Spinnortality | cyberpunk management sim

Repetitive and poorly balanced. Would have been a more fun game without the board and constant product relaunches. It feels like the dev tried to extend the playtime by making it arbitrarily more difficult.

I cannot get through the tutorial. Tried in September 2023 and again today. These morons have flashing rings around things where you need to click. Anyone with ADHD or epilepsy, stay away from this game! These idiots only needed to put a still, yellow halo to highlight what you need to find. Instead, they bludgeon you with flashing lights. Over a year later, still the fucking flashing lights.

The usual losers will find this funny. Those who consider themselves soooo tolerant, but find the misery of others funny.

Solid strategy game

Normally I wouldn't recommend, but I think if you can get it for a few dollars on sale it's worthwhile. Overall, a very interesting game concept that is technically well-implemented, but lacks a bit in the actual fun of the core gameplay loops. There are tons of options for manipulating governments, researching cyberpunk technology, controlling the media, etc., but a lot of what you are doing on each game turn is looking at marketing angles and deciding what products to launch in each country. The marketing angles aspect is an interesting mechanic, but having to do it repeatedly every turn as the primary way of making money grinds you down after a while and stopped being fun for me.

fun and intersting stories underlying the game

An extremely fun business simulator. I REALLY wish it had modding capabilities, however. It would add so much more replayability, and I already have several ideas for fun mods that I would want to create.

The game could have been fun, if it wasn't for a single, terrible design idea. Your corporation becomes weaker every turn. That's because the income from your products gets lower and your workers' discontent grows higher. So, to contrast this you're forced into one of the most tedious micromanagement loops I've ever experienced. You have to monitor your products across all countries, delete them and then relaunch them. Then you've to raise the salary of your workers, so you get less and less income over time. You can automate some tasks, but it does little to save you from the tedium - also, automation is locked behind a tech. For the life of me, I don't understand the point of this. It's just fake difficulty because there aren't real competitors in the game - you know, the whole point of playing a business simulator - so you're forced to play against the clock in a very artificial way.

This game is fun until it's not.

The most interesting part of the game is going through the tutorial and learning the game's mechanics. Then, once you've learned the basics of the mechanics you've run out of money and start a new game.

Then by the time you have a grasp of the mechanics, you realise that the game is incredibly short and shallow, and has an immediately glaring problem preventing you from effectively reaching the meat of the late-game and plot. And that is "relaunching".

You see, every turn the amount of money generated by your launched products is slowly reduced, until those products become unprofitable. You need to re-launch these lagging products in order for them to return to being profitable. The game has a feature whereby you can launch products at will from the over-view screen, without needing to open up an individual nation's management menu. You are also *supposed* to be able to re-launch products from the overview screen, but as long as a product is making money, you *cannot re-launch it* from the overview screen. The game prevents you from doing so, stating that the product is still making money, even when it's clearly flagging in profits and a re-launch would be strictly beneficial to the profitability of the product. This means that the game is actively preventing you from efficiently managing your corporation, and extending what should be a single click action into 4+ clicks as you must now open each individual nation, find the appropriate product you're looking for from a list, then get another pop-up menu advising the product is still profitable (even when its profits are far below the maximum), and THEN launch that product. This is an accessibility anti-pattern and effectively slows down the decision making process.

I'm not asking for automation, or to reduce the micromanagement aspects of the core gameplay loop. In my mind they're fine as is and part of the decision making process of the gameloop. What I am asking for is the ability to make my own decisions about what products I want to launch and re-launch without the game thinking it knows better than me and actively prevents me from making decisions to play the game.

This problem permeates throughout the game so deeply that it becomes effectively unplayable to anyone who values their time. There are far better management games, with far deeper micro and macro management that I really can't recommend this game, as it's lack of real depth and tedious gameplay loop, with a system that tries to aid the player but only serves to impede decision making.

Other reviewers mention political bias, and it's an interesting case. Because of the implicit role we take as the villainous head of a mega-corporation, many of the issues that we create are progressive issues. However, due to the nature of conflict being a driver for story-telling, it is often more interesting and effective to take positions that are either right wing, corporatist or fascist, and the tag-lines for these types of products are far more interesting and funny than competing tag-lines. In many ways it feels like the game is encouraging me to be "evil", while the writing takes an amusingly flanderized perspective of these issues. Converting nations towards security states with low freedom tends to be highly effective, as multiple early level products are easily marketable to security states. It creates this sense of ludo-narrative dissonance from which arises a good deal of comedy.

To put it into perspective, in my 7 hours of playtime I haven't run into any issues from multi-cultural states, issues that might be expected such as balkanization, racial enmity, ghettoization, or something as simple as a language barrier. My country has multiple official languages, and this creates a perhaps negligible degree of inefficiencies, as language barriers prevent access to services without translation, and vice versa.

But the game is quick to tell you how the LGBTQ+ youth are suffering as countries become more Xenophobic. Which as a non-queer identifying lover of both men and women, I take a particular schadenfreude to. Another such email notice, which comes from what I can only imagine is a romance quest? Comes from a colleague living in a nation as it becomes more Xenophobic. Something about how she isn't burning down churches and bombing city centres. There's something peculiarly quaint with how it's written, an exaggeration of an exaggeration of a legitimate grievance, which simply makes me ask the question of what the political message of the game is, and even if there is any? The game pretends to have some form of anti-corporate sentiment, a sentiment that I can share and a sentiment that pervades the cyberpunk genre. But there's also perhaps a perverted hope, as one of the end-goals is to "leave the world a better place than you entered it", in creating some form of a utopia. A utopia built on the backs of countless human rights abuses and underpaid employees. It's a strange option to have in a game which seems it can't tell whether or not it's a critique or a pastiche; to have some sort of corpo-facist CEO somehow uplift humanity, almost as if giving justification to the corporate cults of personalities dedicated to modern day CEOs. If the game has a political slant, it's extremely confusing as to which side it's on.

With all that being said, I think this gives the game a rather humorous tone, and a quality of writing worth reading through just for the ridiculousness of the scenarios as they arise. The vast majority of the meat of this writing however, is locked behind the mid-game micro-management, and with the above stated interface issues, it's impossible for the game to be worth my interest or time to keep reading.

A hidden gem. It's exactly what it says on the tin: an evil cyberpunk corp sim. It has:
- Solid (and fairly complex) management mechanics
- A good sense of progression throughout the game, where your goals and actions gradually shift depending on the game state. At first you just want to make money, then maximize research speed, then meddling with laws to actually allow you to sell all that crazy tech. It feels natural and interesting.
- Way more content than I expected. Tons of events, mechanics, new challenges such as wages starting to really cut into your profits or a rival corporation rising up. It stays fresh, fun and challenging.
- A great representation of society slowly but surely falling into dystopian cyberpunk future.

A few minor bugs with tutorials (which are quite helpful by the way) was the most I encountered.

If you're even remotely interested in running a cyberpunk corp - buy it!

I've played this game for 20 hours which I guess is pretty good considering I paid $10. I really like the game, the aesthetic is cool but even as it is there are some really bad balance issues. The major one being Authority, it is really "hard" and slow to get, really hard, I played 20 hours and I barely got 4 upgrades for my Authority.
The next issue is money, if you micro-manage you'll have a lot, making most of the Agendas worthless--if you even get them. You need agendas to win and so I was no where near finishing with what I played even though I consider it a pretty optimised run.
Next issue, you have so many more military and cyber points than class, I maxed out my class upgrade as soon as I could but it was still not enough, whereas I was running "impose order" on all my nations every turn I could so I could buy the legislation I wanted.
Like I said I really enjoyed the game but there are so balancing issues.

This is what I want from Cyberpunk 2077 Corpo life path!

It is very different from other "world domination" game, even dictator ruler can't shape everything, but megacorp in dystopia world can manipulate almost everything, including culture( people mindset ). I really like the concept, and I wish there are more option, choices and consequences.

Crisis( AI and mutant ) is quite repetitive, dull and annoying though.

So, after reading a few reviews about it not having "depth" etc, I was a little wary to begin this game. I'd bought it a while back (I have a few games in my list to play...) and cyberpunk has always appealed as a setting, so I was preparing myself to be a bit disappointed.

I started playing yesterday noon and apparently I've played for 24 hours (it's 10pm now...)

If you enjoy strategy games, or interesting simulations, don't mind failure, and can lose yourself in the narrative and headspace of a parasitic CEO attempting to survive in a dystopia, dealing with shadowy board members and their demands, searching for the secret to life everlasting, and balancing public opinion with making money, then you will love this game.

I'm genuinely happy I decided to play this. Absolutely amazing, and I'm glad I gave it a chance rather than letting it lay buried under the thousands of other games on my "to play" list. I want to play some more now, but the whole "played 24 hours out of the last 34 hours" thing has worried me a little. Thank goodness it's been the weekend!

This game oozes potential. From its premise to its simplistic, yet surprisingly deep gameplay, Spinnortality is great. However, just like its name, there is something off about it the deeper you get, until you realize this game is nigh unbeatable...and not in that good, strategy game way; but instead, due to frustrating bugs, poorly thought out mechanics, and unbalanced agenda trees that make 2 out of the 4 victory possibilities impossible beyond easy mode (even then it's a pain).

RNG is terrible and you WILL fail with anything in the game under a 90% success chance. You will regularly fail anyway. I've played 2 separate games where a shuttle launch to the moon with a 99% success chance failed.

Class connections are required to reduce Corruption in your company, weaken your company's Employee Union, unlock Marketing Angles, and qualify for a host of special events...and you will be starved for them ALL game -- every game. That would be fine if you didn't end up with a huge stockpile of mostly useless Military & Tech Connections (the other 2 types), which just further exacerbates the issue.

Company popularity seems unimportant at first but turns out to be vital. Your Corporate Image will make or break you every single game. Dip too low and it will compound, dropping favor with the "Council" until you fail and have to restart or reload. There are very limited ways to improve this stat and this means that taking 2 of the starter "techs" in the Agenda Trees is absolutely vital to any long term game attempt. Each new Agenda Tech requires increasing amounts of influence with this Council, which can be a huge problem if your not trying to win via Commerce Win.

Finally, the game will always hit you were you're weakest. It's as if the code reads where you're slacking and increases the difficulty in that exact spot. Not buying political favor with nations, suddenly every high end research is banned. Not buying enough media stocks, sliders don't move and you get hit with random negative impacts to your Corp Image. Not researching fast enough, you run out of money. Researching too quickly, your employees hate you and strike. Not doing any of the above? Board members die in the 2080s. Yeah, there is no one way to win but there are over a dozen ways to lose and quickly. Realizing you must pick up Agenda techs in a specific order to win, coupled with a somewhat cumbersome UI, and horrific RNG means this game is a pass.

Truly a shame since it holds such promise. Insult to injury is the pop ups in steam for the creator of this game's new Kickstarter attempt. Honestly, I'm not interested in the next one when this one is so flawed.



Pros: Interesting Premise
Great Atmosphere
Decent Music
Gameplay is unique and mostly fun
No singular way to win

Cons: RNG fails consistently at 90%
Required Agendas (Social Network & Media Conglom.)
Marketing Angles a waste
Humane Victory Impossible beyond Easy Mode
Corponation Victory Impossible beyond Easy Mode
Truly nuanced game play impossible
Class Connection Starved
The game will always hit you where you're weakest

I found this game extremely frustrating to play, I assume because I just don't get how you're supposed to play it.

You're playing as a megacorp at what I assume is the beginning of a corporate dystopia. You research products, then research marketing angles for those products. If you pick an angle that aligns correctly with the country you release the product in, you make money. Simple, in theory.

The money you make per product goes down over time. In order to stay in the black you have to keep releasing new things. However, every researched product makes the public hate you more, for reasons I never understood. Doesn't matter if you're only selling designer organs and robot butlers, the public will hate you for it. If public opinion gets too low you lose.

Then there's the board of your megacorp. They give you quests you have to complete that give you a unique currency that unlocks other features. Want a paramilitary unit to topple/prop up governments? Then you better do whatever random BS the board wants you to do. Board quests are randomly generated, which I found annoying.

Most of the "products" you're releasing are pretty bland. Instead of flying cars or laser weapons, you're mostly just researching types of employee spyware. That's not really what I think of when I think of "cyberpunk".

This is a game that really seems to take the fun out of cyberpunk. I want to concentrate on building a moonbase or achieving physical immortality, not micromanaging the third relaunch of my social media platform in Asia. It also seems to push you to play as evil as possible, toppling governments and generally just being a dick. I don't think it's for me.

The game involves releasing products where morality and damage to the society are ignored. This ranges from the mostly harmless tools to programs that will effectively control your whole life. While an interesting concept on paper this game boils down to "re-launching" products to gain money which is in turn used to pay your way into controlling the region.

Attempts to aid in this to allow players to focus more on the changing the world in the game were poorly implemented. Automation is a trap that will tie up workers indefinitely, will give diminishing returns as it fails to relaunch products and will make terrible marketing choices if you pull the people out of the country. To balance getting too much income your workers will demand a cumulative +20% pay rise which will rapidly grow out of control and creates a time limit.

Effectively this game was a simple business simulation with the theme of dominating the world with profits however it effectively self destructed. The current state of this game is playable and winnable but has very little going for it in terms of enjoyment. Gameplay will quickly become repetitive and there is very little variation in each play through with the game effectively punishing you if you try to deviate too far from the norm.

I really like the themes and aesthetic! But overall it's just too much clicking around minmaxing numbers - I don't feel like I'm getting to make enough meaningful decisions. I expect in a lot of companies the CEO is actually just pushing numbers around it's not really what I'm looking for from a game. (Also, the Board might have been better presented as investors - that way you could have had a COO etc to feature as NPCs! - but I'm just about self aware enough not to complain about lack of corporate governance in a computer game. I mean, *just* about. I'm trying, okay?)

Excellent take on a cyberpunk management game. Now that I've played it a few hours I feel confident in my review.

Pros:

The long term goals are structured well and the "pace" of the game is very well done. I don't feel like I'm fighting a losing battle from turn one. It gives you the ability to carefully plan and formulate how you proceed.

The Skill trees and research is interesting and very fitting to this world. I enjoyed unlocking new items and marketing them to certain areas as well as seeing the varied impact it has.

Bending governments to your will and mandating law changes is a load of fun. The scale of your influence in the world is what really sells this.

Make the public adore you while you secretly manipulate the world powers to force the sale of ethically questionable products... if they don't want to play along invade their country, take over the media and manipulate the public until you are seeing adequate profit.

Interactive tutorial helps guide you along.

Space Laser.

Cons:

The individual governments lack depth. I'd like to have seen more politically charged missions, and fighting to keep themselves in power. I love that the company can get in bed with them, but that's sort of the end of it.

There isn't a lot of info on how to manipulate the prosperity of a nation (other than through military might). It would be helpful to know how this system works and what directly impacts it as opposed to the "trial and error" method.

Also there's a lack of influence between nations. There are no wars, no fight for land or resources, yet Xenophobia is rampant. I'd have liked to see these nations fighting with one another as the player intervened. Oceana fighting with Europe would have been interesting. Perhaps trade wars, or import restrictions.

It is a management game, but aside from money and product there's little actual managing. It would have been interesting to see actual resource management such as precious metals, forests, ores, etc. Having to do business with other huge companies as well as manipulating their governments to put them at a disadvantage would have been a very interesting mechanic.

Overall:

Don't let the cons fool you though. From what I've read this was a one man project and they absolutely nailed it. Excellent game overall. Hopefully the Dev continues with it, either in updates or a sequel.

9/10

TLDR; great for a solo effort, but held back by a shallow economy, and fairly simple and obvious trade-offs for hiring. Counter-intuitively, the game rewards you monetarily for maintaining an almost entirely human workforce. Regardless, the game becomes a slow slog within the first half hour, as you can quickly amass so much cash that you can stop playing the core game loop and simply hit "next turn" so that you can complete the board objectives and eventually accumulate enough agendas to end the game (something I did not have patience for). Note that I did have all of the cloning vats with multiple rounds of clones, almost the entire tech tree, and a fully colonized moon. While it's an entertaining diversion for an hour or two, there's very little depth here. The story messages were amusing and could use more expansion. The interface could also use additional polish.

Spinnortality is a game with political problems.

No developer is unbiased, I accept this, and i've played games made by people all across the political spectrum.
Most developers can avoid letting their personal biases taint their work, spinnortality fails at this. There is a significant left leaning political bias in the writing and viewpoints.
Most of the time it wouldn't be a problem, but spinnortality is a game ABOUT politics. It shoves politics in your face every two minutes, you can't avoid it.

For example an axis which could have been dryly named Nationalism vs Globalism, is instead Xenophobia vs Diversity. That's not a neutral viewpoint, its a careful selection of buzzwords to make one extreme sound superior.
An "Echo chamber" marketing slant makes references to "removing leftists from your feed"
A news story talks about poor innocent "LGBTQ+ youth being disowned by religious parents"

There are four victory conditions, and they are: Fascist dictatorship, two almost identical variants of corporate oligarchy, and democracy for all. By force. Yes.
The one victory condition the game highlights and holds up as the shining example of what is ethically good, is just american foreign policy. You have to knock over the government of every nation and install a democracy. Every non democratic form of government is evil

The politics are just too on the nose, from a slanted specific worldview, and lacking the subtlety and nuance which is absolutely necessary for a game that involves politics so much. Stellaris is a good example of how to do it right.

However, this reflects a larger problem with the writing, its just kind of amateurish. For a game backed by Alexis Kennedy, i really had higher hopes. The core gameplay loop of researching marketing slogans and picking the right ones to sell your products is an original idea, but the writing of these slogans quickly becomes repetitive and all blends together. Its like the writer was running into the limits of his vocabulary. In general, most of the text has a kind of "written in a hurry, not really reviewed" feel. It lacks soul and erudition, it fails to provoke interesting thought

While this core loop should make for an interesting game, it gets almost immediately sidelined by the Focus Group feature, which removes all the guesswork of trying to match marketing slogans to values, and instead just labels the axes of cultural values that it favors. This instantly robs the game of its best feature, and just turns it into a dull matching routine of scrolling down the list and picking one where the sliders are in the best place.

Theoretically you could just not use focus groups, but in practise this becomes hugely repetitive, once you have six products each to launch in nine different territories, you're doing a lot of the same things over and over

Theres also a research mechanic, which is heavily limited. Your research choices are focused on an extremely narrow range of fields, genetics, AI, and social media, basically. A seemingly arbitrary selection that misses out on a million things that make cyberpunk settings unique. There's also a business management category which is just a vast and vague mess of buzzwords.
Within each of these categories you have many products to launch, and this leads to why the writing is repetitive. How many different marketing slogans can you come up with when your range of products consists of ten different websites revolving around social media ? The author apparently tried to come up with five for each, and it fails badly. One blends into the other, they lose all distinction. Like "Posting tips" is a product i'm supposed to market and launch, this just feels silly, and kind of like scraping the barrel

The whole system of political values for nations is an interesting one, however the assignments of those values seem utterly arbitrary. I don't know how the heck you view russia and the middle east as a safe and diverse places, while america is a one party state. Yea its a fictional universe, but if you're going to put cultures in each nation that have zero relation to their real world counterparts, then why set it on earth at all? There's nothing relateable in these countries, everyone will just look at theirs and see that it makes little sense.
You can manipulate these values via influencing the media of the country, but i can't really see why. The only real gain is that certain values are easier to market products to, but mostly you can pick the marketing slogan to fit the country, and gradually shifting their values one point at a time doesn't really seem worth the effort

Overall, spinnortality has some cool original ideas, but I feel the implementation of them is lacklustre. Bizarrely huge quantities of attention are heaped on seemingly irrelevant things like social media products, while leaving huge gulfs in the tech tree where other things are notably absent or have little effort in their implementation.

The writing is average at best, which isn't good enough for a game that relies so heavily on it.

The politics, which are unfortunately a central mechanic, are ham fisted, naive and significant lacking in nuance or neutrality. While it is a game about playing as the bad guy, it has distinctly leftist, and somewhat childish ideas about what good and evil are. And it judges you constantly

As a whole, its a package that doesnt really gel together, and kind of leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth

ohai I'm Alexis Kennedy you may know me from the testimonial in the blurb at the top.

Control your expectations. This is a £9 game. I'd happily pay £30 for a game with a bigger tech tree, more variety of products and more gradient in the mid-game balancing.

BUT there is a lot going on for what it is, and I really like it. The systems have more nuance than it looks two hours in. Just spamming product launches isn't really what you want. I thought there was an obvious victory path, then I realised there was another obvious victory path, then I realised I was wrong again,

The narrative throws some unexpected punches, the writing is terse, effective and often thoughtful, and I sunk a lot of hours in without realising it. Give it a try, and watch for whatever Patton does next.

Exceptional management sim, not sure about the procedural rhetoric--I understand the spirit of the critique, but it does rationalize and therefore encourage the kinds of thinking it is attempting to criticize.

I cannot help but contrast it with Tarn Adams' and community developed Liberal Crime Squad, which manages to be far more effective at a critique of capitalist politics, without losing sight of the acts of violence, terror and oppression actuated by the player as fundamentally gratuitous too--it is too easy to conclude that the ends justify the means through this game, and that seems to be a problem, although still an interesting one,.

The game has some great ambiance and theme but the options you have are somewhat bland. The difference between selling 'Designer Organs' and 'Business Management Software' is just the product name, there are no interesting decisions to make, you pick the marketing that most closely matches the social situation.

Overall I found the game kind of shallow with limited replayability.

It's tidy. No apparent bugs, and the presentation is fine. But it's just too simplistic for me.

You've only got a small handful of 'products' to pick from, with some very basic tech trees. Countries have been combined to form continental states...

Actually instead of describing the whole game, I'll just say that there just aren't enough options to take when picking out a strategy. I recently played 100 hours or so of Evil Bank Manager (which is in the same vein but set in medieval times), and there's different ways to win, something like 25 different types of investments you can make, around 50 nations, different approaches in tackling the competition, etc.

In Spinnortality there is no competition except the clock, and there are so few paths you can take that I really don't see any replayability here. It also looks like you often get random tasks assigned to you by the board, and I personally don't like having to complete arbitrary tasks of that nature in a game like this.

There's a post on the forum saying this game would be great on a tablet. I strongly agree with that. This would be a very good mobile game. Mobile players expect clear, easy to read graphics and simple gameplay, and this title has both. But when I sit in front of a PC and fire up a strategy game I'm looking for more meat than this.

Play as a megacorporation. Fill your company with vat-grown braniacs and borderline rogue AIs. And then fund some rebels in south america to overthrow the local government and install a puppet government so you can lower the tax rates so your facebook-knockoff doesn't pay as much in taxes.

This game has it all, if all you want is a great corporate management game with a cybertech setting.

Finally! A solid cyberpunk management sim!

I was waiting for the release of this game since I stumbled upon it an was really eager to get my hands on it. Made by just one guy this game is awesome!

Some facts:
- stable
- solid
- feels finished
- addicting

What else can I say? If you want a management sim in a cyberpunk setting you're garantued to have a good time with it.
You play as a corporation that wants global domination. But how do you do this? There are many ways, things to unlock, research to be done, shares to be bought, espionage to be done (but don't let the public know this), officials to be bribed, etc. The focus here is on a future world, where the internet and AIs dominate and where you can hoard, sell and make money off of users data, monetizing, etc.

Overall I'd give this game a solid 5/5. I experienced no bugs, no freezes, no crashes and the tutorial is really good and easy to follow!

Cheers to this awesome developer, publisher, and fellow viennese!