Despotism 3k (PC)

In a post-apocalyptic sci-fi future, mankind has brought itself to ruin. A small bunch of humans survived, only to be enslaved by an evil AI that forces them to work and breed to keep its own engines powered. It seems like the stage could be set for one heroic person to rise up and free these people from their tyrannical robot ruler, but instead, we as players find ourselves as the evil AI in this darkly humorous inversion of the expected dystopic fiction.

 

Despotism 3k is a resource management game all about strategically managing the enslaved humans. To help with softening some of the bleak situation, Despotism 3k dehumanizes its people, portraying them as featureless pink humanoid shapes who never show much character or personality. At worst, you might read about certain individuals trying to escape, the robotic ruler you play as depicted more as a cartoonish villain who delights in being evil and cruel without the player having to really witness anything too dark. While the humor of the experience is definitely dark and sometimes deliberately twisted, it swings towards being over the top like old grindhouse films, delighting in being violent and lascivious without crossing the line to where things might be disturbing or hard to read.

The humor is certainly meant to draw players in the same way many games where you play as a villain does, but there is a difficult gameplay core to Despotism 3k that will require smart thinking and careful management of your human resources. The computer has five machines of interest the humans will interact with in different ways, the most important being a wheel they run in to generate the power needed to keep the evil AI alive. To produce more humans involves pairing people up in the breeding tube, and to keep the workers from croaking, you must have some working in the food machine generating enough food to keep the people from dying of hunger. It is possible for them to die of exhaustion as well though, meters below each machine showing how tired the humans are and the storage capsule being where they can rest and regain energy before being moved to one of the working tubes. If you need to manage your population numbers or get some quick power and food though, you can always deliver some humans to the bioreactor to be dissolved, and while it is tempting to simply use the bioreactor in a pinch when your population is too high to sustain or you need some food and power in a hurry, it is actually a pivotal part of the kind of ruthless management needed to succeed in Despotism 3k.

 

The relationship between all the machines is incredibly tight and must be managed closely to make even a decent amount of progress, the two storylines containing 25 days you must survive through, each day made up of six 20 second segments where your power will be drained at the end of each section. Things start slow and manageable, but as your power requirements grow, more people need more food, and your capacities gradually grow, you’ll need to upgrade your machines appropriately, manage your workers effectively, and do so quickly to squeeze as much efficiency out of your workforce as possible. Despotism 3k is almost entirely designed around the gradual learning of how these systems must be balanced, the two storylines much easier once you get a feel for the rhythm of upgrades and worker allocation but the exact way to space things out coming mostly through learning by failing again and again, a loss requiring a restart from Day 1. This can make the almost identical early game start to drag as the game waits a bit to start putting up a fight, but Despotism 3k definitely requires tight management skills to survive. There are unlockable modes to try and give the game more longevity outside of its two story modes, some being as simple as difficulty settings while others will change fundamental rules about the way humans and machines work. However, none of them shake up the core design in a way that would feel remarkably different, the parameters for success usually just shifting the way things are managed rather than requiring a different type of thinking. The way this difficult time management game tries to really shake up its challenging but repetitive design is through random events, and these only end up undermining the entire experience.

Despotism 3k caps off each day with a randomized event from a pool of referential and sometimes humorous shake-ups to the game. Presented in text boxes where the player will need to pick replies from a set of options, these events, besides being the primary means through which the game injects its black comedy into the situation, can alter the way your machines or humans work, the right answer potentially providing bonuses to productivity or new capabilities. A wrong answer may end up hurting your work though, damages to your equipment, human loss, and other downsides waiting for you if you pick certain choices. What the best outcome might be isn’t always clear even if you get that the game is referencing something, one pivotal choice in particular asking you to recognizing a reference to a minor moment from the cartoon Rick and Morty, and since you are a villain, the reward for behaving badly or behaving reasonably isn’t always going to be the same across these multiple choice events. Even when you start to recognize them and know the optimal route, the next problem emerges: some are no-win scenarios. Sometimes, the best outcome to an event is irreparable damage to your food machine, the death of some of your human workers, an entire machine going offline for a day, or some other impediment that you might not be able to afford. The randomness of when these might appear on your 25 day survival journey means they can pop up early and completely sabotage a run or spring up late and throw a monkey wrench in an otherwise sustainable work flow. You can get boons from these of course, some so good they can even make up for bad management, but the complete randomness of them and the fact some have no positive outcome can lead to good runs getting abruptly ruined. For a game that already can feature stagnation and repetition, the possibility things go belly-up at the random whims of fate makes trying to succeed seem less skill-focused and too contingent on things outside the player’s control.

 

This is pretty much just a poor implementation of Rogue-like elements. Rogue-like games will often feature randomized elements that are meant to make each playthrough different in some form, but where Despotism 3k differs from its fellow members in the genre is the execution. The best examples of this style of game rarely forces you into a bad decision; if you come across a negative upgrade or item you can often choose not to pick it up or ever use it, and oftentimes your skill can even overcome any negative modifiers. Not so in Despotism 3k, where the relationships between systems is so strict that you can find yourself in a losing situation if the wrong random modifier is thrown into the mix. A better idea for longevity comes in the second storyline, but even it has its problems. The stories involve the evil AI trying to understand its existence, so in the second story it begins sending people out into the world as represented by a branching chart of locations to explore. This is only a menu instead of a true break from the single screen you see during most of the gameplay, but sending your slaves out can reward you with more resources or the key items needed to complete the game. The problem is this portion of the game has the mission success rates contingent on how many people you send, and since the parameters for success are already so tight and prone to random shake-ups, you can’t really afford to send people on a mission that could fail, the time and resource cost potentially too devastating to waste in the long run. Thus, you pretty much have to send out enough to have a 100% success rate, and while this is achievable and adds a new layer of management that can be appreciated despite the all too risky option of trying a less than perfect excursion, it also gives another aspect that can be hurt by the ways the game throws you randomly out of balance with its event system.

THE VERDICT: Despotism 3k could have been an intellectually challenging resource management game that, while repetitive, could have provided the satisfaction of sussing out how to make the systems work, new mechanics and modifiers requiring the player to adjust their approach to succeed. However, even with dark humor to spice up the experience, the delicate balance of the game can be broken in an instant by the random events where players sometimes can only pick a detrimental option, the unpredictability of these meaning that a run on pace for success can be sabotaged at any point if the wrong one crops up. While potentially not all that engaging without the random potential for positive and negative modifiers, the way the Rogue-like elements were integrated leads to much more frustration and failure than random delights.

 

And so, I give Despotism 3k for PC…

A BAD rating. Figuring out how to succeed at Despotism 3k at all is a challenge in itself, learning the ins and outs of the systems, how best to make them work together, and dealing with the ever increasing demands having the room to be challenging even if the management can get a bit automatic and rote after a while. Trying to implement a shakeup to keep player interest isn’t a bad idea, and things like the excursion system give a clear goal to work for despite the percentage of success system being a joke. The random events aren’t even poor in concept, but the fact they can crop up at the end of any day and can potentially only provide negative consequences turns a game that seems to be about expertly managing intertwined systems into one that is also heavily dependent on luck. Having your hard work thrown out already feels disheartening, but then having to push through the same processes again with the knowledge it might also crumble in a way outside your control makes it hard to get invested in Despotism 3k, let alone wanting to try its different modifiers since those challenge modes might just screw you over with a random event as well.

 

If you remove the punishing random events, you aren’t left with a truly excellent game by any means, but one that can scratch that itch of wanting to see a well-oiled machine operate at peak efficiency. It provides a challenge that requires thoughtful balance to overcome despite the repetitive nature of it, and while the black comedy surrounding it does help it feel less like a chore, the negative impact of the random events are what truly makes Despotism 3k feel as bad as the future it depicts.