A typing job at the end of the millennium
Chimpology puts you to work as an aspiring corpo-chimp router in 1999, pushing pictures from server to client one bit at a time. The whole game runs on two buttons, so the difficulty comes from reading what the game wants next and hitting it in time rather than from a big control scheme. Images arrive, you route them, and you keep the internet running. The premise is played straight and silly at once: the slow modem lines aren't a bandwidth problem, they're chimpanzees typing pictures out by hand, and you're one of them.
Playing with two buttons
Everything is built around those two inputs, which means almost any controller works. The game has been tested with a keyboard, a gamepad, a dance mat, a guitar, an arcade stick, a banana, and a semi machine dolphin — in practice that means a keyboard or any HID controller. You can play on rhythm or ignore rhythm entirely, and you can feed your own pictures into the game by navigating to the game folder. The game does not actually transfer your pictures anywhere, so you're free to use whatever you like. Remote Play Together is supported, so friends can join in over a session rather than needing to be in the same room.
What to know before you start
One mistake and you're fired, so runs are short and sharp rather than forgiving. Expect a mix of puzzle, rhythm and arcade pressure wrapped in pixel graphics, with psychedelic and psychological horror dressing on top — the tone swings between cute and unsettling, and the parody of corporate work and dystopian internet culture is part of the joke. It's tagged as family friendly and casual, but the constant demand for accurate input under time pressure is where the real challenge sits. Come in ready to concentrate, keep your hands on whatever device you picked, and don't trust anyone who blames the modem line.