We’ve released Paradigm, a browser-based narrative strategy game about leading a software company through the AI transition.
It’s a choice-driven piece focused on product direction, hiring, customer pressure, internal culture, and long-term strategy. The emphasis is on tradeoffs and consequences over time rather than puzzle-solving or traditional management systems.
I know it sits a little outside some more traditional IF modes, but I hope the choice-based structure makes it of interest here. If anyone does try it, I’d be glad to hear what you think. The perspective of this community could offer a fresh new insight that helps develop a better game.
I suspect the subject matter will put a lot of the audience here off. I should note for anyone else who might be considering it, the game itself seems to be statically-authored rather than LLM-based, or at least, it doesn’t have the characteristic agonising delay after every choice which you see in games that call out to an external LLM service. Whether the text was human or AI-written, I have no idea, because all of the corporate-strategy-speak blurs together for me anyway.
I played through once and got a score of 91/100, mostly by choosing all the most conservative and long-term-focused options and ignoring the hype. I didn’t get a great sense of agency; I feel like there were a lot of choices which said “you could do X, which risks A but mitigates B” and then not long after I was dealing with B anyway. My “cash” and “momentum” stats fluctuated a bit; the other three seemed to stay maxed out. I still don’t know what a “moat” is (unless my company is actually headquarted in a castle, which I don’t think is the intention).
Business-speak – your business has a “moat” if competitors have a hard time copying your strategy. If your product is a bunch of off-the-shelf open-source components slapped together, you have no moat.
This comes up in AI-land because of a leaked Google paper a few years ago. I have no idea if they still think this way, though.
I gave this a try. I liked the presentation. The UI was good and the game was responsive.
Unfortunately, though, it just didn’t feel fun to me. Maybe it is designed to deliver a different experience so my criticisms are off base, but I wasn’t sure what kind of game it was trying to be and I had trouble connecting with it on any level.
The abstract way the stats and choices were presented made it feel very shallow as a business simulation game, but as a piece of narrative fiction there was no real narrative. I had no idea what my “product” even was. The choices made were all general, vague things that felt like corporate middle management memos; at no point did I feel invested in the narrative at all, and I struggled to even feel like there was one.