Nothing quite prepares you for what happens when you first click it. You’re presented with a handful of tabs to flick through that show your status and reputation, available hold upgrades, cargo, and a big red button marked “TRADE”. The game starts with your mentor-cum-antagonist Mentaur Minty introducing you to the organ trade and setting you loose to learn it on the job (there’s no tutorial as such, just a screed of moral rationalisation for the spare part industry). The other factor is that it’s completely unhinged. That SWOTS is one of the few Elite clones to jettison the Buck Rogers and double down on the Derek Trotter, as opposed to the other way around, is but one factor that makes it the most interesting twist on the formula in nearly 40 years. Instead, it’s focused entirely on what is ostensibly the boring bit but is really what made Elite so compelling: buying and selling dubious goods in a morally ambiguous free market. Styled in monochrome green and evocative of sim games that your dad played on the BBC Micro when he should have been studying, what we have here is David Braben’s Elite stripped of what is supposed to be the exciting bit but is actually the boring bit (flying a space ship).
Your interface with SWOTS’ putrid reality is scarcely more elaborate than ’s. This striking sense of place – well, less of a sense and more of a chokehold – is a testament to Strange Scaffold’s skill at world-building. The acrid stench of libertarian economics having been allowed to fester unchecked in a galaxy gone insanely wrong. You can almost smell the decay in the cargo hold as you check your pixelated manifest of extra-terrestrial body parts.
Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is sticky, and squelchy.