Space Drilling Sim is a corporate poverty simulator

Space Drilling Sim came out a couple days ago. I played it for a few hours.

tl;dr if you love being given a one quart cup of water and told to piss a gallon or be fired: this game is for you.

The conceit of the story is blah blah global warming blah energy crisis. A rock of Unobtanium hits the earth. Generic evil megacorporation goes waow we can burn this for fuel. Wagies get shipped off to die in the coal “draxnium” mines.

The actual gameplay is more like Evil Genius with claustrophobia¹. Your whole base is a Tetris inventory in a limited space and ten vertical layers. Corridors are free but staircases are not. Some buildings take up more than one floor–so the level above refineries has less space available. Some buildings also require access to the edge of the building–so refineries have to be placed on the outer border. This part is neat.

Minion management is done by having to build a tedious amount of needs-satisfiers. You need oxygen generators, but also water generators, but also electrical generators. Bedrooms store eight people. Bathrooms claim to service eight people (but its more like sixteen. ) Canteens also service 24 people (but its more like fourty-eight. ) I think this is because there are separate day and night shifts and people only use these facilities during their shift. The game doesn’t really explain this. But it does have meters at the top of the screen for how much space is left for bedding, bathrooms, and food².

It shows how many meals are currently cooked and not eaten. It does not tell you how much canteen capacity is left.

Minions also have skills. Minions basically only have a single skill and they can only ever do that one thing³. Refiners are above moving boxes. “Handlers” are dedicated box pushers. 3D printing needs a skill. Growing plants needs a skill. Cooking needs a skill. Despite being far out in the solar system and in cramped spaces you have to fill up three floors of a cramped platform with fifty employees because they went to blobdamn college and will not touch a crate when the station needs it moved. That’s for poors! This drives you to fill up the place with habitats which in turn need showers which in turn need water generators. It’s also not really strategic. You have to hire an entire Costco of employees for basic functionality.

Also not really explained is that being a medic is a secondary competency some employees can have. They will stop doing their real job and run to the infirmary as-needed.

This would all be kind of okay. But the game has the default lazy capitalism story of “line must go up” where you have to make a certain cash goal every day or lose. The amount of cash required goes up every week. The game lampshades the fact that the quota doesn’t respond to the fact you can’t physically do certain things yet.

“Ah! I can get ahead of this by building a fourth refinery and hiring all eight people.”

“No. Your supply line only permits 3 refineries.”

“Ah! Let’s see about getting some more supply lines.”

“No. Not allowed.”

So the gameplay loop is mostly the game shitting on your head endlessly about rising revenue demands that the game itself also blocks you from managing. You have to reach a “level 2” station before you can worry about that. You do. The game lampshades the fact that level 2 is still rising your quota without giving you the ability to actually expand the facility beyond its initial limit of 3 refineries. You get “compressed draxnium” containers instead.

These containers require polymers. Building rooms requires polymers. Running two refineries full time producing quota will use up all your polymers. A mandatory trade mission appears to introduce the interstation trading mechanic–they want 18 polymers and you will not blobdamn progress to rank 3 without dropping all of your production to satisfy them. You fail a quota. Rep goes down⁴. You deliver the polymers. Rank 3 appears.

You are now legally required to make even smaller bedrooms as an arbitrary requirement. These have to be researched because interstellar fuel companies are deeply incompetent. Lines must go up, the game still hasn’t allowed you to expand your sources of materials. Corporate sometimes doesn’t send shuttles because the weather is bad–this doesn’t apply to the quota ship though.

Corporate forgets to send ration packs. You’re supposed to get enough rations to feed employees per day unless you don’t. Employees are mad that there’s no food. You cannot buy food. You cannot spend any of your treasure hoard of cash to buy a stockpile of food for storm days. You have to buy techs (wait several days for research to bittorrent hentai or whatever) to be allowed to grow food that people eat. Deep-space companies are so incompetent that they don’t have any idea what humans can eat or how to grow any of it apparently. These meals then require three separate crops if for no reason but to waste slots⁵ It’s not a “more varied = better” like most games. It’s literally you must grow these three things and then have a licensed forklift operator walk them down to the canteen.

So you are forced to wait days for research, days for plants to grow, download jpegs of a bedroom⁶, cook salted wheaties, before management allows you to drill for more space oil. Or at least I assume that eventually happens. I crumpled up the install and threw it in the garbage before getting to rank 3.

As far as I can tell the game is more about pathfinding around arbitrary roadblocks more than anything. You aren’t really getting an operation going, struggling to fit in modules, claiming territory, getting better modules and refactoring. You’re just being told you suck and when you ask the game about doing something about that it replies “no, fuck you.”