Bret Devereaux

As a CEO and James Bond villain, I worry that remote work will allow my staff to avoid the trapdoors I have placed under their chairs.

May I suggest that Evil Genius 2 is actually quite good and you might enjoy it? Though for the most part, the trapdoors that lead to sharks are for enemy agents and not your staff. For the most part.

I actually read mostly disappointing reviews about the lack of tutorial/instruction especially if you didn't play the first game.

True. The game is poorly explained. There is increasingly a proliferation of steam guides which fill some of that gap. The difference between an efficiently designed layer and an inefficiently designed one is considerable and that isn't made clear.

Unfortunately, the same holds true for Spellcaster University. Even the guides aren't particularly helpful about the underlying statistics and needs. I don't understand why devs today do this. They're not making a Dwarf Fortress where the mistakes you make ARE the game.

I've noticed that - a tendency for games, especially smaller studio and indie games - to be massively under-documented. My guess is that it's a result of genre-shifts. You can really see in the aughts a deliberate shift away from the heavy manuals of earlier games...