Perhaps the most notable thing in Friday Afternoon is a development right at the beginning of the game--your glasses break, and you have to find a means of fixing them despite your limited vision. The solution itself is not particularly hard or innovative, true, but Mr. Schweitzer shows admirable thoroughness in concealing the office behind a blur until the problem is solved. The problem is vaguely reminiscent of one from Wishbringer, though that was an absolute bar on vision rather than a reduction--but it did draw me into the game effectively enough, much more than the average conventional-task game tends to. My only problem with that part of the game, really, was that the solution came too easily; I wanted to have to rely on other senses, follow a complicated pattern, something, but the payoff was a bit mundane.

After that, Friday Afternoon becomes fairly conventional, though enlivened by a good deal of wit; one of your co-workers has responses that echo those of the hacker in Lurking Horror, for one thing, and the solution to the problem of looking up a phone number is entertainingly zany. (At least, zany in a bored-and-trapped-in-an-office way.) The only puzzle that really breaks IF rules is one involving repeated actions without the first few failures being clued--i.e., the player might give up after a try or two, since the responses don't indicate that you're getting any closer. With some tinkering on that--feedback that changes, some reason to believe that pursuing that course will lead you to the goal--the puzzles would be fine.

A secondary but just as significant problem in Friday Afternoon involves a certain calendar and what it assumes about you, the player--namely, that you're a straight male who enjoys having pictures of women in tight clothes in your office. While this certainly doesn't do anything for the game, in my eyes, the sexism involved isn't so painfully blatant that it's offensive; I found it a bit annoying, I suppose. (When I played this one, I had already encountered Leaves and its much more juvenile example of the same problem.) I don't think that the existence of the calendar in the game is itself wrong, but there are a few lines that could be better put--namely, in a description, you're told that it's from August 1997, "but that isn't what you're looking at, is it?" And elsewhere, when you find a note indicating that the company's female employees are offended, you smile and note that the management won't see the calendar in its current location. No, not outrageous, but still a little obnoxious on both counts. Imputing thoughts or feelings to a player can be very effective when well done, but these aren't thoughts or feelings that are really worth imputing, given the assumptions involved. My feeling is that the calendar should still serve its purpose in the game--but that the suggestion that it, er, does whatever it does for you should be removed. (And, I must say, the answer to "read calendar" is quite amusing.)

Some have objected on similar grounds to the central premise of the game--you need to get out of your office by 6:00 lest you miss your date with Tanya, and your date with Tanya is particularly important because you want to prove to yourself and to the world that you're not a nerd. Not a particularly noble reason for going on a date with her, true, but the game doesn't say that it's the sole reason or that you have no actual feelings for Tanya, merely that you feel like a nerd and are tired of that feeling. My feeling was that this is simple tell-it-like-it-is; for many people, going on a date--either the first one ever or the first one in a long time--serves as ego reinforcement, a sign that you're attractive, interesting, etc. It isn't particularly fair to the other party involved if that's the only reason, but the interests of comedy are at stake here; it's not as funny, somehow, if you're anxious about missing your date because you're desperately in love, and this is supposed to be comic, not tragic.

All that said, there are plenty of things to enjoy here, notably an "Easter Egg Hunt" in the hint menu that gives the player interesting things to try--with a prize in the form of the original release of the game. I didn't find many of the Easter eggs involved--though I wouldn't mind getting a push, particularly for "re-creating a scene from The Graduate". There is plenty of deadpan humor in the writing, for example when you try to move a stack of boxes and get this: "You'd rather not do anything with it: you might hurt yourself if it all fell on top of you, and you don't want to go on a date with Tanya with band-aids all over your face." Or a reference to a desk as "taking up space," to which the author adds "(Much like Marc's job description, from all you've seen him do." The view of your co-workers is consistently amusing, even if they're a bit stereotyped; the sugarcube is a very funny take on office boredom.

Though there isn't a lot about Friday Afternoon that will stay with the player, the author should get credit for not doing much wrong. Using the phone, admittedly, requires fairly specific syntax, and the scoring system--where you get ten points for significant tasks, but one routine action gets one point--is a bit odd. But the game is entirely free of grammar problems (the author is Dutch, though it's not clear what his familiarity with English is). There's a time limit, though it's sufficiently loose that you really have to be lost to run afoul of it--but it does provide some measure of tension, the puzzles work the way they're supposed to, and the whole thing's done with a measure of humor. I gave this one an 8 on the competition scale.