Everlasting Corporations - Spinnortality
In a future of megacorps and artificial intelligence, it is your job to bring immortality to the board of directors. Spinnortality is a cyberpunk management game that was developed and published by a single man. In it, you run a global corporation that sells products in the hope of learning how to live forever and eventually ruling the world. The game is fun for a quick jaunt but is riddled with tedious micromanagement that hurts the late game. Despite that, I thought that Spinnortality was a fun take on the cyberpunk genre.
Being a global corporation, the main mechanics of the game regard researching and selling technologies. The player will start by learning about social media and eventually be selling products that tell you exactly when you will die. To effectively sell the products they have to be marketed in one of the various regions. The key to making money is to link the right slogans with the right cultural beliefs. For instance, a slogan that promises a quick and easy solution would work best in a nation that favored convenient solutions. The brunt of the game is matching the correct slogan with the correct nation.
Beyond the basic sales mechanics, you will mostly find yourself clicking through random event menus and occasionally executing various missions such as sabotaging a nation. These random events were actually the highlight of the game. They gave a glimpse into the realities of the world that you are running and often asked questions about the role of corporations in global culture. The gameplay effects were generally significant enough to impact my choices throughout the game even if most of them were not particularly groundbreaking. Those events were a great part of Spinnortality’s experience.
The main problem with the gameplay is the long-term monitoring of sales numbers. Over time any marketing campaign that the player starts will lose money. Basically, people will stop buying your product because they already know or have it. To fix this, the player can restart campaigns, basically resetting the income. In the late game, this becomes a massive chore. You have to click between each region every turn to make sure that you can maintain a reasonable income. There is very little strategy to it as you should always start whichever slogan best fits that region. Making money becomes a terrible chore in the late game. This problem also increases the time between the best parts of the game: the events. It would have helped Spinnortality’s gameplay a lot if the developer had streamlined or automated marketing in the later game so that the player could focus on the interesting aspects of the experience.
Spinnortality brings up a lot of cyberpunk themes, especially those that focus of the titular megacorporations. The player is continually asked to comment on how much power they think a megacorporation should have or the moral imperatives that they might have to society. These are interesting questions, but you do not need this game to be presented with them. Spinnortality is, in itself, almost entirely neutral on what is a right or wrong path. The choices are boiled down to stat buffs and debuffs where there could have been an opportunity to examine the ramifications of corporate enterprises further. Basically, the cyberpunk themes are present but hollow. There are a lot of questions with no answers or elaborations. This is not a serious detriment to the game as a lack of theme does not hurt the gameplay experience, but the game could have been all the more interesting if it had been willing to really tackle the moral questions that it raises.
Overall, Spinnortality is a decent cyberpunk management game that is marred by tedious late-game play. The core mechanics surround how the player chooses to market various products on different continents. This becomes a tedious chore of fitting the best slogan to each nation that includes almost no choice on the part of the player. There are deeper mechanics that allow the player to influence the world which are quite fun. If there had been a way to automate Spinnortality’s tedium in order to allow the player to focus on the more interesting mechanics then the game would have been far better. The cyberpunk elements of the game are fairly surface level. A lot of moral questions are raised regarding the role of corporations but the game never examines them beyond a surface level. While this does not hurt the gameplay directly, Spinnortality would have been far more interesting if it had been willing to really tackle its core themes. If you like management games are looking for a quick game then Spinnortality is a great buy, especially on sale. It has decent gameplay that can keep you entertained for a few hours.
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