Division of Labour
In Division of Labour, the player takes on the role of The Manager in a developing nation called Auriverde during a world ecological collapse.
The player manages the workforce and machinery of a factory, fulfilling contracts and earning profits for the Overseer Corp. Buying resources, manufacturing goods, managing the workers and facing moral and ethical decisions are the core of the game.
Compassion
The player has the option to make their workers more comfortable to improve efficiency, or pay them more to increase worker happiness. Events may occur where the player can do a favour for a worker, give time off for a holiday or generally try to help them.
Exploitation
However, Overseer Corp always demands larger and larger profits, and so balancing these becomes the core of the game. To make greater and greater profits, more sacrifices will need to be made and corners will need to be cut.
Storytelling
Along the way, the player will be presented with moral and ethical decisions regarding their works and the world at large. Whether it’s simply a worker who needs time of for medical reasons or an earthquake on the other side of the world sending migrants flocking to Auriverde for work and security, there’s always decisions to make.
Development Progress
A playable demo will be available very soon. To stay up to date with development you can follow our site. For now, consider adding us to your wishlist!
Read More: Best Management Automation Games.
Bouncer Story
So if you like light resource management games you will enjoy this game. I played it for almost 4 hours straight yesterday and the time just flew. I did finish my first playthrough in this time so it is a short game but fairly priced around 5 bucks cause it’s pretty fun.
– Real player with 6.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Management Multiple Endings Games.
My playtime: 5h (based on Steam, finished the game, Kiss of Death ending)
Intro
Bouncer Story tells a story of you, a bouncer, who suddenly amassed a lot of debts in a single day from gambling. The thing is, you’re in debt to the mafia, and there’s no telling of what they will do if you can’t pay the debt in time. You’ll have to use your wits to earn a lot of money while paying for rent, debt, and skill points to survive the harsh job as a bouncer.
Pros:
- Multiple endings
– Real player with 5.0 hrs in game
Game Director Story
Game Director Story is an unflinching and satirical look behind-the-scenes at how big-budget AAA games are made. Based on first-hand accounts by industry veterans, Players will experience the emotional roller coaster of guiding a team through the agonizing decisions and compromises needed to ship a game.
You will take on the role of a newly hired Game Director in this character-driven narrative experience, responsible for balancing your relationship with your team, publisher, press, influencers, and fans.
Decide how you want to handle real industry situations like crunch, technical debt, inclusivity, micro-transactions, sexism, exclusives and more, and be prepared to deal with the impact of your decisions on your team and the game.
- Based on real-life scenarios
Based on real events contributed by veteran game developers, players will experience the emotional roller-coaster of game development. Experience all phases of development, making difficult decisions while guiding your team to the euphoric finish line of shipping a game.
- Balance competing relationships.
Maintain critical relationships and the frequently conflicting interests of your team, your publisher, the press, and fans, all while preserving your vision and staying on budget.
- Characters with heart and soul.
Get to know your team members through their stories and help them to grow as a professional or overcome personal challenges.
- Sit in on a Team Chat to check in on your colleagues
Sit in on the daily Team Chat to get a sense of how your team is doing, what they’re concerned about, and how they feel about your decisions.
- Deal with unexpected and game altering obstacles.
Live through iconic industry challenges or situations that can occur during development like “Publisher requests a last minute E3 presence”.
- Live with the consequences of your choices
With the clock ticking, choose the decisions you believe are important, and live with the consequences on your game and the team.
- Real, but humorous.
While GDS tackles real industry challenges, a healthy dose of humor and satire keeps things light and entertaining, while handling difficult topics in an approachable way.
Read More: Best Management Visual Novel Games.
Welcome to Goodland
You could never have known you would end up in a situation like this, yet here you are: helping a Mexican cartel with money laundering. The cartel doesn’t listen to excuses, and it rarely gives second chances. You would not wish to disappoint them. You know what happened to the last person who did.
And so, you start small in a secluded town in Minnesota; a place surrounded by beautiful forests, yet filled with dark secrets. There are several factions already in play here and they will not want to share their influence with a rising force… but can you survive without allies?
You will need all your courage, ingenuity and perseverance if you wish to overcome the challenges laid before you. Even those closest to you might betray you, but you might also find allies in the most unexpected of places.
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Plan your actions, acquire businesses, protect and promote your business
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Balance your reputation with the police and two local criminal gangs lest your unreliable comrades turn against you
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Make choices and face consequences that aren’t always immediately apparent; there is no such thing as a perfect solution
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Embrace the corruption and climb the ranks in the cartel, try to ask the FBI for help… or find another way to ensure your safety and independence
The Stonks Market
A charming meme game that manages to capture my experience in the stock market frighteningly well. The writing from Vagabond Dog is what you expect, funny and well paced. It’s a relatively short playthrough, but it’s worth to go through a second time if you lost it all when you yolo’d in $JANC the first time. 10/10 would hold again.
– Real player with 5.1 hrs in game
A short, but comical story about a clueless man flirting with the stock market for the first time.
The trading platform sections are enjoyable and are critical to directing the narrative one way or the other. Are you going to lose more than just your money, or will you triumph and end on a high? The story being tied to my trading performance made me care about doing well to potentially get a good conclusion.
I’m about to go through it again and see how my story differs if I YOLO it all!
– Real player with 2.3 hrs in game
This Is the Police
After finishing the main storyline of this game and playing it for ~29 hours, I am incredibly torn on this game. I love it, and yet, there’s some parts of it that really bother me. Ahead may be some spoilers, but I will try to put those in between tags.
Let’s talk core gameplay loop first. There are so many cases you will send officers to and many you will get through through simple math which the game explains to you very early on. This is the basis, but the game offers many distractions. The community will come calling, as will city hall and eventually, bad guys in multiple different shapes. This will eventually get incredibly hectic, which I experienced as fun. There’s a detective (and one other) minigame where you try to piece together the cases frame by frame and I simply loved it to pieces.
– Real player with 31.4 hrs in game
I always have a difficult time writing a negative review about a game that I liked for the most part. So how about I do this: I will first tell you what I really liked about the game, because, if you do like it yourself, you should totally buy it. And then I will explain what I really hated about it.
If you don’t like to read, then watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlLk-t-kCl0
And yeah, I fixed the sound and redid the vid.
So what did I like about the game?
1. 80% of the story. The story is brilliant for the most part. I love novels that put the protagonist up the wall, and when he/she tries to react, they get their backs pushed further up the wall to the point of barely having any control of the situation.
– Real player with 27.6 hrs in game
Epic Tavern
Epic Tavern is a fun and interesting combination of management sim and tabletop RPG. After the tutorial, you start each day off at your tavern. You talk to your customers who usually have pretty interesting story lines, learn of new quests, serve them food and drinks that they may or may not like, get them super drunk, and build your relationships so that you may hire them to do your bidding. At the end of the day, you equip your heroes and send them out into the world on adventures that may only take the day, or it may take several. The success of these missions (and the events on the way) is based on the skills of the heroes and a few rolls of the dice. Many adventures have multiple approaches available to choose from to best fit the skills of your heroes, which means there’s a pretty good reason to play it a few times. After all your teams of heroes have finished up, they go back to the tavern for more alcohol abuse. Wash, rinse, repeat.
– Real player with 372.4 hrs in game
At the heart of EPIC TAVERN is a lack of focus on what is trying to be and executing both game subsystems. On one hand it is a tavern simulator with resource constraints. On the other it is a random event generator in guise with “sometimes” good story elements. You as the bar-keep are tasked with navigating both of these systems. Each subsystem has a wonderful loading screen that is viewed over and over as the game loop progresses.
You can recruit and level up your stock of adventurers in tavern play and then take them out on the road rolling dice. During dice rolls there is the “safe bet” and the “risky” chance to choose from. Even though there are about 5 “actions” to choose from it only boils down to two real choices in its current implementation.
– Real player with 202.0 hrs in game
Pro Strategy Football 2022
I came into this series last year with Pro Strategy Football 2021. A game which, for an old time gamer sparked a lot of nostalgia in the way it was presented. There were things missing like game keeping records for head to head etc I fixed that little itch with a spreadsheet and small things like not being able to navigate to a players career stats from any screen. Still the game was a little gem.
Those things have been addressed with this addition along with numerous other improvements and continued optimizations as the game feels tighter and slicker when loading if that makes sense.
– Real player with 798.4 hrs in game
A tremendous effort by a lone indie developer with a day job. This game was created with love and passion for the game. Know what you are buying first, because it won’t be for everybody. Please read the description and feel free to ask things in the game forum first if you wish. The developer (Kerry) is very honest, open, and transparent - and very consumer friendly and a great guy! (plus it is a really terrific community too).
The game’s strength is the on-field gameplay - and in that department, it is unheralded, producing an accurate, realistic simulation of the game. You will not be controlling the players with a gamepad - it is focused on coaching, or if chosen, spectating games. In the coaching department there are thousands of plays that can be designed on the fly. This year many new formations (both classic and modern) were added and entire leagues (or individual teams) can be tailored to utilise them in ways that create their own characteristics or flavor (and there are mods done by really talented mod authors covering almost the entire NFL, USFL, and various other leagues too –- including fantasy leagues and teams).
– Real player with 355.6 hrs in game
Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind
It’s an excellent game. Surprisingly engrossing graphics, quite a lot of fun to manage your clan, etc. The negatives are… Difficult to cover without some spoilers though. So I’m giving it a thumbs up because as a stand alone it’s a masterpiece. As a successor to KoDP it has definitely gone a bit off the rails. Spoilers to follow so stop reading now.
Yes it’s an amazing game. A couple things to be aware of though, which made KoDP a standout for it’s time but which Six Ages has given up on: unlike KoDP where you were expected to follow the path your ancestors set or you were punished severely, in this one you’re supposed to be “good” using today’s moral compass instead. Seriously. You can’t kill off other tribes, they’re super easy to ally with, it’s almost impossible to lose heros (compared to the original,) you’re supposed to jump on board with everything that’d be attractive to modern sensibilities (slavery is bad, yeah help enemies consistently, etc.) That’s a pretty big departure from the original where if you spit on your clans history you’d consistently be wrecked for it, so yeah. Important to know: Your ancestors were all idiots and the gods actually support going full hippy rather than doing whatever backwards crap those apes cared about. I tried KoDP like that the first time and was shocked how punishing the game was towards applying modern morality to the game. I was dissappointed that all I had to do to be this game on its hardest difficulty was to just disregard literally everything I’d learned about the lore and the world from the original. As long as you’ve never played the original, this is a nonissue; it’s only if you’ve gotten to experience the alternative, where you’re having to make judgements based on how their culture would likely interpret and react to events, that you realize how much actual depth that removes from gameplay.
– Real player with 152.9 hrs in game
A number of your clan’s children have gone missing while foraging. Your people are anxious for their return. What do you do?
** consult the clan’s spirits
consult a god
immediately send out a search party **
King of Dragon Pass 1.9
Six Ages is a great game. It is basically a streamlined version of King of Dragon Pass with various new systems and all new stories and events. You have to manage your clan, make sure people are fed and happy, please the gods, explore lands close and distant, negotiate with other clans, practice magic, fight, etc. etc. I have heard people compare it to the Banner Saga, which I have not played yet, but I think the gameplay is fairly different. In Six Ages, you do all of the actions above by picking options in the various screens and events, not by e.g. positioning armies or walking around places. There are many, many events, which are beautifully painted scenes with text, where you have to make interesting choices that will effect the management of your clan and the world. There is really no other game quite like it; the genre is unique.
– Real player with 132.1 hrs in game
Dark Moon
EMBRACE THE DARKNESS
Dark Moon is a survival strategy game where time is working against you. With the Moon’s electronics down it is up to you to traverse the lunar soil and try to make contact with Earth while managing your crew and resources. You will never know what you will encounter along your way, thus be prepared to make crucial decisions and live with the consequences. Whatever you do - don’t go into the light!
As a member of the Engineering Council sent by Moon Shell, your task was to oversee the construction of a newly developed mining system on the Moon. The simple objective changed dramatically when a massive solar storm hit the Earth, destroying all electronics in its wake. Soon after, you witness the Sun’s scorching heat as the Moon’s main communication relay falls into the light. You are alone, and now everything within the Sun’s reach is gone within seconds. The light is your enemy and the darkness is your salvation.
SOLAR PRESSURE
The Sun is destroying everything it touches, you must avoid its radiance. The Mechaplex - a giant, general-purpose engineering vehicle will stand as your base of operations. It will also serve as your getaway vehicle, thus plan your actions accordingly and escape the tireless enemy. You must constantly move forward.
NON-LINEAR SURVIVAL
A different experience with each playthrough as each location and event may bring unpredictable results. Scan the terrain and obstacles with your drones to prepare for what lies ahead. Embrace or beware of other survivors who will want to join your convoy. Gather minerals and use their properties to increase your chances of survival.
MANAGE YOUR MOBILE BASE
The Mechaplex is your means of survival; build new buildings on top of it, research new technologies, enhance your crew’s abilities, and traverse the lunar plains. Develop new mechanical prototypes that will enhance your mineral gathering or focus on enhancing your convoy’s movement speed to elude the Sun’s deadly grasp. You can’t stay in one place for too long.
IMPACTFUL DECISIONS
You are not the only one who is seeking a way out of this disaster. New crew members, some even pilots such as yourself, can join and bring you valuable abilities and new building platforms, but you have to feed and shelter them. Will you help the unfortunate? Or will you look out for yourself and not risk being betrayed? What kind of person are you?
CREW RELATIONSHIPS
Keep in mind that your crew will react to your decisions. Some members will dislike joining with someone from a rival country while others will embrace him. Decide to throw out a popular member and you may risk a revolt, which may have dire consequences for everyone.