Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, announced last week with an extraordinary trailer, is largely delivering on what it promises. “The information is in the title,” says the Steam description of it, shamelessly written by developer Xalavier Nelson Jr. “There are cut, detached meat products derived from alien and human bodies, and you definitely buy and sell them.” That’s that then. But in a surprisingly exclusive way, I can also reveal to you that SWOTS currently supports the Xbox Kinect (2010) as a control edge, making it probably the last Kinect game.
It is not clear why this is the case as Space Warlord Organ Trading is a management game. Inspired in part by Market Crashers, a game developed for the Nintendo 3DS StreetPass system, it revolves around short, intense game rounds, each representing a day’s trade in an organ market powered by Space Warlords requirements. It’s played through an eye injury, yet pretty green-on-black UI, which looks like a disturbing sci-fi version of an 80s stock trading terminal. And again, it can be controlled with an outdated motion tracking system. Fortunately, it also supports mouse and keyboard.
Currently there are 31 organs in play, although Nelson says this is scalable and can change “when I finally wake up in the middle of the night and decide once and for all that teeth are actually an organ”. The current selection of guts includes familiar human parts such as hearts and pancreas, as well as weird alien organs that work together in difficult ways when stored together. It’s all a lot less gory than it sounds, although it’s still impossible to describe the aesthetic of the game without using the word “pulsating”.
One of the Space Warlords is a dog named Chad Shakespeare. Nelson told me about several others, but it didn’t dawn on me until quite late in the interview that he may have been kind of preoccupied with Space Warlords that supposedly existed in our reality, without breaking the kayfabe for a moment. To be honest, it is quite difficult to talk about this game without sounding like I made it up. But to be fair, it looks good Turn right in my street.
All this is likely to be expected from Nelson, a man of unwavering enthusiasm who believes in riding a concept until the wheels fall off. He develops and publishes SWOTS as Strange Scaffold, under which label he is also currently working on An Airport For Aliens Currently run by dogs. For this project, Nelson has contracted work from Ben Chandler of the point & click specialist studio Wadjet Eye, pixel artist Julian Minamata, composer RJ Lake, artist Judith McCroary and VR developer Sam Chiet, from Desktop Goose, who is apparently responsible for the Kinect -thing.
SWOTS will hit us on Steam at an unspecified point in 2021, after which you can buy and sell any organs you like, and – in Nelson’s words – “finally realize Microsoft’s hardware dream of picking an organ from the sky and move it with your hands ”.
Disclosure: Xalavier Nelson Jr has written for Rock Paper Shotgun on many occasions and is close friends with Ghoastus.