The worst thing you can think of about SWOTS – uh, it’s an acronym! Like a slap in the face of a thrown liver – becoming the organ itself. They are really grim. See how they spin, sparkle and pixelate in your cargo hold; whitish neon veins and ventricles beat under your cursor. They look both freshly peeled and pathetic antiques, like they’ve been plucked from truncated sprites in the Black Isle Fallout games. The tab-based interface is also terrifying: relics of the MS-DOS command-line era, stippled Macintosh textures, and CyberTM wireframes, somehow projected into a distant, nightmarish future, a place you can only get through terse The future of message understanding comes from your customers, some of whom are bleeding. But by far the scariest thing about Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is the music.
Is it possible for the soundtrack to smell? If so, this one will exude Adderall, formaldehyde, stale pizza and several years of sweat, and all sorts of other aromas that haven’t been invented or discovered, and hopefully never will. No, I will not link to Youtube videos. You don’t want these things in your game history. There’s nothing to escape, but you’re safest in the ship’s cargo hold: here, the background soundtrack becomes an echo, a mournful lightness alluding to long, lonely weeks at the helm, accompanied only by frozen kidneys .
Switch to the stock market tab and the beats rise to something ticklish, fuzzy, lewd and obscene, pumping your heartbeat and stimulating your flight response. Worst of all, though, is the theme that plays when you hit the “deal” button and start your day at the otherworldly bazaar of flesh: a cheeky, ascending riff, Zelda’s treasure chest music on Satan on the synthesizer. Good luck and the hunt, intergalactic hawkers of guts! The Milky Way is your gallbladder. Do you have the guts and vision to earn a million credits? If not, don’t worry – the heart and lungs will do the job equally efficiently.
It’s a simple enough simulation with all the anatomical details: accepting requests from the buyers tab, some of which are time-sensitive; buying organs from the market feed; handing them to them via the completion tab. Each trading day lasts two minutes and you can’t determine a quote in advance, so you need to hurry. The biggest headache is the market feed. Organs of every rarity, freshness, and size are constantly being added to it, and are constantly being poached by competitors with their own expertise and level of decisiveness or dexterity. You also have to worry about having enough room in your cargo hold that organs will slowly decay and depreciate; some non-human varieties will leak caustic fluids and grab your slots until you pay to fix them. You can buy larger hulls, including ones with freezers, to keep these tufts extra crispy. But in the short term, you may want to take advantage of the human soul’s restorative abilities, which increase the condition of any immediately adjacent organs. The human soul is classified as an organ is everything you need to know before playing SWOTS, really.
The more you trade, the higher your reputation, which slowly unlocks more valuable non-human parts to trade. The higher your reputation, the more you start ignoring individual buyers in favor of growing and selling organs on the stock market. You can buy shares of specific organs: prices are influenced by what you do each trading day, but they can also be influenced by random narrative events, such as eyeballs that arrive unexpectedly for a rotating position. More exotic meats require more careful handling. For example, some organs eat other organs. Try not to store them for long periods of time.
Your competitors go out of their way to ruin everything for you; you can read their profiles on the trader tab before each day begins. What every SWOTS player hates is Chad Shakespeare, a grinning canine tycoon who traded bald eagle eyes for a mythical liver. Part of your distaste for him stems from knowing he has money to burn and seeing the whole thing as a sport, even though that probably takes the character more seriously than I do. But your biggest opponent is the interface, which is carefully designed and not fit for purpose.
Owned by lead developer Xalavier Nelson Junior Post in detail About the art of building gaming experiences around friction and abrasiveness. In this regard, SWOTS is a master class. Organ fodder is a roller coaster of frustration, a rolling anxiety attack commensurate with the obscenity of your profession. Accidentally buying the wrong item is commonplace because between scrolling to something and clicking on it, the feed refreshes. Another trader usually snips a high-value organ from under your thumb (you can at least see which items they’re examining).
I often forget that I don’t have more room to produce more products and click frantically for seconds on an unresponsive buy button. It’s impossible to look at the market, your cargo hold and the request screen at the same time, which creates further bubbling panic as you skim through the garbled bulletins and arrange your stomach for the best, always aware that quality meat may be out of your pocket squeezed out of the fingers. So instead of wasting time hitting the “check” button, you need to look for ways to speed up your reaction—for example, by deciphering organ barcodes. You also learned to cheat and pay other traders to take time off when you need more time to think.
Amid all this chaos, a story with multiple endings is advanced by accepting gold frame commissions. The universe gradually introduced itself. There is talk of never-ending war: many of your regulars are soldiers on the front lines. There are pop-up scams—a strange relief because time pauses while you read them—and predatory mentor images. On the surface, at least, there’s a chance to be a good guy: One, penniless buyers need materials from organ cloning farms, which could bankrupt you. Your character also has a dark past, although I think most people who make a living selling alien entrails do. Some of your buyers know about this. You can bribe them to keep quiet, or see what’s lurking deep in a maggot wormhole. That said, you can find time to join the plot thread while arguing with Chad Shakespeare.
The need to enjoy SWOTS, in order to shorten your gut, understand that you don’t really want to enjoy the game, or even be particularly good at it. Your belief that organ selling is a vicious business is not one of the ironies of capitalism that turns a horrific reality into a sinful pleasure. It’s a very unpleasant work, both in terms of what it asks you to do and how it forces you to do it. When you’re allowed to digest it, the text can be very interesting: the progress screen counts your playtime based on the number of breaths you take, which can, for example, trigger a very unwelcome response to your own, heart-pounding corpse reflection. But the humor is unsmiling, laced with fanaticism, and based on a feeling that everyone and everyone in this fly-infested universe is hopeless. It is possible to become addicted, master the stock market and watch the credit roll in, but there is always an overriding awareness that you are hurting yourself.
