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Short, darkly comedic business sim, January 24, 2024"All you brats have been put through Vomit School, but you're the only one who learned anything there. And you have the motivation. Turn this business around, and you stand to inherit something."
A surreal business management sim about vomit. The gameplay is pretty bare-bones. Once you figure out a good set of expenditures - which is mainly a matter of changing the vomit formula - you can more or less stick with it. I won on my first try. (If only running a successful business in real life was that easy...)
A lot of the stats can be ignored - I didn't touch QA or training or processing, for example. The game could also stand to be way more clear on what some of the stats actually do. Right now most of the gameplay is "tweak stat, see if it does anything, repeat". Besides the vomit formula, the other stats I got the most mileage out of were wholesale price, varieties, and gallons produced. (Particularly, increasing varieties to 10 seems to up demand with no downside. What's up with that?) The formula guessing minigame is slightly fun, but also somewhat tedious. (The controls for changing ingredient percentages stat by stat can be really annoying, so I wonder if you could make different formula presets and have shortcuts for setting the balance to a specific formula?
Random events each quarter change the calculations, and though they initially have little impact, I found myself getting surprisingly invested in changing the numbers to max out profit. Capitalism, baby!
The little dialogue snippets you get every quarter are the real gem of this game, though, not the gameplay. Simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. Best of all, the background events aren't totally random but follow a fixed storyline, and you can feel the economic shocks influence your decisions. (In other words: the war is the best part.) The author said this is just a proof of concept, and I hope we get more. Lots of storytelling potential here.
Excerpt:
"He's got his own vomit factory now?"
"Fuck no. He says that's unnatural. What he's started is a center for holistic vomit. That douchebag is telling people they need to rediscover their cultural heritage and reclaim the means of vomiting from the soulless clutches of fat cat industrialists."
"So?"
"So, he's charging people to come vomit in his ugly-ass clay pots."
"You mean he's paying them?"
"No, he's charging them, and those gullible fucks are eating it up!"
At the end, I had 2,261,644 dollars in the bank after about 30 min of playtime. I'm rich.