Management sim Manifesto is the first game ever without politics: Grind workers into dust under your bootheel in a carefree romp that is 'definitely not about the video game industry… stop reading into things that aren't there'

MANIFESTO Reveal Trailer - YouTube

A paradox: videogames? They're pretty good. The videogame industry? It's bad. Like, mondo bad. A brutal parade of layoffs and exploitation, where grinning execs make out like bandits and everyone else is grist for the mill. One day, of course, the revolution will come, sweep away bourgeois society like so much dust, and the era of mankind's prehistory will end.

It all looks rather appetising. You're a CEO overseeing ranks of underpaid workers who toil away in small neon cubicles. Your goal is to grind every millilitre of surplus value you can out of them before chucking them, broken and burnt out, into a black hole. Rearrange your peons into the most productive arrangements, and generally produce Balatro-like numbers on the back of a vast amount of human suffering. It looks quite enjoyable.

It is also, just in case you're sat there getting ideas, "definitely not about the video game industry… we wouldn't dream of it. There's zero chance we would use the medium of video games to comment on the fact that 1/3 of developers were laid off in the last two years. Or that CEOs and upper management take huge bonuses, while employees take all the brunt of their crappy choices. Manifesto is just a video game, stop reading into things that aren't there, okay?"

Well, I'm convinced. Though I will say, despite clearly being a parody of the videogame industry (which is a true nightmare at the moment), I think it's also just, well, kind of a parody of industry in general. I'm pretty certain viewing your employees as anything more than raw material for your money-generation engine puts you at a disadvantage, as a capitalist. If I check a list of the richest guys on Earth, none of them are famous for their empathy.

Workers toil in Manifesto. — (Image credit: No More Robots)

Anyway! Manifesto is from Breakpoint Games, who made the similar Relentless (though I get the impression the studio has buffed up its art team in the time since that came out), and is coming soon. You can check the game out on Steam.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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