So after the abject failure of my last attempt, the next morning when I went to work I took a number of reference photos, as well as looking up several photos from the movie Office Space. I agree with Ymedron that conveying the boring office quality had more to do with environment dressing than color scheme. I tried to alter that in my edits below.
@Tourist:
I liked your thin drawer/larger drawer idea, and incorporated it. My own cubicle has the same (though it's a thin drawer, then two larger drawers, but I didn't want to take up that much room). My cubicle also has the inlet handles, but I after toying with them, I decided that visually I liked Decroded's edits with the extending handles more. Going along with Ymedron's suggestions, I added some office artifacts, though I'll likely add more (a picture, particularly, and eventually a chair, though it'll need to be animated, since I'll show the main character standing/sitting in it). Your vent suggestion is also accurate, looking at my reference pictures, and I'll try to add those in.
@Decroded:
Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for your edits. I feel like I really was able to see where I was going wrong with my look, especially with my usage of light and shadow. I don't feel like my own edits are quite as good as yours, but I cannot express just how incredibly much looking at your stuff helped me understand where I was lacking and where I could improve.
Also, my deepest apologies for making the submissions enlarged. I was inserting them at 3x size, as that's the size the game will be displayed at (and thus, the size I would always zoom out to to check how it looked overall), but I'll be sure to not do that anymore.
Anyway, here's my latest rendition. It still needs some work, but I feel like it's a great improvement over what I had initially. As always though, if you want to point out something wrong or something that can be improved, I'm all ears! (also, to note, that monitors are just a matte color because they'll also need to be animated when the main character is working)
