Political Animals

Never heard about it. I normally only read QT3 so if it isn’t featured here, or it shows up the rare times I go through the “steam recomends you buy these 10 games, or you can just skip them and get a new list” thing, it doesn’t exist.

When I use the Steam recommendation thing I normally only give each title a few seconds of ‘glance’ before I jump to the next one.

The first thing I see on the steam page is that is has a very colourfull art style, and it kinda looks like a kids game? But the title Political Animals make me think of Animal Farm.

Not really into political styled games (after playing Balance of Power on the Amiga in the 90s) so I doubt this (or any other political style game) would interest me.

(Although I once imagined making a strategy game set around the 90s Yugoslavia conflict though, so at one point I was “into” political type games.)

I’ve started to look at new games released and think to myself, this game will be in a humble bundle in 6-8-12 months, I’ll just wait for that.

Many of us here have massive backlogs and also massive wishlists, I do have Political Animals on my wishlist, I love to try all kinds of games. Its just a time issue for me. :)

I had heard about it, maybe from Tgb’s post already mentionned.

I had checked it out, but if I recall, it came out in a the same timeframe as other games using somewhat similar esthetics (there were a quick rush of Pikmin clones at a point last year), and when I read the name just now, the superficial me had assumed your game to be one of those.
I also was not a fan of Democracy, and, although I am not American and wasn’t concerned by election information overload, I don’t enjoy games discussing directly current issues in general - I tend to think such games are patronizing, and while I appreciate my opinions being made fun of, I tend to be annoyed if a game makes fun of the opinions I don’t share, for some reason. Given the subject material, I thought that was the case of your game.
To be clear: I am not saying that is what your game is, at all. It is just the impression I got with the very little info I looked up for it when it was released, and why I dismissed it until it ended somehow in the “pikmin clone” category of my brain oO

Yes. In fact, I own it. Pretty sure I first heard about it via @cliffski’s Twitter.

Since I have it and have played a few games, this one isn’t really applicable.

@jsnell You’re absolutely right, although given that is a cicumstance that is ultimately out of my hands, I try not to think about it too much. Nice to know we’re ahead of the median I guess! Did you do this research using Steamspy? I had no idea you could get into such granular detail.

@stusser I’ll add you to the list of “fatigued from elections”.

@Dan_Theman Yeah we’ll definitely put out an update during the midterms once people get excited about campaigning again.

@instant0 Thanks for the feedback. I personally only go through the recommendations myself when there is a sale and I get trading cards out of it, so I’m totally with you on that!

@lordkosc I’ll make sure to post here if it’s ever part of a bundle. :)

@Left_Empty Totally understand. I think we were fighting an uphill battle balancing satire with gameplay and not being too cynical about it. I actively campaigned against the game simply being cynical, but it’s a tougher balancing act than you might think. And yeah the slew of election games (some of them even in VR!) took us by surprise. While we intended to launch near the elections in the hope of additional marketing, this game was in development quite some time before the candidates even announced their intent to run.

@Fishbreath Thank you so much!

I had not heard of the game before… but I just watched Quill’s video, and it really looks quite good. Rather than being overly cutesy, the animals make politics a lot less of an open wound. And it does look to have interesting strategy to it. From what I can see, I like it better than the games aiming for realism.

Going by the Quill video, the one weakness seems to be that sometimes the info you want (like what is this operative good/bad at) is not accessible – at least he seemed unable to find it.

At this price, I’ll buy the game.

@FinnegansFather Very much appreciate it!