David Sanders
David SandersIf you remember when the original iPhone and its first couple of successors initially hit the market, I would wager you’re at least somewhat familiar with the catch-all phrase, “there’s an app for that.” With the rise in popularity of Simulation games on platforms such as Steam, I would argue that a similar notion, “there’s a game for that,” has become increasingly relevant over the past few years. For example, if you’ve ever wanted to experience what it’s like to play the stock market without taking on any personal financial risk, there now exists a game tailored to that exact purpose.
I’d like to think I can say that with a considerable degree of confidence thanks to the efforts of the dynamic duo of developer Power Struggle Games and publisher Fellow Traveler. Their most recent joint venture is a title known as The Invisible Hand. Now, despite what I said a moment ago in my opening spiel, I wouldn’t necessarily classify The Invisible Hand as a simulation game, strictly speaking. I could be wrong about that, but if I am, I suspect that’s primarily because I know next to nothing about how the stock market and stockbrokers actually function.
I think I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, though. Before we get into The Invisible Hand’s main gameplay mechanics, I’d like to tell you a bit about the game’s plot and the events which set the stage for it. The game’s story mode begins with you frantically taking calls from what feels like everyone at your job at a financial institution because the stock market has apparently just crashed. There’s plenty of swearing, finger-pointing, and general senses of doom and gloom flying every which way.
The game’s introductory cutscene (though I’m not sure I’d call it that, but that’s neither here nor there) sets things up when a barrage of thought-provoking questions are rapidly posed to you by an anonymous caller: “What’s the matter? You wanted to be a big-time stockbroker, right? Isn’t this what you’ve been waiting for? To come through with the miraculous answer in a moment of crisis? Well, what is it?” Of course, you don’t have that answer, so you’re initially just as powerless to stop this downward spiral as anyone else is.
The events of The Invisible Hand over which you have some degree of direct control officially commence on September 26th, 2023. That date is significantly closer in time to the present than I expected when I first started playing, so I hope this game doesn’t end up accurately predicting the future. In any case, you lost your previous job at that unnamed financial institution as a result of the stock market crash. Now you have to work your way back up to where you once were, and the first step toward doing that is getting a job at a new firm.
You’ve already found a decent enough place to fill that role thanks to a couple of your previous connections. It’s a corporation known as FERIOS Capital. You’re required to go through orientation first, which entails you being forced to take a ten-question quiz so that the higher-ups can judge your personality based on your answers. Thankfully, if you’re told you somehow screwed it up, there’s apparently a federal law in place that enables you to reattempt this process as many times as you need to until you attain a perfect score.
I want to mention at this point that the description for The Invisible Hand on its Steam Store page clearly states that the game will see its players potentially have their “wildest dreams of wealth come true… at the cost of everything else.” Based on that quote and the rather cynical answers that are quite literally pre-selected for you in that questionnaire, one thing has been made abundantly clear to me during the time I’ve spent playing this title.
That one thing is that FERIOS Capital expects you to focus entirely on making the company heaps of money throughout every conceivable nanosecond of every workday. Your supervisors actively discourage you from trying to be a halfway decent human being, much less any sort of hero, if doing so would even slightly negatively affect your ability to bring in truckloads of cash for FERIOS Capital. For those at the top of your new employer’s structure, to quote the title of former professional wrestler Ted “The Million Dollar Man” DiBiase’s theme music track, “it’s all about the money.”
Now, I recognize that the idea of a financial corporation that exists primarily to make money isn’t exactly groundbreaking or revolutionary. Neither, I would argue, is the concept of those above you in any company’s hierarchy near-constantly breathing down your neck to ensure that you consistently do your part in helping that company achieve its goals. However, I wholeheartedly believe I can back up what I’m saying with concrete evidence.
As further justification for this claim, I present a paraphrased version of one of the quotes that appear on your computer monitors whenever you manage to summon forth the sheer audacity to leave your desk at any point during the workday: “You are idle, but the market is not.” To me, that quote is a warning that not only “gently” encourages you to stop blatantly wasting precious company time and get back to work, but also serves as a bit of potential foreshadowing. By that, I mean to state the obvious to a certain extent.
As I’m sure you can guess if you’ve heard even a single fact about the Great Depression, the stock market is one of the most volatile forces in modern economics. Thus, circumstances that can be either excellent or cataclysmic for both your personal bottom line and that of the global economy are equally liable to occur with little to no warning. If you’re not perpetually at your workstation, closely monitoring the market’s every last move, one of these events could make its presence known and potentially leave you one of the last to find out about it.
If you aren’t aware of such a situation as it begins to develop, logic dictates that you can’t react to it. At the very least, you can’t respond in time to either fully capitalize upon its beneficial effects or mitigate its potential negative outcomes. This is why I say you ideally want to keep as close an eye on as many of the goings-on within the in-game stock market as you can at any given time. That concept leads me nicely into discussing some portion of The Invisible Hand’s core gameplay mechanics.
If you’re even vaguely aware of how the stock market works, I’d wager you’ve at least heard the phrase “buy low, sell high.” That is, the ideal strategy is to invest in any given stock when its individual share price is on the lower side for whatever reason, hold onto any shares you purchase until they’ve significantly increased in value, then sell them off in order to simultaneously recoup your initial investment costs and make a tidy profit. This idea is at the heart of The Invisible Hand’s main gameplay loop.
Granted, due to the aforementioned volatility and reactive nature of the stock market, you ordinarily wouldn’t have an entirely clear idea of how any of the stocks in which you invest are going to fluctuate in value over the course of any given trading day. That’s exactly where the titular “invisible hand” comes in, though. One of your connections who basically got you your new job at FERIOS Capital, a fellow by the name of Harper Ward, calls you at one point during your first day at the new gig.
He informs you that he had “his guy” grant you access to a shady-looking website called GEISTnet. Mr. Ward describes GEISTnet as “a closed network made up of information brokers and anonymous insiders. You don’t know who they are. You don’t need to know who they are. They get taken care of.” Your contact goes on to explain that you’ll “see information on GEIST that goes against what you’ll see on TradeFeed, what you’ll watch on INN, what you’ll hear from your friends and your family – everything, basically.”
Before we go any further, I feel I should pause for a moment to explain one of the gameplay aspects I just mentioned, namely TradeFeed. For all intents and purposes, this is essentially a considerably less toxic version of Twitter aimed primarily at both amateur and professional stockbrokers like yourself. It’s not always totally helpful to you, but you’ll typically find at least one or two nuggets of useful information there during most trading days. An incarnation of a modern social media website that’s both not a total cesspool of hatred and actually beneficial to its users? What a novel concept!
Anyway, you’ll always see TradeFeed on the leftmost side of your primary computer monitor, right next to your main stock purchasing and selling interface. This is handy considering how often you’ll need to keep an eye on the stock market and how helpful TradeFeed can be in that endeavor. Having said that, though, I strongly advise against relying solely on the information you find on TradeFeed, especially since you were clearly told that you’ll find contradictory intelligence on GEIST.
In the words of Mr. Ward, “Just remember: what you see on GEIST is the smart money. Not only is it the truth, but we know it is before anyone else does. There’s nothing wrong with the information everybody gets on TradeFeed, and you’ll need all of it as things pick up, but GEIST will always be the ace up your sleeve.” To that end, you’ll find that GEIST nearly occupies the entirety of your secondary computer screen.
What makes GEIST such a wise bet, exactly? Well, it offers you certain highly valuable pieces of information to which only the insiders who run the network would have access. It is with this knowledge that you can make the most concrete decisions about which stocks to buy, which to sell, and precisely when it would be most advantageous to do either of those things. Sometimes, though, the decisions that GEIST tells you to make will seem odd or perhaps outright stupid to your colleagues.
This can make it hard to trust the network because there’s always the chance that common sense, your intuition, and eventually, even your moral compass will try to stop you from doing as GEIST suggests. For example, during that first phone call with Mr. Ward, he says you’ll soon have reason to invest heavily in a certain commodity when everyone else is rapidly selling it off. Again, I don’t know much about the stock market, but it sounds like that strategy is liable to get some raised eyebrows directed your way.
Even so, when you take your first look at GEIST after the market has opened for the day, it’ll tell you in plain language that the stock in question will surge at precisely four o’clock that afternoon. While your gut may tell you to go with the crowd and drop that particular stock like a bad habit, once the clock strikes four, you’ll get your first taste of the power of GEIST if you just go along with what it says. Through this gameplay mechanic, you’re encouraged to consider multiple sources of information (even if these sources periodically conflict with one another) while still making your own independent decisions.
Buying that stock before it skyrockets in value will probably make you look foolish to your co-workers at first until it makes you look like a stock-trading wizard once you start raking in tons of cash for both FERIOS Capital and yourself. However, all of that isn’t to say you should just do whatever GEIST tells you to do at all times without questioning your decisions. I think that would make the game far too easy. It seems to me that all GEIST and TradeFeed do is provide you with at least some portion of the information you’ll need to make tough calls from time to time.
You’re almost certainly going to screw up every now and then, even if you’re extremely careful in your decisions. Sometimes things will happen that are totally out of your control, so you can’t mitigate the fallout from such events. You’ll have to learn to live with that and try your best to avoid screwing up frequently or catastrophically enough to find yourself out of a job once again.
Thankfully, The Invisible Hand features suitable difficulty modes to accommodate players who just want to experience the story without the risk of termination and those who desire more of a challenge. You can choose how you want to go through the game during your orientation. As far as I’m concerned, that’s definitely a point in the game’s favor. This title also features mechanics which allow you to speed up and slow down the flow of time, based on your confidence in the decisions you’ve made during a trading day and how hectic things currently are on the market.
If you have the courage to leave your desk, you’ll find a drink machine in the back of the trading room. It can dispense both coffee and tea, though you’re only granted access to the latter capability after a few days on the job. Drinking a cup of coffee speeds up time and allows you to more expeditiously power through a day in which you’re confident in your trading decisions. That is to say, if you’re absolutely certain that everything you’ve done is going to end well, coffee ensures you don’t need to bother sitting around twiddling your thumbs for quite as long.
On the opposite side of that coin, drinking some tea slows down time. This is quite handy if you need more of a chance to think things through or want to see if the market calms down on a particularly exciting day. I don’t know what kind of tea is available at FERIOS Capital, but if it has this effect on their employees, I could certainly put it to good use myself. I recognize that’s neither here nor there, though.
There’s only one somewhat major aspect I dislike about The Invisible Hand. Every now and then, you’re expected to invite your colleagues over to your apartment for reasons I’ve yet to be able to discern other than socializing for the sake of it. Perhaps I just feel this way because I’m borderline antisocial outside of certain circles of people in my life, but these portions of the game seem unnecessary in my view.
I don’t really care if it’s company policy or peer pressure to invite my co-workers over to commemorate any occasion; I feel I have the right to celebrate my new promotion (for example) in private if I so choose, thank you very much. Having said all that, I believe I would recommend The Invisible Hand to you if what you’ve read about it piques your interest. Not everyone wants to be a big-time stockbroker, nor is everyone cut out to succeed in that profession. Even so, the game offers a wonderfully satirical take on modern capitalism, and you folks may know very well how much I love satires like this.
I also understand if you’re not exactly interested in a game that’s ostensibly about trading stocks all day, though. Even in the context of the game, where there’s zero real-world implications or financial risk to me personally, things can get overwhelming and quite stressful in a heartbeat. Ultimately, the question of whether you have what it takes to make it to the top of FERIOS Capital is yours to answer.
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The Invisible Hand
$12.99
Pros
- Brilliant Satirical Take on Modern Capitalism
- Has the Potential to Easily Evoke Feelings of Great Success
- Agreeable Price Tag
Cons
- Frequent Occurrences of Strong Language
- Gameplay Can Become Stressful and Overwhelming At Times
