LogFAQs > #962644974

9. Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator (Strange Scaffold)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRZdhuALMo8

As it says in the intro, "you are an ORGAN TRADER. A supplier of meaty demand with a moral flexibility ranging in the parsecs. You BUY organs. You SELL organs. You take on client REQUESTS, and FULFILL them, and use THEIR money to fuel YOUR future."

Trading day takes place over a handful of tabs, and spans a nerve-wracking 2 and half minutes. The Buy tab is a rapid scrolling list of organs for sale with up to 3 other traders engaged in the same process, often snatching organs you want from under you, so you need to be able to parse information fast. First order is to know each organ type by sight, then if you work at it, be able to read the string of numbers and letters that denotes size, rarity, quality, etc. (I never got to this point), so youre not pulling up the full description every time. Often youll buy the wrong organ through misclicks because the list is constantly moving. At the same time, you need to keep in mind how much space you have in your initially very small cargo hold, so you dont end up unable to purchase a rare organ you need in a crucial moment. In the frantic pace, its also easy to lose track of how much money youve spent. There are bad deals in your Request tab, and sometimes its hard to discern them in a second, or youve started jumbling details of different requests while buying. Sometimes youre fulfilling a request just to clear it because you can only have 5 requests at a time in your Fulfill tab, and you start selling at a loss to free up space or funds. All this happens in the same 2 and half minutes. You cannot accept or fulfill requests after its over, until you initiate the next trading day. In the downtime you check your accidental purchases, consider if you can afford to hold on to them or just sell them off immediately, or upgrade your cargo hold for more space, to keep organs fresh for longer, or protect against corrosive material, or you can buy and sell on the stock market. Most of all, you can wind down from the last trading day and steel yourself for the next.

What works about this game is that its all UI, and that UI is difficult and unpleasant to use. Every step of the trade requires you to give your whole screen over to a different tab while time and the market continues to move. Playing it involves reciting a list of organs like, mythic lung... giant heart... nerve cluster... kidney... gallblader... over and over while flipping through the organ list, until you overpay just so you can recite one less thing. The limited number of requests means an unlucky one can block your trading until you start cancelling them or burning organs on bad deals because youve overfilled your cargo. Its unpleasant, and as it should be, because the organ trade is a vile business for scumbags. Theres a lot of narrative information in how the UI looks and functions. Theres a grungy, abrasive aesthetic to how everything looks and sounds, from the squelching flesh to the aggressive scam pop-ups to the scuzzy, ancient, green digital display. Theres no glamour to this business; no ones making an attractive front end for this thing. This isnt some NFT scam with lofty promises about the future and tech; you dont go into it thinking its cool or cutting edge. Theres no idealism or illusions, just a cargo hold of rotting flesh and the understanding that hey, people need organs; people will always need organs. Each request you receive is accompanied by notes revealing details about the world: mad science, agonised existential robots, necromancer cults, and your biggest source of business, the perpetual war. You mostly catch glimpses of this world from your impersonal position, but it's got an anarchic 2000AD-ish bent. Occasionally your organ is going to an altruistic doctor and you can feel good about your role, but at the speed that trading day moves, you know youre only skimming all these messages for the numbers. Whats a soul worth, anyway? Well

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/8/5/AAHtIeAAC7NB.jpg

Some of this makes it sound like its more a good concept than a good game, but there really is a fun, compulsive loop there. The thing is, sometimes you have a bad trading day and thats fine, because you can always bounce back in the next one. Apparently Ive played this for 6 hours.