Remain At Your Desk wants you to fake a 9-to-5 while gutting the corporate network

Most clicker games are about counting up. The numbers go up, you click faster, you watch them go up faster. Remain At Your Desk flips the framing. The numbers still go up. They just belong to your employer, and you’re the one quietly siphoning them off.

The pitch is two jobs. The first is fake. You sit at a cubicle, click through tickets, file reports, sync databases, and look busy enough to keep getting paid. The second is the real one. After hours, you tunnel into the same company’s network and pull data that isn’t yours. Crunch Moonkiss Studios bills it as a “Cyberpunk Incremental Clicker”, and the whole game is the tension between those two clocks.

The trailer leans hard into the bit. It’s tongue in cheek, but the systems shown off underneath are doing real work.

Two economies, two clocks

Where most incrementals give you one resource and a long upgrade tree, Crunch Moonkiss Studios builds a split currency system that does the genre’s heavy lifting in a different way.

Credits come from the day job. They’re plentiful. They buy automation, faster clicks, fewer reports, more time on your real work. Intel comes from hacks. It only drops when you breach something, so it’s rarer and riskier. Intel feeds its own tree of upgrades, and those upgrades make every future hack faster and more dangerous. Push hard enough and the Black Market opens, where intel buys permanent edges that survive every prestige reset.

This is the part of the design that’s actually doing something the genre doesn’t usually do. You’re not optimizing one curve. You’re balancing two against each other, and the riskier one is also the one that scales harder.

Personas, leverage, and the audit you don’t want

Every hack raises suspicion. Push too far in a single shift and security starts paying attention. Eventually an audit lands on your desk, an interrogation follows, and if your story doesn’t hold, you’re demoted to Intern with nothing in your pockets.

To stay ahead of that, you build a roster of personas. Each one carries different bonuses but burns out if you over-rely on it. Suspicion creeping up? File a fake report. Wipe the logs. Lean on a different cover.

The smarter long-term move is leverage. Hit different target variants and you build a dossier for each one that survives resets. The email server tells you who hates who. The security network tells you where the cameras don’t reach. Executive files show you how the org actually works. That kind of permanent, target-specific knowledge is what turns this from a clicker into something closer to a corporate stealth roguelike with spreadsheets.

A solo dev with a free build already up

Here’s the part that bumps this from “neat pitch” to “actually playable right now”. Crunch Moonkiss is a solo studio run by Jared D., a NYC-based developer with a background as an award-winning film composer. He’s also working on a music-driven tower defense called Groove Defense, which gives some context for why the audio cues and pacing in this trailer feel more deliberate than the average idle game. The release target on the press kit is late 2026, with the Steam demo planned for a window before that.

In the meantime there’s already a free, in-development build on itch.io. It’s labeled an early version, but it’s been receiving active updates, including recent passes on the tutorial, UI, and colorblind options. That mix of “wishlist now, play a rough cut today” is unusual on Steam, and it’s a reasonable bet for the kind of player who wants to stress-test a clicker’s loop before paying. If your only experience with the genre is afterthoughts like idle tab games, this is closer in shape to Cookie Clicker crossed with the social-engineering layer of something like Hacknet, except the table you’re stealing from is actively trying to figure out who you are.

Worth a wishlist

The reason this one is worth flagging early is the framing. Incremental games rarely have a tone. Remain At Your Desk has a tone. It’s a satire of office work that lets you literally play both sides of the resentment. You fake the busywork your real bosses think is the job, then use the tools they handed you to gut them. That’s a sharper hook than most clickers ever attempt, and the systems sketched out so far look built to support it instead of just dressing it up.

If you live in this genre, throw it on the wishlist. If you want to see how the loop holds up before launch, the itch.io build is free. For other recent indies worth keeping on the radar, the River Drift discovery and our Wax Heads launch coverage are the catch-up reads.