Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, announced last week with an extraordinary preview, largely does what’s on the lookout. “The information is in the title,” says the Steam description, which developer Xalavier Nelson Jr. said. blatantly wrote. “There are smooth, stand-alone meat products derived from alien and human bodies, and you definitely buy and sell them.” That’s it, then. as a peripheral control support, which probably makes it the latest Kinect game.
It is not clear why this is the case as Space Warlord Organ Trading is a management game. Partly inspired by Market Crashers, a game developed for the Nintendo 3DS StreetPass system, it revolves around short, intense rounds of play, each representing a day’s trade in an organ market, powered by the requirements of Space Warlords. It’s played via an eye-popping but still pretty green-on-black UI, which looks like a disturbing sci-fi version of an 80-year-old stock trading terminal. And again, these would mean that you have to spend for these processes. Fortunately, it also supports mouse and keyboard.
Currently, there are 31 organs in the game, though Nelson says it’s scalable, and that could change “when I finally wake up in the middle of the night and once and for all decide that teeth are actually an organ”. The current inner line contains familiar human parts such as hearts and pancreas, but also foreign organs that interact in difficult ways if you store them together. It’s all less bloody than it sounds, although it’s still impossible to describe the aesthetics of the game without using the word ‘pulsating’.
One of the Space Warlords is a dog named Chad Shakespeare. Nelson told me about several others, but it only dawned on me late in the interview that he might be doing a little bit to Space Warlords that presumably exists in our reality, without breaking kayfabe for a moment. Honestly, it’s quite difficult to talk about this game without sounding like I made it up. But to be honest, it does seem right up my street.
This is probably to be expected of Nelson, a man of relentless enthusiasm, who believes he is riding on a concept until his wheels fall off. He is developing and publishing SWOTS as Strange Scaffold, under which label he is also currently working on an airport for strangers currently run by dogs. For this project, Nelson contracted work from Ben Chandler of point & click specialist studio Wadjet Eye, pixel artist Julian Minamata, composer RJ Lake, artist Judith McCroary, and VR developer Sam Chiet of Desktop Goose fame, who appears to be responsible is for Kinect thing.
SWOTS will be with us on Steam at an unspecified point in 2021, where you can sell and sell all the organs you want to buy – in Nelson’s words – to finally realize Microsoft’s hardware dream of picking an organ. out of the air and move it with your hands ”.
Disclosure: Xalavier Nelson Jr. has written for Rock Paper Shotgun on several occasions and is close friends with Ghoastus.