Daily Thread: The Sewing of Discontent

I think the game has a nice mix of class anxiety and comedic potential - think Ken Loach's films meet Wes Anderson's :) The newspaper headlines a special treat. It all seems well written; the flow properly frustrates the player (as it should in a game about making ends meet) and the music score is nice. Also, without any blood and gore, the game transmits the cruelty of everyday labor exploitation - it might seem retro but it's actually topical.

All my kids died, and I died from melancholia after reading a book - 10/10! No, but seriously, while game mechanic is fun to play, the game is sending strong message about the working system which can be, in some way, applied to today's time. Recommended!

The game is decently fun, my only problem is the payouts for the owner. I got to a point the Owner was earning about nothing, as he gave ME all the money for product produced, with is well kind of halerious in a pro union game. Easy change just up the amount owner gets per clothing item.

People play games like Flight Simulator or SCUM for realism. They obviously haven't had half their family die because they can't sew to save their life. It happened to me and, thanks to this game, I got to relive that experience. 10/10 would fail at sewing again.

An appropriately stressful game which I managed to be somewhat decent at, surprisingly, after my first run I made it all the way to the end sans 1 child. The satire isnt exactly subtle but it doesnt need to be. My only complaint is that the music can only be turned off instead of lowered in volume, and that the difficulty is kinda rng dependent, I got an easy day early on and it just spiralled into me not struggling with money much. Also, a Bibliography at the end would be nice

Reading can in fact kill you! 10/10 Easy 100% for achievement hunters

I enjoyed this game, a commentary on worker's rights that takes place in a textile factory in industrial Manchester. The gameplay is clever, coming up with a clever mechanic to recreate using a sewing machine. The player has to make their daily clothing quota lest they be hit with a penalty, and they then have to figure out how to balance their living wages in their home life after a day's work. It nails presenting the themes it's trying to convey, I was also curious about it having visited Manchester only a month before its release. A very cool project worth checking out if you're curious about games as a medium for activism.

A very cautious positive review, with a couple of issues that need to be highlighted. The game basically has three parts. A sewing game, a health & family budgeting sim, and the humor and story: 1) The sewing game's controls are VERY buggy in terms of the garment rotation. Even if you continue to move your mouse in the same direction, expect the garment to unexpectedly turn around and swing in the opposite direction. This is frustrating and feels broken, though it doesn't seem to bother the other reviewers, so maybe I'm just bad at it? I personally found it to be impossible to meet quota during a workday: no point in even trying. (Just hold down the fast forward button until it ends.) 2) The budgeting sim is BROKEN. Your whole family is going to die. As near as I can tell, the best strategy is to let them. Don't feed them, EVER. The only person who matters is your husband, and only because he makes more money than you. That said, keep him alive while the children starve. This is the only way I found to get about 80% through the game. I'm not sure it's actually possible to finish. Maybe it's just barely possible if you're actually good at the sewing game, which (as mentioned) I am not. 3) The best part of the game by far is the humor and story, and this actually combines with the problems of the first two points to create something really, really (accidentally?) funny. The main plot is accessible by reading the newspapers each day. This will create the lol scenario in which you are choosing to buy a newspaper with a little under half your personal salary to advance the plot instead of feeding your children. Of course, to avoid a game over, you must personally eat, and so you end up going the humorously sociopathic route of feeding just yourself and your husband while casually allowing all six of your children to die. Their deaths are not even mentioned in passing -- there is the vague implication that you're just chucking them in the crawlspace John Wayne Gacy-style. And as they die, what you WILL be spending your time and attention on is unionizing your workplace! #Priorities There will be a great deal of chatter about the gross unfairness of the capitalists as you: --Complete zero work --Collect your paycheck daily with zero risk of being fired no matter how useless you are or how much damage you cause --Continue to argue that obviously the problem with this arrangement is the lack of a union --Casually starve your useless children Taken together, it manages to project a modern sense of entitlement backwards into an era where there really WERE issues with the treatment and valuation of labor. And, really, that is quite funny!

If you just let your whole family die of starvation, you can slack off for two days. There should also be an option to offer a beer to the owner so that you can leave work earlier around noon. With that option, the owner calls in "sick" for the next day and that day you don't have a quota. Pros -your whole family and children can die of starvation -a sentimental reminder of game dev job Cons -could use an audio middleware like Wwise or FMOD to make soundtrack more dynamic. By the start of the day, music should be calmer, getting more "angrier" and "aggressive" by the end. Maybe Mick Gordon could rework it... or at least, some cheap knock-off from Croatia, idk...

Simple but entertaining game with interesting concepts and far reaching ideas. It takes a couple of minutes to get used to the controls, and then some to actually get good at sewing, but that's the point. The apparent simplicity combined with some novel mechanisms depicts the brutality of the industrial era manual worker quite well. All in all, it is a fun and educational game, but also, it might be more than that, it might be a proof of concept for politically and educationally relevant games with bigger budgets in the future.