Highly impressed by Q-Up
I spent the last few days periodically playing Q-Up, an incremental game about esports which is clearly very directly inspired by Riot Games and other southern Californian megacorp studios.
It's a trip to play, as someone who worked at Riot on the periphery of a lot of the specific scenarios and dynamics which the game parodies. You play an esports player who is somehow accidentally (or not so accidentally? I'm still not quite finished the story) inducted into the company as a kind of employee as well. You play the game and periodically get emails about different internal projects and leadership dynamics. It's a well-observed parody of a particular kind of demented workplace.
Mechanically it's fascinating - it's another game about managing randomness and risk, but its approach feels completely unique. Every round, you flip a coin; the results of the flip trigger a bunch of player abilities which you lay out on a node map. The abilities can sometimes trigger or re-trigger one another based on how you arranged them on your node map. The game is structured like a single player game - you're mostly playing to progress a story - but the other players in your matches are "real," and their builds are real builds the game grabbed from online to populate your match.
I'm enjoying myself a ton. I do sometimes have to step away when it reminds me too sharply of idiocy I've seen in real life. My one criticism of the game is that it seems to on some level have bought a lot of the comms/PR rhetoric that these large esports companies produced about themselves over the course of the last two decades, even as it parodies them. If I'd been writing it, I might have made some of the plot beats even more cynical and pathetic than they already are... though I can't say that would have made the game any better.
At any rate, it's an incredible accomplishment. The game has multiple characters to play through with, and feels utterly enormous. It's mechanically deep while also managing to be simply an enormous joke. You should check it out!