Incredibly boring. The only real sense of gameplay was in clicking the thieves which wasn't fun in any way. It never felt like I was running out of anything because I just kept making more and more until a glitch with one of the awful time-gated upgrades bought me thousands of carrots off of one deal and left me with no money a minute before I had needed to buy the next requirement.
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Red Market's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality of the game | #2 | 3.852 | 4.070 |
| Overall enjoyment | #3 | 3.302 | 3.488 |
| Length of the game | #4 | 3.324 | 3.512 |
| Speed of the game | #5 | 2.795 | 2.953 |
Ranked from 43 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
Interesting game. The economy feels a bit loose - I had enough money to buy both vegetables and soap before I bought vegetables - and the variance in the black market is odd, there were always enough $1/$2 potatoes and $3/$4 wheat etc. There's probably not scope to include an alternative to gulaging people, but it might be nice if there was a flavour option of your workers coming from building community solidarity instead of just from blackmail?
I didn't play much past soap, I didn't have the time right now.
Easily the best game in this jam. Masters the feeling of having to swipe good deals, catch thieves, and try to buy the government deals before running out of time, while not being too tedious over time. The ideas are a bit slow though. Also would like some sort of pause button.
Submitted
Resource Starve0/10 the thieves don't "run out of" the store they clearly walk
nice game from what I played so far, for actual critique I feel like there's a slight mismatch between 1) feeling like I need to be playing actively to snipe good deals and gulag thieves since I've got a high markup, and 2) the comparatively very slow rate of Idea research progression. I think I might enjoy it a bit more if I could pay to speed up a research, or if on the flip side the game lent itself more to a less intensive "set it and forget it" store management kind of balance. I don't know how much more "new mechanic" content there is past production roles. But the game is definitely fun as it is.
Yeah I replayed it now that I'm not in the rush to finish, and feel like you that Ideas could go faster, maybe by assigning "ungulaged" people to it.
Productions are the last mechanic in it, and also the one that permit a bit of idle time. But they come late, because Ideas are too slow.
Thanks for your input :)
As of right now this is the best game I played this jam. The worst thing I can say about it is that it doesn't have a pause or an quickly unlocked auto mode for me to have an excuse to stop playing it. I've played this game for 30 minutes and I absolutely love it.
While not being a traditional idle game, it does absolutely everything right, integrates the theme, game balance, interesting game situations, tension, and so on. And to boot when I thought it ran out of content it opened a new tab.
10/10, would gulag again.
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