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Watch trailer on Steam ↗Layer8Problem
Schnaftikus Games · Published by Schnaftikus Games
27 achievements
Last updated 5 Sept 2026
Welcome to IT hell! Survive as GlobalCorp's only sysadmin – for a single day or a whole week. Fight absurd tickets, collect loot and lower your pulse with coffee. Keep the boss radar and your aggro down to still have a job at 16:30 – without throwing your monitor out of the window.
£2.49
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Price history
Indie, Simulation, Casual · 2026 · More under £5 games
About this game
Welcome to Layer8Problem – the ultimate sysadmin simulator!
You are Miller, the only competent IT administrator at GlobalCorp. Your job would be great, and quiet, if it weren't for the users. Because the biggest security risk in any company is always sitting about 30 cm in front of the screen – the notorious "Layer 8 problem".
Your goal? Survive the everyday office madness until you can finally clock off at 16:30. Without getting sacked. Without setting fire to the server room. And above all: without running out of coffee.
How does it play? Layer8Problem is a satirical, text-based decision game with resource management. Every email, every phone call and every trip to the coffee machine forces a decision on you. Do you handle it professionally, or do you take the path of maximum laziness? Every answer you give moves the three values you survive on:
Aggro: Stupid questions drive your blood pressure up. Reach 100 % and you lose it completely, and your monitor goes out of the window.
Laziness: Why do today what you could simply ignore? Dodge the work too often and the boss gets suspicious – and punishes your decisions harder.
Boss Radar: Quietly browsing the internet or sabotaging a colleague is funny – right up until the boss notices. Fill the radar and you get a written warning, then the sack.
Two ways to play
Working Day. One shift, 08:00 to 16:30. Survive until clocking-off time – by the evening everything is forgotten, and tomorrow you start from zero again.
Working Week. Monday to Friday in one go, and here nothing is forgotten. What you leave lying around today is still lying there tomorrow. Your backpack comes with you, so does your reputation, and your laziness certainly does. The valve and the written warning come once per week instead of once per day – blow up on Tuesday and you have no second chance until Friday. And on Friday, from 15:00, the weekly meeting is waiting. Nobody escapes the weekly meeting.
What is waiting for you at the office?
Over 1,300 events: From the "accidentally deleted internet" through burning printers to the Nigerian prince in your inbox. You decide whether to help, to troll, or simply to hang up.
IT emergencies against the clock: 38 incidents with a countdown. When the ransomware hits or the cooling in the server room fails, the timer starts. Solve it before the time runs out!
The office ecosystem: Meet colleagues drawn with affection and no mercy. Rescue Kevin, the apprentice, from total meltdown, endure the buzzwords of Chantal from marketing, argue with Frau Elster from accounts, and learn that Egon the caretaker is best bribed with duct tape.
Collect legendary loot: 32 items – dusty USB sticks, energy drinks, ancient Windows 95 manuals. With the right item in your inventory, hopeless situations can be solved "creatively" (a hammer is, after all, just another troubleshooting tool).
The building remembers
Office politics (the reputation system): Every action has social consequences. Do you cover for Kevin when he takes the network down, or do you grass him up to the boss? Your standing with the seven colleagues – from the grumpy caretaker to the choleric CEO – shapes your working day. A good reputation unlocks story paths and favours; colleagues you have annoyed will make your life hell.
Decisions with an echo: The machine you had Kevin reinstall turns up in the rack hours later – with a dragon sticker and a program selling compute power overseas. Leave Gabi hanging and you will find a drawer in the tea kitchen that was not there before.
The knowledge: Miller writes down what he finds out about this building – about the colleagues, about the people who keep calling, about rooms, and about affairs nobody started that are running all the same. The pages fill themselves, across weeks and fresh starts alike.
Reading for after hours: A diary that narrates your day every evening. A company chronicle with blank pages at the back, which Miller fills in by hand. A noticeboard carrying notices you caused yourself. And an intranet that reports, in the finest corporate prose, what you got up to today.
Choose your working day
Not every day at the office is the same. Match the challenge to your nerves: play "Friday" (easy) for a relaxed run, take "Wednesday" (normal) for the classic madness, or face "Monday" (hard) – where the flood of tickets is merciless, warnings are scarcer, and the boss forgives nothing. For the Working Week you choose something else instead: how rested Miller turns up on Monday – rested, irritated, or in need of a holiday.
English and German
The game exists in full in both languages – not just the menus, but every single event, the inbox, the phone chat, the intranet and the knowledge. You can switch in the middle of a run: the save file does not depend on the language, so the week carries on exactly where it was.
Steam features
Unlock 27 achievements, compare your failures against other sysadmins in the global statistics, and use cross-platform cloud saves to carry on the fight against the users seamlessly – even in the middle of a Working Week. Your friends list, incidentally, gets to see whether you are currently hiding in the server room or surviving the Synergy Gala.
***
The idea for Layer8Problem came to me in a completely pointless, far too long kick-off meeting at work. What started out of sheer boredom as a tiny text adventure in a CMD window has, over time, become the madness you see here. I develop this game entirely on my own, in my spare time, driven by a great deal of heart. Buying it supports the continued development and future updates directly.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
- Processor: 2.0 GHz Dual Core
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Integrierte Grafikkarte
- DirectX: Version 10
- Storage: 500 MB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX kompatible Soundkarte
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 11 (64-bit)
- Processor: 2.5 GHz Quad Core
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Integrierte Grafikkarte
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 500 MB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX kompatible Soundkarte
Supported Languages
*languages with full audio support
Latest news
Patch NotesOfficial
Version 6.2.1
Maintenance, and two things the game held out but never handed over: an achievement and a chronicle line.MacGyver never completed. The tool set was looking for a cable under a name the game stopped using in 6.0, so however much you collected, it stayed one short. It works now.One of Müller's chronicle lines could never be written: the evening he actually documents the server room asked after a flag under the wrong name. The pen works now.Svelte and Electron are a version further on. Nothing in the game changes with it.Read full article on Community Announcements (seluce)AnnouncementsOfficial
Version 6.2
Sound and feedback:When the day ends the music stops. The report, the curve and the diary page are there to be read, and silence after eight hours of office noise carries that better than another track. It comes back with the next morning.A decision that costs 30 or more anger or boss radar now makes a sound - a short, low hit, in the same synthesised voice as the rest of the game. Until now those moments were the only ones with no sound at all, while a menu click had one.Using an item shows what it did on every bar it moves. Only the boss radar had a floating number, and exactly one item raises it - so for every other item the bar simply dropped with nothing to say it had.Kevin and Egon have faces in the two emergencies that are entirely about them. The other boss fights are infrastructure with nobody in them, and stay that way.That sound answers to the sound setting, the shaking to the shaking setting. Switching the shaking off used to take the feedback away entirely; now it comes through the other ear.The Synergy Gala:The invitation used to ask for its eight badges on the difficulty you were playing, and it could be earned once per difficulty. That was meant kindly, but the evening is the same on all three - and anyone who played mixed difficulties ended up with eight badges spread over three tiers, no complete tier, and no way to find out why. The eight now count wherever you earned them, and the evening happens once per career.You can see who you have already won over: the team view marks a colleague whose own story you have seen through, and says so once the whole house is behind you. What the invitation still wants beyond that is left for you to work out.The noticeboard and the company intranet have each heard of the gala - one wondering, one in writing.The evening itself got denser. The smokers' corner remembers something about 2019 - and standing there in silence is still an option, on purpose. Egon runs a late-night taxi service, the mirror ritual in the w...Read full article on Community Announcements (seluce)Patch NotesOfficial
Version 6.1.1
The rules of the game:An action that crossed closing time and raised the ticket warning at the same moment left the day running - and the extra action that followed could no longer end it, however badly it went. Warnings have their say and the day ends anyway; the same held for the safety valve at full anger.Mails now weigh the same as everything else: they quietly used a softer difficulty multiplier, shrank relief values on easy days, and their minutes never brought tickets.Ignoring a mail logged a smaller radar penalty than the bar actually moved. One number now.Phone-chat endings now cost the time they say and take the items they say - every ending used to cost a flat 15 minutes, and the prince's black card stayed in the backpack after returning his millions.In week mode, the silent hotline still answered tickets: with the day's calls spent, clicking the idle line kept removing one ticket per click.An ending caused purely by using an item was queued but only shown after the next unrelated event. It shows immediately now.A consumable reward from a chat was silently dropped if you already carried one, and a snack morning could stuff an eleventh item into a full backpack.The day curve ignored mails and items - a day that went badly wrong could show a chart with no spike in it, and the diary then called it calm.The diary claimed a day without lies as soon as your excuse stock had grown overnight, even if you had just used one. The chronicle also accepts the pen on a fresh morning now."Sloth" was unreachable with laziness pinned at 100, and "High-Wire Act" was skipped when one long action carried the tickets straight from eight to ten. Both can be earned now.On a day started from the picker, the team view's arrows stayed frozen at zero and the diary could never name who moved.Steam and a second machine:Playing on a second machine could overwrite the first machine's career - achievements, found items and the chronicle regressed to the newer install. The two archives un...Read full article on Community Announcements (seluce)AnnouncementsOfficial
Version 6.1
Presentation:The bug report form has lost its emoji; the note underneath carries a proper interface icon.Several achievements at once - one long action can cross several gates - now arrive one after the other, stay a little longer together, and the stack slides when one leaves.The boss-fight countdown bar runs smoothly instead of stepping twenty times a second.On the desktop the phone grows while a chat is open, so a long message no longer has to be scrolled through a tiny window. Only the log below makes room - buttons and inventory stay put - and it comes back when the chat ends.Chat bubbles slide in from their own side instead of just fading, and the chat header shows who is typing.The texts:Twenty-four result texts have gained a beat. They said in one line what had cost an hour or a written warning, or passed a verdict where a scene belonged. The punchlines that work short stay short.Five result texts still read the display out ("Deine Wut sinkt massiv" above "Aggro -20"). They say what happens instead.Bug fixes:On Linux with two graphics cards the Steam version could take so long to start that Steam gave up. It starts immediately now, with hardware acceleration as before.Let a boss fight's countdown run out and the stats hit, but the result box stayed empty. The failure text shows again, and the knowledge notes that unlock on boss fights can actually unlock now.The knowledge note on Wuttke's Excel mail quoted a subject line the mail never had. It reads the mail it describes now.The towed Golf on the charging point belongs to Egon in both places now - the tow result used to name a man from sales while the furious follow-up mail was Egon's.Escape closes the knowledge book and the week's condition picker instead of opening the settings on top of them.The diary could stay empty for a whole session, most reliably after a language switch on the start screen. It fetches its texts itself now.Switching language during the tutorial left the speech bubble in the old langu...Read full article on Community Announcements (seluce)AnnouncementsOfficial
Version 6.0
English:The game is now available in English. In full, not in parts: every event, the inbox, the phone chat, the intranet, the noticeboard, the knowledge, the company chronicle, the achievements, the morning moods, the excuses, the news ticker, the diary and every label around them. Around 11,600 texts, a good 650 standard pages.It was translated scene by scene, not word by word. Where a punchline does not carry in English, it has been rebuilt - Kevin's nickname for Miller, for instance. What draws its effect from the German stays German: the Mettigel, the TÜV, the Döner, the colleagues' names. Müller is called Miller, which is the literal translation and the same joke: the most common surname in the country, and therefore nobody in particular.There are two places to switch: at the bottom of the start screen with a plain DE | EN, and in the settings. The one on the start screen is deliberate - anyone who ends up with the wrong language cannot go looking for a settings menu whose label is in the wrong language too. On the first start the browser decides, in the Steam version the language set there; anyone who has played before stays with German.The switch happens on the spot, without reloading and without losing anything: in the middle of the day, in the middle of an event, in the middle of a phone chat. Everything on screen comes along, the log and the open conversation included - a week you began in German can be finished in English. Save files are language-independent.In the Steam version, everyone now reads the friends list in their own language. Until now it showed the player's - play in German and you were off fetching coffee for your English friends as well.Lunch break:The break now has a memory too. Run ten kilometres with the running group and you feel it on the stairs the next day; let the sales rep take you out for sushi and you find a summary in your inbox in the morning saying "as discussed", although nothing was discussed.The seat at the board's table s...Read full article on Community Announcements (seluce)
