Everything in Good Job is designed to keep you from achieving what its title implies. Even simple tasks like delivering parcels or mopping up the floor are made comically complicated with unpredictable physics and ridiculous office tools at your disposal. Good Job isn't so much about finding a way to achieve your objectives in the cleanest manner possible, but is instead a fun playground for you and some friends to muck about in. It's at its best when it gives you the freedom to create solutions to puzzles using the chaos you orchestrate, only faltering in a handful of scenarios.
Good Job puts you in the working boots of the ill-equipped and woefully unqualified child of a mega-corporation's CEO, and you're given any and every job possible as you climb the corporate ladder. The first floors are simple--you mop up brightly colored goop off the floor, deliver packages to color-coded desks, and courier projectors to meeting rooms in need. As trivial as it sounds, the chaotic layout of the offices combined with the loose, QWOP-like control scheme makes moving objects feel like you're spring cleaning after a rough night out at a bar. Dragging a projector, for example, is humorously tricky. It easily slides around while you drag it, knocking over decorative art pieces and smashing the glass walls of meeting rooms. Good Job isn't worried about how well you complete a job, but rather if you're able to get it done period. Leaving a mess of memos, fire extinguisher foam, and distressed co-workers in your wake just makes it more fun.
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Every object in Good Job is physically reactive, giving every little bump the potential to set off a chain reaction of destruction. Each level is designed with this in mind, forcing you to navigate through doors just too small to pull objects through, around twisting hallways filled with precariously placed vases and paintings, and over electrical cables that will catch anything you might be dragging with you. These are presented not only as obstacles, but as fun opportunities to create chaos that makes your job a little easier.
Electrical cables, for example, can be used as slingshots for office chairs or useless photocopiers, letting you smash through walls to create shorter routes or large doorways. You can reroute cables to move other employees impeding your progress too, disconnecting the distracting television they are fixated on and forcing them to get back to work. Motorized floor cleaners will handle a spill in a flash but can also act as a barely-controllable vehicle that displaces nearly everything in front of it. Most of Good Job's office tools and equipment function as you expect them to, but have the flexibility for you to turn them into ridiculous means of completing your objectives.
These objectives change with each level, tying into the themes of each of the nine different floors. These rapidly change from predictable corporate workspaces to colorful biomes filled with small ponds and overflowing vegetation and pristine labs housing automated robots and a variety of chemistry equipment. Each floor's theme is a welcome change, and the handful of levels within each are briskly-paced and avoid outstaying their welcome. There are a few levels that are much larger in size than the rest, which makes navigating them at your walking pace a bit of a chore. Without direct camera control it's also more challenging to survey these larger levels as opposed to the more self-contained ones, making them far less fun to play through.
Each floor also introduces new mechanics, and Good Job continually combines them with new types of objectives and clever spins on repeating ones. The process of mopping up a mess is expanded upon in a later level, where you navigate a lab with an expanding, gelatinous pink cube that soaks up any moisture around it as it grows. It's functionally the same mechanic--you're moving around a space and cleaning up a liquid mess--but the means of doing so change enough to make it feel new. Watching the cube morph its shape to narrow doorways created by overhead pipes gives the objective its own unique feel, making it stand out rather than blend in with similar stages.
This is one of many examples, with Good Job mixing together its various office contraptions to allow you to create your own solutions to puzzles. There are obvious ways to achieve your goals, and there weren't any puzzles that left me pondering a solution for more than a moment. Figuring out how to complete a level in a different manner was consistently satisfying, however, thanks to the unpredictable reactions you need to discover to achieve a solution. It's rewarding to stumble upon actions that you might not have considered--in my case, how an overloaded vacuum cleaner could be used as a mobile explosive to destroy restrictive level layouts--which lead to pockets of joyful discovery. You can play Good Job both solo or with friends in cooperative play, and its malleable puzzle solutions allowed me to comfortably complete each one regardless of how many other people I was playing with.
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On some occasions, Good Job does get too complex with its puzzles for its style of gameplay to support. Some solutions require a degree of precision that is both frustrating and unsatisfying to match. In one instance I had to roll three large boulders over to a zen garden, placing each in a specific hole. Rolling them in a particular direction was challenging enough, but having them move off their marked spot with just the slightest touch made it infuriating to line up five in close proximity to each other. In another stage I was tasked with cleaning up a lab floor completely, forcing me to hunt for small paint pixels across a floor strewn with knocked-over objects and destructive collateral. In both cases, Good Job abandons the freedom it encourages in finding solutions to its puzzles, and loses most of its enjoyment in the process.
These moments are fleeting and not frequent enough to put you off the majority of Good Job's charming and engaging puzzles. It finds a middle ground between being a destructive playground and an inventive puzzler, with enough variety throughout to make its brief playtime feel well-balanced. You certainly aren't the best person for any of the jobs you're thrust into, but it's a lot of the fun bumbling your way through it all anyway and still getting the job done at the end of the day.