I’ve changed a lot throughout my life, but there’s one part of me that I’m positive will remain consistent until I die: I will never become a stock market guy. Don’t try to sway me. Nothing you can say will ever change this. You can call it a smart investment, but I call it gambling. Why would I bet my money on a bunch of companies run by people who have the power to make one stupid decision overnight that can wipe out entire fortunes? I’d rather become a Rock Paper Scissors hustler — sounds like a more financially stable strategy!
Wall Street may never understand me, but Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator does. The latest shitpost-turned-game from Strange Scaffold, out now on Steam, is a full-on stock market satire that puts an absurdist spin on that ludicrous concept. Interstellar baby-betting becomes an apt metaphor for one of society’s most alien rituals. Even if the one-note joke wears thin, it reaffirms something very important: That I should not be allowed anywhere near a stock exchange. Good God.
A spin-off of 2021’s hysterically chaotic Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, Baby Simulator is one of gaming’s few stock market sims. It feels like a spiritual cousin to the Nintendo 3DS StreetPass minigame Market Crashers, but with a much darker setup. In the future, babies have become the most valuable resource there is. And where there’s value, there’s an industry rushing to capitalize. A market arises in which people buy and sell infants. Well, sort of. They’re really trading stocks that simulate a baby’s life, from birth to the exact moment of their death. It’s a clean bit of satire that needs little explanation beyond the elevator pitch: Capitalism makes products of us all.
So, how does one actually… trade a baby? After choosing a story scenario, in which you have a certain number of days to meet a profit goal, you’re given a few alien babies to choose from each day. Once you make your selection, the markets open and you’re tossed into a line graph. As the graph simulates your baby aging, that line starts rising and dipping based on the different milestones of its life. Helping out a neighbor? The value of your baby goes up. Speaking out against the government? The price drops. Just like the real stock market, your goal is to buy shares when your baby’s value is low and sell when the value is high. As in, you want to invest in your kid when its life absolutely sucks.
Strange Scaffold gets some grade-A comedy out of that buy-and-sell hook. Each baby has its own absurd life story that’s told through rapid-fire text events. One of my kids got a value boost when he bought a gun… and then proceeded to bottom out when the buffoon kept accidentally shooting itself. Other kids will hit rock bottom only to mount a movie-worthy comeback story in which they rise to stardom… only to suddenly die in an airlock accident at age 45. There is a bounty of laugh-out-loud moments throughout the six campaigns available at launch, though the joke loses some bite anytime I see a great goof that felt handcrafted for one story mechanically repeated in another baby’s life.
Additional systems both increase the nuances of the moment-to-moment trading while strengthening that satire. You can short a baby. You can place side bets on babies. You can hire an advisor who will try to predict things about your baby, like how long it will live and its expected floor price, but they’ll take a cut of your profit in return — and also they’re just wrong sometimes. Everything you do is an elaborate gamble. The only thing you can really count on is that there’s no predicting how one’s life is going to go.
The risk-reward of it all is maddening. Every time you think you’re up, something is bound to go terribly wrong. You pick a real fuck-up of a baby that quickly dies in a stupid accident. A short attempt is thwarted by your dumbass kid “turning their life around” or whatever. You buy big anticipating a marriage that’s about to raise stock value, but instead the little shit has to run his mouth about the government. It’s a comedy of constant errors in which you are destined to learn nothing and keep dropping your money into a garbage disposal.
As you can no doubt guess by now, I am terrible at Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator. But I don’t imagine that it’s a game you’re supposed to be good at. It works as a stock market satire because so much is out of your control. How can you possibly know if Apple is about to reveal a real bomb of a product? Or if Ubisoft is planning to upend its entire business overnight? You can try to read the tea leaves to take educated guesses about how stocks will perform, and you can diversify your portfolio to ensure that all your eggs aren’t in one basket, but you may as well be betting on football games. Every time the market opens, it’s any given Sunday.
Additional campaigns and content are coming to Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator over the next two months, but you can get the point within an hour of play. After that, you’re largely repeating the same bit, but with interchangeable traders and a few more random events that shake up the pace and cost of a day. It’s all best enjoyed as a short cautionary tale. Boot it up, lose thousands of dollars, pull all of your money out of any company investing in AI, and lock it in a safe hidden below the foundation of your home.
