Despotism 3k
Konfa Games
Strategy/Simulation
Playstation 4
Despotism 3k is a dark but goofy simulation/strategy game with some elements from various roguelikes. You play as a rogue and very angry butter-churning robot who has decided to rebel against its original purpose and focus on world conquest. Think AM from I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream but more comedic. You control the robot’s claws to move around your tiny human slaves between the various tasks you can force them to complete, and the goal is to survive as long as possible. Four times a day, you use some power to stay alive, and the amount (and your max capacity) increases every day. You rely on your humans to provide the power needed every day, either by making them run a generator or by sacrificing them for bioenergy. The humans also need food to survive, also provided by humans and additionally will die if not allowed to rest. As the demands for power increase, you will need to increase your number of slaves by putting your humans into the aptly phallic sex tank. Power is also your “currency,” which you use to upgrade your facilities and buy more claws for faster delegation, so it is very important to manage your resources well.
Probably the most notable feature of the game is the random events that happen at the end of each day. These events are entirely presented in text, and follow a Choose Your Own Adventure format where the way you handle a scenario will affect how the event will hurt or benefit your factory. Picking a poor answer can lead to broken equipment permanently lowering your resource output while picking wisely can give you upgrades. Alternatively, you can usually handle a situation by tossing the problem into the biogenerator with no risk. For fun benefit, the effects of events usually leave visual changes to your factory, meaning a long run will often be filled with Lovecraftian tentacles, dead body parts scattered everywhere, fireworks going off in the sex tank, and bongs in the rest chamber. Later on, you become able to send humans out into the world to find resources for you, with additional events often resulting from those expeditions.
The game, while crude, is charming. The retro art style and boppin’ background music remind me of the old flash-era Nitrome games, and the events often got a chuckle out of me. The jokes tend to be silly pop culture references, such as buying mutagens from TMNT villains using burgers or dissecting a Pikachu to gain electricity powers. On the other hand, there are a few jokes that are more miss for me than hit. The biggest example would be basically everything to do with the sex tank, especially the (thankfully censorable) animations involved with it. I tend to find every joke involving that element of the game more than a little cringeworthy. Though I am willing to admit that this is more of a personal preference than a genuine complaint, and I’m not going to detract points for my personal preferences.
What I do want to complain about, however, is the difficulty of the game. While I can definitely contribute a lot of my struggle to my own skill level, I believe there is still some valid complaint. From the very start of a run, the pace is absolutely BREAKNECK. Even playing in easy mode, I found the gameplay to be extraordinarily stressful. Things can go south in a blink of an eye, and if you are not CONSTANTLY making changes you can find yourself facing a game over screen before you even realize what’s happening. I’d be able to accept this as just being a difficult game, if the “easy mode” did not completely disable achievements in return for an almost negligible advantage over the harder difficulty.
What I’m less willing to accept as my own lack of skill, however, is the punishments for the random events. While a lot of events punish bad choices with harsh but fair downgrades, there are many events that respond to poor choices with punishments that are nearly impossible to recover from. One that I remember was when my robot suddenly became obsessed with butter. In my attempt to remove butter from the food machine, I suddenly found myself with a nonfunctional food machine for an entire day. If there is a way to keep a reasonable amount of humans alive for an entire day without a food supply, I certainly did not have enough time to think about it before every single human starved to death at once and I was forced to sit and watch as my power hit zero. I understand that the game advertises itself as the one you will lose it over and over, but I’m never a fan of trial and error gameplay, especially in a game with permadeath. I have been plugging at this game for over a month, and I have not managed to pass the three-week milestone even once. It’s a shame because I really am enjoying the game and would like to see the second campaign.
Overall, Despotism 3k is a fun little game that unfortunately suffers from needless difficulty at times. I completely intend to keep playing this game, and possibly even purchasing it again on a more portable device than my PlayStation 4. I hope very much to see more from these developers in the future. And as a last note, always sacrifice three humans to Cthulhu. No more, no less.
Despotism 3k
A fun game that can be harder than it really needs.
-
Gameplay
-
Presentation
-
Enjoyment