Capturing the ways we relentlessly destroy ourselves and others for big business, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is our 2021 Indie Game of the Year.
I previously said this about the game, and I still stand by it. “Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is a crafty management sim, and one that simultaneously has you enjoying the genre while questioning the morality of the processes of business. That it can juggle that enjoyability while having you asking yourself unsettling questions about your behavior makes for impressive work.”
In it, you are working the organ trading market, continually finding fresh organs for an increasingly hungry clientele. While you can buy low and sell high as much as you like, and also do your best to keep your organs from devouring one another in your ship, it always feels like you’re steadily becoming overwhelmed. And if you can keep your feet underneath you and stay ahead of what your clients need, it feels a bit like you’re just feeding organs into an endless maw, working soullessly until your mind and body can’t take it any more. If that doesn’t strike you, perhaps the nature of your trade – organ dealing – may strike you as abhorrent. But does it make you stop? Or do you keep moving forward to make those numbers go up?
Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator draws you in with a clever business simulation, but it’s truly impressive elements are its bleak moments. In realizing that you are feeding an endless appetite for destroyed lives, in acknowledging that your own labor is making that devastation happen, and in seeing that this work is destroying you and your soul for something as simple as money, it asks you to question what you do in your own life. What you give up in order to ‘make a living’. What you trade of yourself, or force others to trade of themselves, so that you can make a few more bucks.
It’s a scathing look at business and what our capitalist systems take from us all. It asks us to look within and ask ourselves what we’ve already given away, even if it’s just through our silence. And what we ought to do to try to take our pride, art, and souls back.
Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is available now on the Microsoft Store and Steam.
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