yes, I try to type that name from memory every time, and yes, I often get it wrong. It originally came out of my head as SOWTS instead of SWOTS.
I had skipped over SWOTS many times on gamepass because the name was, frankly, too wet for me, but upon learning xalavier nelson jr (Hypnospace Outlaw writer, etc) was the director behind the game and that the game involved lots of Simplistic High-Speed Capitalism, I decided to give it a try.
simon says for organ orders
I took about an hour from start to credits last night, achieving one of the game's 10 (?) endings, and I can say that the description is accurate, the music slaps way harder than I thought, and that I pigeonholed myself into a suboptimal gameplay experience. I read more about the game afterward and I think it was definitely my fault, however.
at its core, the gameplay of SWOTS is an order fulfillment game, about opening the UI to one tab where you accept a bunch of RPG side quests asking for a heart, an eyeball, and an inky black void between stars, then chanting "heart eyeball void" to yourself repeatedly as you tab over to the market and try to ebay snipe these items from a junk pile of entrails and among us beans (not a joke) before a dog, a robot, and a child purchase them from under your own personal eyeballs.
this in itself provides an incremental-like sort of gameplay trance, where you fill your book with orders, go to the market, and then trigger-finger on anything that matches for a nearly-guaranteed profit (the game's intro is correct by saying "you only lose money if you want to"), and you slowly hone your skills at listing-hunting by understanding the average price of an amogus and learning how to read the product code that indicates "among us bean, grade 57, blood type AO-, mythic rarity, large size".
capitalism, ho-rgans
this is itself, a fun, if not shallow, gameplay loop! for better or worse, if you are me, you can unintentionally play the game entirely like this, reaching an ending by making easy money taking simple requests which just ask for specific items (meaning that you only need to identify the pictures and not read the barcode carefully).
this meant ignoring most of the depth that the game slowly unfolded to me - playing the stock market, interacting with other traders to cool the pressure on the market board, and organizing purchased inventory in your cargo hold (as I did not realize items both decay and can affect other items in storage), to name a few.
during my play, I never "understood" how to manipulate the market nor the intricacies of the cargo hold, so I never upgraded my ship or bought stocks, instead just dropshipping items 4 requests at a time.
is 'you can ignore everything and just make money' subtext or game design
similarly, the game has some light story which unfolds through the descriptions of special requests, some of which are marked and will trigger (non-terminal) ending cutscenes, but I missed some of the story beats because each 150-second trading day is fast-paced and encourages you to skim the requests for the operative word (Lung) in the name of optimal profitmaking.
overall, what I felt is that I enjoyed the game, but I understood that I could have enjoyed it more if I felt the need to actually interact more with the deeper mechanics of the game - in a sense, I ignored a lot of it because the cost of understanding how it worked was too mentally or economically great to budge me from the simple path I was on.
in a sense, I felt like I broke the game, but not in the way where you feel euphoric knowing how the game works enough to bend its systems to your will. and I think if I played it again knowing this, I would be able to break it a bit more correctly.
top comment: "You'd expect a dark and gloomy melody from a song with this name but it's actually really lit and motivating, just like selling spare human parts"
I'd like to give my final point to the music in this game, which completely caught me off guard in the "I know everyone said the music was great but I didn't know the music Slapped" sense. I was expecting some moody, ambient, dissociative work, but trading music is frantic, fast, and impressively chip-uplifting, and I love it to pieces.
finally, there's at least one interesting interview with nelson about intentional friction in the game which helps contextualize everything a bit more. thanks for the game!