I am perhaps holding this to too high of a standard, this is just intended to be a cute little demonstration of the Steam Deck hardware, but I think that even in that regard it wasted a lot of the potential that is has. Most of the demo is spent watching mildly amusing skits in an extremely exaggerated version of the sillier parts of Portal 2 before being presented with extremely rote tasks that fail to actually show off the features of the hardware very well.

The only things this game actually teaches you about the Steam Deck that are not immediately obvious just from looking at it are:

• It has a microphone.
• There are buttons on the back.
• It has a gyroscope.
• How to use the on-screen keyboard.

With only the last of these being points really being something useful to take away afterwards. It demonstrates gyroscope aiming and gestures towards the touch pads existing (they are represented as trackballs on the eponymous desk that you can spin but only do anything in one brief segment where you are just meant to mash all the buttons willy-nilly anyway), but doesn’t really demonstrate the usefulness of these.

The vast majority of games will not support gyroscopic aiming out of the box and the Aperture Desk Job does nothing to indicate how to actually set it up, or that you might be able to set it up, for any other game. The hardware features are shown but the actual power of these features—the software that allows detailed control customisation and the thing that would be of much greater benefit to tutorialise—is not mentioned at all.

Even aside from that I wish it was more simulationlist and let the player sit still for longer with a specific control setup and let one explore the physicality of the various controls rather than rushing on to the next gag.