Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, announced last week with an extraordinary trailer, does largely what it says on the board. “The information is in the title,” says Steam’s description, blatantly written by developer Xalavier Nelson Jr. “There are detached meat products from foreign and human bodies, and you’re sure to buy and sell them.” That is, then. But, in a surprising exclusivity, I can also reveal that SWOTS currently supports the Xbox Kinect (2010) as a control peripheral, making it probably the last Kinect game.
It is not clear why this is the case, because 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 and intense rounds of gaming, each representing a one-day trade in an organ market driven by Space Warlords requirements. It’s played through a painful but still pretty green-on-black UI interface that looks like an annoying scientific version of an 80s stock trading terminal. And again, it can be controlled with a tracking system. obsolete movement. Fortunately, it also supports mouse and keyboard.
There are currently 31 organs at play, although Nelson says this is scalable and can change “if I finally wake up in the middle of the night and decide, once and for all, that my teeth are actually an organ.” The current list of interiors includes familiar human parts, such as hearts and pancreas, as well as strange alien organs that interact in difficult ways if you store them together. Everything is much less bloody than it seems, although it is still impossible to describe the aesthetics of the game without using the word “pulsating”.
One of the Lords of Space War is a dog named Chad Shakespeare. Nelson told me about a few others, but it occurred to me quite late in the interview that he did a little about Space Warlords, which would have existed in our reality, without breaking the kayfabe for a moment. Honestly, it’s pretty hard to talk about this game without looking like I invented it. But to be fair, it looks right on my street.
Probably all this is to be expected from Nelson, a man with relentless enthusiasm, who believes in driving a concept until its wheels fall. He develops and publishes SWOTS as Strange Scaffold, under which the label still works at An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs. For this project, Nelson contracted work from Ben Chandler for the studio specializing in pointing and clicking Wadjet Eye, pixel artist Julian Minamata, composer RJ Lake, artist Judith McCroary and VR developer Sam Chiet, renowned Desktop Goose, who is apparently responsible for Kinect thing.
SWOTS will be with us on Steam at an unspecified point in 2021, when you will be able to buy and sell all the organs you like, as well as – in Nelson’s words – “finally realizing Microsoft’s hardware dream of snatching an organ in the air and moving it with his hands ”.
Disclosure: Xalavier Nelson Jr. has written for the Rock Paper Shotgun many times and is a close friend of Ghoastus.