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Ripped Pants at Work is a “frantic stealth game about searching for new pants”

Briefs encounter.

Developer Scott Ethington has announced Ripped Pants at Work, a "frantic stealth game about searching for new pants". That's the trouser kind, by the way.

Ripped Pants at Work begins when a routine pencil-retrieval operation goes badly wrong, causing your trousers to tear so vigorously that they explode clean off.

From there, with your undergarments embarrassingly exposed, you're tasked with slipping unseen through the bustling rooms and corridors of your workplace (eventually moving out into the city streets) in search of new trousers.

Being spotted too often will result in your immediate unemployment, so you'll need to hide your modesty behind bookshelves and bushes as your hunt continues. If you're fired, the cycle continues with the next (randomly-generated!) person hired for your job. The trailer made me laugh because I'm extremely immature.

Cover image for YouTube videoRipped Pants at Work Official Announcement Trailer

According to developer Scott Ethington, Ripped Pants at Work started life as a low-key personal project: "Toward the end of 2016, I started making a small game every week to keep myself fresh while working at a dead-end QA job. I made 12 games in total, and the original Ripped Pants was number 11.

"The idea came to me while sitting in a Barnes and Noble cafe with a pen and a notebook, trying to figure out what my next game was going to be. The song "Split Pants in Detroit (or Hyrule)", by Open Mike Eagle, started playing through my headphones, and I knew what what I needed to do."

The original itch.io version of Ripped Pants at Work was apparently a bit of a surprise hit after it was discovered by several YouTubers, "In total, most of [my] one-week games had an average of about 14 downloads. The one-week version of Ripped Pants at Work has over 3,000 downloads." This, says, Ethington, "made me decide that a bigger, better, more colorful version of Ripped Pants at Work might be worthwhile!"

Ripped Pants at Work is currently scheduled to release in January 2018 on PC and Mac (here's its Steam page), for the positively minuscule price of $2.99 USD. Pants!