It will either be the answer to your prayers or a contributor to your eventual insanity.
The premise of WTF puts you, a nameless, unemployed everyman, at the mercy of a job placement office. However, these aren’t your average jobs. There are forty different placements in the game, although you’ll initially have just four to choose from, such as a game where you use a pocket counter to tally up the number of people rushing across a street. The jobs usually require just one button press on the PSP, like you may expect. Interestingly, though, a fair number of the jobs cannot be ‘finished.’ For example, one game has you stabbing a tabletop between the spread of your fingers. All you have to do is press ‘X’ while the blade hovers between fingers to play the game. However, there’s no hard and fast goal here; you’ll play until you mess up. Others take that even further – capping pens by pressing ‘X,’ for example, never ends; you’ll just play until you cannot take it anymore.
After exiting a game, you’ll earn a paycheck, which can vary from about three cents to hundreds of dollars, depending on your patience with the games. You can then take a trip to the Vending Machines to spend some cash. There are bronze, silver, gold, and ‘celeb’ machines, each of which cost different amounts of money to use. Using these machines typically earns you worthless trinkets like robot-shaped erasers, ship anchors, and hundreds of other items, which are displayed in a collection screen. Every so often though, you’ll score a new job to play, and the ones you unlock through the Vending Machines are more fun than the initial batch. There’s a lumberjack job where you’ll need to chop wood as it comes up on the block (but watch out for occasional bunny or dolphin that accidentally gets thrown up instead!); a chick-sorting job has you sorting baby chicks into baskets marked ‘boy,’ ‘girl,’ and ‘heaven’ for the one’s who didn’t quite survive (along with a deliciously evil sound clip when you ‘accidentally’ send a live chick to ‘heaven’); and much more.
The problem is that the jobs in WTF straddle a fine line between humorously absurd and boring and lame. When you find yourself capping thousands of pens to get a fat paycheck, you’ll probably find yourself thinking whether or not this is funny or just sad. The truth is that it’s a little of both. In the end, WTF’s gameplay weighs heavily on a deep personal opinion – you’ll either ‘get it’ and have a crazy time, or you won’t and find yourself searching the heavens as to why this game even exists.
This attitude is driven home further by the ‘Tools’ – if they can even be called tools. Also acquired by gambling with your paychecks at the machines, Tools give you little chunks of functionality for your PSP. One is simply emits bright, solid colors so you can use your system as a flashlight; another will split up the cost of a restaurant bill, complete with a ‘gentlemen mode’ that sees the fellas incurring more of the cost; another still puts a set of eyes on the PSP’s screen, allowing you to hold the system like goggles over your own eyes and use the analog stick and shoulder buttons to look around and wink. Your mileage on these will obviously vary, depending on your attitude toward the wonderfully weird. However, no human being could possibly resist the awesome power of the Ramen Timer, which plays a hilarious full-motion video of either a male or female model (who shout things like, “Wanna be all buff like me? Then eat your ramen!”) for three or five minutes – however long you cook your ramen.
Graphically, WTF is a hodge-podge of a bunch of different styles, from 16-bit sprite-based artwork to rudimentary 3D to live photography. The aimlessness of it ends up being where a lot of the game’s charm surfaces – each job has its own unique style that helps keep the relatively one-dimensional gameplay fresh. Most of the art exhibits an excellent clarity on the PSP’s sleek 16:9 screen (although a small minority of the games appear a little stretched out). Piercing electronica permeates through much of the soundtrack, which seems appropriate here. Sound effects are generally basic and limited but serve the small scope of the individual jobs nicely.
WTF is an extremely strange game that requires a strange degree of scrutiny. Although most games on the market can be summed up from a functionality standpoint, WTF’s particularly plodding and hilariously mundane gameplay requires a specific mindset to enjoy. If you’re typically in the market for the weird and obscure, this is certainly a game you’ll want in your collection. If that pre-requisite seems iffy to you, make sure to pass.