No Pineapple Left Behind: Be A Dole
The man from Delmonte says...
"A game about de-unionized schools and tropical fruit."
Sold.
Subaltern Games, they behind satirical world-domination-through-exploitative-labour-sim Neocolonialism, are on Kickstarter asking for funding for a project turning their ire to the American schooling system.
An evil wizard goes to a school and turns all the students into pineapples, you see. And as pineapples, all they need to do to have the school succeed is get good grades in formulaic tests. Do you see what they're doing there? Manage the school tightly, burning through teachers with unrealistic workloads and dehumanising curricula, and this simple, profitable status of pineapple students will see you succeed! But accidentally lose any grip on things, and those pineapples might turn back into complicated, personality-driven children.
Oh gosh, I love this concept - enough even to swallow my frustration with the fiddly neediness of management games, just for the catharsis of such a valuable point being so smartly made. If the game's any good, of course - no way of knowing that bit yet. They make a bold comparison with Prison Architect, which could come back to nip at them. They've got 11 days left to make the bulk of their $35k, with the $10 tier for a copy of the finished game.