Update on May 22 at 5:39 PM West: The developer has patched the game so it no longer features black slaves. A few hours ago, the game was about whipping white slaves, and now it’s about sending kisses to women wearing nothing but bikinis. The developers have swapped racism for misogyny, which also sucks, but the move at least shows they’re caving in to the backlash. The real win here is that the reviews are finally at “Mostly Negative,” which is cool, but still not as cool as “cannot find game.”
There are bad games, then there are evil ones. Plantation Simulator is both. An excuse for the act of torturing human beings that’s been sitting on Steam for nearly 10 days and enjoying a “mostly positive” review average.
I’d rather say I was making a very tasteless belated April Fools’ joke, but I’m afraid that’s not the case. Plantation Simulator really is about managing a plantation that runs on slave work. Steam was ok with that, even with a description that reads like this:
“In this game, you will be whipping black people to keep your farm productive. If you whip your black person too much, they will die.”
Regarding the game itself, it looks like Custer’s Revenge, and its gameplay doesn’t seem to stray too far off, at least in terms of cruelty. I would advise even anyone who, for some twisted reason, could potentially find this enjoyable against it, as the main focus behind making Plantation Simulator was obviously to create something vile, not something made to be played and enjoyable.
I assure you there’s no way you’ll be finding even a small semblance of a legitimate reason this got made. Sadly, however, many similarly awful games are made nowadays. So, what I’m having a harder time wrapping my head around is how the hell did it bypass Steam’s validation process? The world’s largest games storefront often bans LGBTQ games that feature anything deemed too risqué, delists more thematically complex games on a seemingly arbitrary basis, but is fine with selling hate crime: the game. Make it make sense.
This game’s uncontested existence on Steam for such a relatively long period of time is a sad indictment of the state of the games industry, as well as that of the community in general. We see so many games starting to get review-bombed even before anyone has had the chance to finish them. Then, for absolutely no explicable reason, this crap’s comfortably sitting at “Positive,” after over one week at “Mostly Positive.” The content of the reviews themselves is equally unworthy of your attention, in case you were wondering.
I know that by bringing it to everyone’s attention, I risk simply making it more popular, lucrative, and inspiring other ghoulish devs to use Steam’s apparently surprisingly lax policies on human abuse. Still, I have some hope in the gaming community, so I’m taking the gamble in the hopes that people will ask Steam to get rid of this crap.
