Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator Review
Short everything that baby has touched.
Imagine you’re standing shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of the most bizarre-looking alien lifeforms on a packed stock exchange floor. You’ve got your entire life savings riding on the speculative value of a hominid greyling infant’s future life events. Its share value has skyrocketed to 4500% of where it started this morning, and you’re certain it must have hit its ceiling. With nowhere to go but downhill, you know what you have to do to come out of this with even a single intergalactic credit to your name. It’s time to SHORT THAT BABY!!
This is the feeling that Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator, by indie darling studio Strange Scaffold, is aiming to evoke. I think it is a non-trivial distinction (one that the game makes very clear) that you’re not actually trading babies, but rather trading stocks that represent the value of the babies’ simulated futures. So, the premise is both a good bit more convoluted and a little bit less degenerate and exploitative (but only a little) than the title initially implies. But make no mistake, by design, nobody comes out of this looking good.
Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator in Action
There are winners and losers, sure, but moral failure is baked into the system. Much like our own financial markets. In the best case scenario you clamber your way into leeching off a baby’s relative happiness. In the worst cases, you curse your chosen baby’s good fortune or bask in their demise. After playing just a few in-game days, it was amazing to discover how quickly life events and baby traits mentally get boiled down to ones and zeroes. This is the closest I will ever come to experiencing what my student loan servicers feel like… and it makes me feel dirty. I’m looking at you, Nelnet.
In terms of gameplay, I was pleased to find Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator is fairly straightforward and met me where I’m at. As someone who learned everything I know about financial markets from watching The Big Short, I came in a little apprehensive that I would be out of my depth. But if you can hang onto the fundamentals of “buy low, sell high,” that on its own will get you started. I love a game that starts off with an extremely simple core concept, and layers on complexity as you go, which is exactly what you’ll find here.
There are winners and losers, sure, but moral failure is baked into the system. Much like our own financial markets. In the best case scenario you clamber your way into leeching off a baby’s relative happiness. In the worst cases, you curse your chosen baby’s good fortune or bask in their demise.
A suite of options for the baby futures day-trader
While the core loop offers an approachable concept, the tutorial introduces you to a variety of strategic tools that will (sometimes) be at your disposal during each campaign. Most importantly, you meet a lineup of quirky consultants who you can hire to predict certain characteristics of the baby’s simulated life with varying accuracy… but they each have their price, of course. Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator also eventually unlocks the wide world of baby futures side betting. Each baby has its own side bet, which you can choose to participate in no matter which baby you choose to trade on that day. Will this newborn live to be at least 120 years old? Might they experience the “lost favorite restaurant to flood” life event? Will their value drop to just 48 credits? There’s a side bet for everything.
Visually, the UI is densely packed with all the data relevant to a baby futures day trader’s business. However, I think Strange Scaffold did a great job of using color, size and layout to draw your focus into the most important elements and allow you to tune out the rest until needed. Cluttered and distracting UI is a pet peeve of mine, but I found myself pretty at ease with my little market trading interface. Similar to the gameplay loop itself, as long as you can lock in visually on the current value of the baby’s shares and keep your trigger finger on the Buy and Sell buttons, you’ll get fairly far. Plenty of other information is at your disposal, clearly marked easy to parse at a glance during a trading frenzy.
The future is bleak… but this baby’s futures are skyrocketing
There’s an impressive amount of world building going on in the trading interface itself. As you observe the simulated baby’s life unfold, the life events paint a vague but fascinating picture of life on their home planet. Some planets, ravaged by war, offer lives of military conscription, injury or glory during active duty, promotion or falling victim to friendly fire. Other planets, rich in natural resources, feature successes in vocational training, tragic accidents during manual labor, and small bright spots in an otherwise bleak existence. These small windows into planetary life pair with daily TV newscasts to reveal a society riddled with corruption and a highly distractible public with constantly wavering values. It would be more comical if it didn’t feel so relatable.
Overall the game is broken into several distinct campaigns, varying from 4 to 10 in-game days of baby stock trading. In each campaign, you play as a different down-on-their-luck trader, desperately clinging to their hopes of striking it big by betting on just the right infant. Their various sordid pasts restrict your access to certain features of the game. Traders on the run from the law can’t trade on adjacent planets two days in a row. Traders with questionable reputation can’t access consultants’ predictions.
Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator Trailer
While the campaigns force you to explore a variety of strategies and some jack up the level of challenge quite a bit, I didn’t find that they dramatically changed how I played the game. Most of my success was based on intuition, luck and quick reflexes. Additional features of the game helped the process feel more controlled and less stressful, but the fundamentals stayed the same, making the overall experience feel a little repetitive. I didn’t find myself wanting to play more than one or two campaigns at a time.
In the end, Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator has a strong identity, quirky core concept, and well-refined gameplay loop. While I think the game does hold up a mirror to society at a clever angle, I didn’t find quite enough substance to keep me coming back long-term. For now, I’m shelving my baby trading license, but I’m grateful for the goofs while they lasted.
Get to the point, girl
Emily’s Score: 7/10
Emily was provided with a review key of Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator by FIFTYcc
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