a birdhouse: “Don’t touch that, that’s my birdhouse!”

Accounting+ was designed by Squanch Games—founded by Rick and Morty co- creator Justin Roilan—and developed by Crows Crows Crows, which was co-founded by William Pough, who designed The Stanley Parable. The former is significant because the humour is very Rick and Morty-like; the latter because much of its humour pivots around the nature of forced interaction and faux agency. We perform certain activities crucial for the story to progress—only to be ridiculed for doing so. In terms of comedic structure the essential format couldn’t be simpler: object interaction activates a stream of amusing dialogue from an NPC. But it does get a little more involved as the experience rolls along. 

My favourite scene takes place in a courtroom, where we’re on trial for killing the obese king of a benevolent world (which we had to do to progress the story). We’re represented by a series of tiny egg-shaped lawyers, who jump out of a suitcase and defend us to a humorously goofy judge—only for us to end up killing all of our tiny legal reps too. A sassy tone manifests from the game’s initial tutorial sequence, in which a preposterous slow-speaking narrator, sounding like a parody of a wellness guru, prompts us to navigate into various “safe zones.” You can spot the Rick and Morty humour from the get-go; the tutorial even culminates with us selecting our favourite of three Rick and Morty memes.

This experience could’ve become onerous, so it’s probably a good thing it clocks in at about an hour. I laughed out loud on numerous occasions, and even when the experience isn’t funny per se it’s always entertaining and well paced. Like most VR comedies of the present era (such as Trover Saves the Universe and Sam and Max: This Time It’s Virtual) the jokes are vococentric, here combined with absurd and/or anarchic settings and scenarios. Extracting humour from—rather than despite—technological limitations cleverly positions the work as a satire enabled—rather than stifled—by current technological standards.