A parody of the common farming game convention of the city folk moving into the countryside to start a farm while teaching history from leftist perspective.

So the game start with a the scene of a country person stuck in the booooooring farming job, until they heard about the awesome life in the city where there are a lot of jobs and cool brand spanking new technology. So they move to the city and starts out in a tiny tenement and have to work in the factory doing repetitive tasks for 12 hours a day.

Now the satirical/subversive part is how the game is presented. When you start out in your dinky little flat the game presents you with an upgrade menu that teases tons of upgrades: bathtub! oven! new wallpapers! more rooms! wallpapers! And so on. So you go to the factory and do the minigames to represent work.

When you start from raw material, the game shows its value starting from something very small like 1 money or something, and as you finish each minigames the goods becomes increasingly valuable until it is worth 100 money; enough for a new wallpaper! Then you toss it in the collection bin, producing 10 goods that day. Then you get into the sleeptime income screen and you get... 10 money. Alright, you have to work for 10 days to get the new wallpaper, I mean in other farming games even the beets need at least 3 days to grow. Except that after food and heating you're down 3 money.

And when you're working, the game presents you with a XP bar for the job. Oh, that means if you work hard enough you will be promoted and get paid more right? Well, when you're halfway through filling it you got hit by a paycut that turn your wage into just 0.5 money per goods, and when you filled the bar you got presented with... nothing. I guess your supervisor congratulates you or something, but materially you get nothing. I suppose with the setting fictionalized, maybe you'll get a worthless ribbon or certificate or something.

This will go on indefinitely and the player might thought of talking with the supervisor, which leads to your character getting told to get back to work. Repeating this again would lead your character getting beaten up. Of course, one option is to talk directly to the boss. So you go up to his mansion, and the guard shoots you in the face.

Might try writing this on Twine.

  • ElGosso [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    When the bar fills up it turns out it's some district production benchmark and you just get a $20 gift certificate to a restaurant that isn't even in that city and is totally useless to the player