The most unexpectedly honest survival game you will play this year does not take place on a desert island. It takes place in a tiny apartment, and it might hit closer to home than you are comfortable with.
Survival games have an honesty problem. You pick up three rocks and a stick, craft an axe, and fell forty trees before lunch. Nobody who has ever held an actual axe believes any of it, but that is fine because survival games are not trying to be realistic. They are trying to be fun, and the fantasy of competence they sell is a large part of what makes them enjoyable. Unemployment Simulator 2018 takes a different approach entirely. It is not realistic either, but it is honest in a way that most games in the genre are not, and that honesty is what makes it one of the more quietly remarkable experiences available on Steam right now.
What It Actually Is
Despite the name, Unemployment Simulator 2018 is a new game with a free demo currently available on Steam. The setting is a small apartment. Your resources are empty beer cans and an increasingly desperate mental state. Your crafting system produces application letters rather than axes. Your threat is not wolves or exposure or starvation in any dramatic wilderness sense. It is the grinding, mundane, deeply unglamorous experience of being unemployed and trying to hold yourself together while the walls close in around you.
The game asks you to manage anxiety, fatigue, and dopamine levels alongside the basics of daily survival. Wash the dishes. Apply for a job. Brush your teeth. Take a shower. On paper these seem like trivial requests. Anyone who has been through a period of depression or long-term unemployment will recognise immediately that the game is capturing something true: that doing the absolute minimum to function can feel like an enormous achievement on a bad day, and that bad days accumulate.
The Mechanics of a Bad Day
The anxiety meter is the game’s central pressure system, and it redlines with a consistency that feels deliberately uncomfortable. Your fridge is nearly empty. Bills are accumulating. The rejection emails keep arriving. You need to manage your stress somehow, which means choosing between options that range from playing guitar to watching television to drinking a few beers to sitting on the bed with your head in your hands. None of them fix anything. All of them provide temporary relief. The game understands this dynamic with an empathy that is rare in any medium, let alone a video game.
The phone is a risk. Sometimes it is a cat meme or a match on a dating app, a small dopamine hit that briefly improves your numbers. Sometimes it is a text from your mum, which the game handles with a specific and recognisable dark humour. You love your mum. She is also stressful. The game does not need to explain this further because it does not need to.
Sleep does not provide the relief you might hope for. Dreams in Unemployment Simulator 2018 are either humiliating or genuinely disturbing, the classic anxiety dreams of teeth falling out and public nakedness rendered with an attention to psychological accuracy that suggests developer Samuel Lehikoinen has spent some time thinking about why our own brains seem to work against us when we most need them on our side.
The Darkness and the Fun
It would be easy for a game built on these foundations to be purely punishing, a misery simulator that mistakes discomfort for depth. Unemployment Simulator 2018 avoids this with dark humour and genuine craft. The minigames are well designed. The animation quality is excellent for what appears to be an indie production. The computer game you can play within the game is called KILL EVERYTHING, and it delivers on its title with a cheerful absurdity that offsets the surrounding bleakness effectively.
There is also something stranger going on underneath the surface. A lucid dream sequence and a mysterious letter lead into territory that the game leaves deliberately ambiguous, somewhere between the hallucinations of an exhausted and isolated mind and something that might be a genuine encounter with something beyond the apartment walls. It is a tonal risk that pays off, adding an unsettling layer of intrigue to what might otherwise be a straightforwardly depressing experience.
At Pale Shadow Gaming, the philosophy has always been about genuine reactions to games rather than performed ones, letting the sessions go where they go and capturing what actually happens. Unemployment Simulator 2018 is the kind of game that produces genuine reactions, the kind that are quieter and more complicated than the excitement of a raid clear or the frustration of a difficult boss. It is the kind of game where you are given a prompt to press a key to cry, and you press it more times than you expected to.
The Honesty That Sets It Apart
Samuel Lehikoinen states on the game’s Steam page that Unemployment Simulator 2018 is based on real events, and it shows. The specific textures of the experience, the particular quality of boredom that unemployment produces, the way that time stretches and contracts when you have nowhere to be and nothing confirmed to look forward to, these are not details that come from research. They come from having been there.
This is what separates the game from the broader survival genre that it superficially resembles. Survival games are usually about competence under pressure. Unemployment Simulator 2018 is about the specific kind of incompetence that depression and financial precarity produce, and the way that the most basic tasks become mountains when your mental health is at its lowest. It is not comfortable. It is not meant to be. But it is honest in a way that feels valuable rather than exploitative, and that distinction matters.
Unemployment Simulator 2018 is available as a free demo on Steam. The full game is in development.
article by paleshadowgaming
