First Impressions - Shocked, But Loving It

I just spent the last 11 hours playing the game nonstop and I absolutely love it. This is the kind of Hollywood-centric simulation tycoon-styled game I've always wanted to play and yet I was blow away at how dark it is.

At first it was just the added tidbits of characters like David Gutman is a mysoginist, Wanda Warryn is xenophobic, and Felix Hill is a gambler, were fun aspects to contend with. And very much added to the worldbuilding and my experience playing: Russel Simmons is a racist and he asked me to get rid of all the black people from my studio which I had none, that I could tell -- the game doesn't tell you what race anybody is so I can only go off of the character portraits -- and I fired his racist ass only for the little bitch to go crying to the Sword of Christ newspaper and costing me 30 rep, so now in every run so far I don't use him in anything. Take that, you fuck!

But it only gets better. Peter Harris thought he could get $60k out of me just because he showed loyalty and didn't go running to our main competitor. But thankfully the previous studio owners had already done some digging and had some blackmail material: he had sex with a minor. Seeing that in my first run was wild -- so of course, I used it that against him.

Getting the news of Donald Fulman (i may be spelling the name wrong) a producer from Evergreen Productions, being a serial rapist and murderer of teenagers made me click pause and just sit at my desk for a solid two minutes. I was like Oh fuck, is this really in the game? And am I gonna have to deal with something like that myself? I've already got my suspicions about some of my employees being that fucking insane and depraved -- still looking at you Peter Harris!

And then going through the Ilegal Gifts section and seeing that there's gift upgrade options called "Monkey Brains", "Human Meat" and the one that had me going holy shit: "Time with a Minor". It's shit like this that absolutely sold me on this game. The added darkness to the world just makes it feel more alive, lived in, and incredibly realistic.

Too often do simulator games hook you with their worldbuilding and lore and then very quickly, once you get a hang of the gameplay, you come to the realization that the worldbuilding is hollow and the lore is just flavor text that flashes on screen every once in a while.

The Golden Age of Hollywood and the studio system was notorious for doing the things they did back in those days. To this day urban legends from that time still persist. It would be a horrible santization of the Golden Age to not include all the grit, grime, and drug-laced illegal depravity that was prevalent at the time.

I'm still waiting on a Mafia/Gang/Cartel simulator that includes all the horrible shit too.

Sidenote: The Steam Store description mentions that the game is in 3 Acts and Early Access takes places during Act 1, which is 20 in-game years. Is that the same for all the acts, making the game a total of 60 in-game years? Because the game starts off in 1929. 60 years later puts us in 1989. Also, with that, will the game be adapting to the change in the times?

Sidenote 2: I know it's too early, but will there be an expansions? I'd love to see what the Hayes Code and Red Scare would do to the gameplay.