Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator review – ghoulish satire of human greed

Xbox One, Series X and Series S, Microsoft Windows, PC; Strange Scaffold
Our compulsion for profit is smartly skewered by this simple game set in a trading-market where the currency is body parts

It's been a bumper year for the slavering ghouls that run some of the games industry's biggest publishers, who have found fresh ways to extract value from players through NFTs and cryptocurrency while producing little of value. Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, with its economy of dripping kidneys and fresh-plucked nerve clusters, feels downright wholesome by comparison, a truly rustic post-capitalist digital hellscape.

It's a premise as old as time: buy low, sell eyes. And spleens. More of a frantic clicker-game than a strategy sim, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is only slightly more complex than a screensaver, though still chemically compulsive. Days are split between navigating a fleshy stock market, and trying to outbid cyborgs and dogs with names like Chad Shakespeare on the freshest human cuts. Think eBay as overseen by Harlan Ellison's Allied Mastercomputer. You accept orders, wait for the organs to show up, grab them before a rival trader does and try to make a profit. As you progress, your customers get fussier. Organs are graded like trading cards, or Destiny loot drops. Where does a mythic lung come from, anyway? No time to think about it. The market wants what it wants.

Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is out now; 15