I wasn't going to buy anything in the latest Steam Sale -- nothing really leapt out at me except games my laptop is unable to play -- but then today, 34 hours before the end of the sale, I decided to have a look down my Wish List.
Turned out there were a few Wish List games on sale for $10 and under, a couple of which for a measly $2, so I thought to myself, "Eh, why the hell not," and bought a couple of things that I'm certain I'll actually play and not have just sit there for the next ten years (or until a CME event renders us all powerless).
We play as Carl Stein, family man and government slave. Within the first few minutes of the game I couldn't help but smirk at this one piece of dialogue.
"Many citizens still think their private life is their own business."
How remarkably accurate, amirite?
Anyway. We are Carl and we are the new landlord of this wonderful establishment! We get to poke and pry into people's private affairs, and, best of all, we get choices. I LOVE games with choice and consequences. Like in Don't Feed the Monkeys when I was accepting random parcels from the mailman instead of refusing them, got given cocaine, sold it for a few hundred thousand, then got arrested! HAH!
Yes. Choice in games is totally my jam.
Except when it's Mass Effect and you ruin your friendship with Wrex and have to shoot him on the Citadel in #3. That's never a fun choice. Never playing renegade again. 😭
But, I digress. BEHOLDER.
We get to install surveillance cameras all over the place, riffle through peoples' belongings (providing they're not home at the time), peek through peep-holes and gather information about our esteemed tenants, then ultimately choose what to do with them.
One of our tenants has an apple in their drawer. Apples are forbidden under a new directive. Shall we have this sucker arrested? Sure! Why the hell not.
While you're busy spying on your tenants and fulfilling missions for the government, sometimes your unsuspecting tenants will ask you for help and offer you quests, money, and a chance at reputation points!
As will your loving family that you're mostly neglecting in order to spy for your glorious leaders. From what little I witnessed, it looks like there are some rather significant family choices too. 😬
I'm enjoying my time with the game so far. Except for one incident where I had a worrying bug where no one was able to use the doorways to climb up the stairs ~ a google-search informed me that the only way to "fix" that bug was to start a new game. Seriously.
That was just a bit game-breaking... you kind of need to be able to travel up those stairs, and the tenants were stuck too. Ugh.
I was unimpressed, but was enjoying the game enough to give it another try and thus I started my new game and thankfully I didn't come across the error this time around.
In this particular playthrough I was a bit of a dick to everyone and very quickly got my comeuppance.
But otherwise: it's interesting, the gameplay is intuitive with hardly a learning curve at all, I really enjoy the premise, and I'm looking forward to having another go later tonight after my son goes to bed.
Maybe I'll survive a bit longer this time! Hehe.
All screenshots in this post courtesy of me, 
