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It’s a Saturday night and you have a Pure Maths Paper 2 A-level mock in two days that you’re completely unprepared for. You’re lying down on your bed, exhausted from a day spent on revision, and letting your youtube autoplay pick your entertainment for tonight because if you have to think about one more thing for one more second you might just explode .
The video opens to a low-quality title screen, reading ‘WHACKYOURBOSS.COM’ in uncomfortably close together left-aligned red text, with a low-contrast (WHY) description of what the game is about below. Thankfully, you don’t have to read it, because soon enough, a voiceover is heard.
It laughs, at first - an amused scoff that comes out as a tch . ‘So apparently, this should let me ‘whack my boss’ without actually ‘whacking’ him,’ the voice says. It sounds… ill . Like it’s spent several days with a cough and needs a ventilator. ‘Wish I could do it in real life, but it’s all he’ll See you coming, Daisy , and breaking into prison isn’t worth it if you’re just going to end up in there again, Daisy , and they’ll probably just refer you to another Section 31 officer, I’ve still got that scar, trust me when I say you don’t want to end up like that, Daisy . Well, Jon , this one’s for you, you bastard. If you can even watch a video without everything going up in a puff of smoke around you.’
Too tired to laugh, you let yourself breath out a sharp puff of air. Wonder if this Jon is related to Newton Pulsifer, you think, remembering the battered copy of Good Omens in the school library you checked out over the summer after Year Ten.
The mouse onscreen goes to the (centred, unlike all the other text - WHY, graphic designer, WHY) lowercase ‘begin’ at the bottom of the screen and taps on it. The scene is now set: an office worker in his chair, being lectured by his (presumably shitty) boss, surrounded by various badly-drawn lineart of office supplies.
Daisy audibly rubs her hands together with glee and cackles . ‘He even looks like Bouchard! God, this’ll be fun. Though I remember less ‘wrong, wrong, this is all wrong’ and more ‘hoo hoo hee hee I have murdered several people and there is abso-fucking-lutely nothing you can do to stop me, so let me blackmail you’. Still. Now, what do I - ah.’
She’s clicked on the mug on the desk next to the office worker. With mild interest, you watch as the office worker bludgeons his boss to death with the mug (with kind-of comical, kind-of graphic sounds), leaving blood splatters and a corpse with its head bent at an unnatural angle on the cubicle wall behind him. Unaffected - and even a little happy - the worker goes back to his computer, getting on with his work with no need for a boss at all. Though it may have been shocking when it first came out, this badly-drawn flash game doesn’t really affect you; you have watched many a playthrough of a horror game, unable to buy them yourself, and you have seen a lot of gore that’s both more graphic and more horrifying than this ever could be.
Daisy, on the other hand, is cackling even louder. ‘Oh, yes,’ she whispers to herself. ‘Can’t say I’ve ever killed someone with a mug, but if Bouchard ever came into the break room - hm. Maybe.’ She hovers her mouse over the ‘cleaner’ button at the bottom of the screen - the only thing that even resembles a regular polygon, by the way (please, graphic designer, STOP). ‘So I’m guessing this - ah.’ Onscreen, a dark figure in a trenchcoat and fedora swipes at the crime scene, which then reverts to its opening state. ‘Unfair!’ Daisy grumbles. ‘I had to clean up my own murders, back in the day. If you don’t want to get on your hands and knees and scrub the blood yourself, you shouldn’t be doing this in the first place.’
Sorry, what?
It’s probably just another weird gimmick that Youtubers like to do to make them ‘stand out’ or whatever. Right?
‘So,’ Daisy says ruefully, waving her cursor around the screen. ‘What to do next? Oh - this cabinet is yellow, I wonder if - yes!’
The office worker pulls at the cabinet door, seemingly in futility, as his boss looks on with an Evil Glare.
‘Oh, come on! You can do better than - exactly!’
You watch as the worker grabs his boss by the collar and smashes his face into the cabinet again and again and again, leaving a straight-up dent in his head. Oh, and lots of blood.
It shouldn’t feel weird (not weird, scary, a primal sort of scary that goes down your spine and into your toes) how Daisy cackles the whole time. It shouldn’t . And yet, and yet…
You watch as Daisy works her way through all five other endings of Whack Your Boss, hiccuping through her unholy cackle each time, swearing against ‘Bouchard’ and ‘Lukas’ and even ‘Jon’ at one point, though you think that one’s in jest (you think).
At the end, Daisy claps her hands. Her voice sounds better, now, if only marginally. ‘Well! I think that went rather well. Might do another one. We’ll see. Martin, if you’re watching this, drop some cash so I can play something that isn’t flash games. Jon, if you’re watching this, thanks for your suggestion. And if you’re not Archives crew then, um, bye, I suppose.’
You have no idea what the ‘Archives crew’ is and, at this point, you’re a little afraid to ask. Still - you’re kind of into this Youtuber’s gimmick, pretending she’s committed murder and all.
(You’re not going to parse your affinity for women covered in blood for another decade or so, not until after you’ve processed your whatever-that-was-in-2018 trauma, but one day you’ll look back on this channel and wonder if it was real. If this woman was a - a - one of them torturer-people.)
(For now, you subscribe. And click the bell. Because if there’s anything more terrifying than That Thing In 2018, it’s the fact that Y outube’s algorithm is so unknown its own team can’t fix it.)