Even if you play the game without breaking any rules or taking advantage of the state of a suffering country, you’re still get sent down a narrow path towards a binary choice that simply ignores everything you did.

It’s very easy to beat your rivals even without doing anything unseemly.īut it’s all irrelevant.

I played the game by almost exclusively utilizing the regular tips. Stock prices randomly spike and crash ridiculously within a matter of minutes, like some kind of madhouse version of the real thing. The Invisible Hand isn’t meant to be realistic, but I wish it didn’t feel like gibberish. I think day-trading makes for an intense, entertaining experience, so I actually enjoyed the gameplay here, aside from the extreme randomness of the stock fluctuations. You go through these one at a time, and they all have personalities and the like. Whoever hits the specified monetary target first gets to keep their job. The overall progression system in The Invisible Hand is ostensibly built around you directly competing with rival stockbrokers. This is pointless and I didn’t bother with it much. You can then lease out your property to further increase your wealth. On top of those systems, you also get wealth sent to your personal account, which can be used to buy pieces of property and goods. But doing this affects public opinion, which The Invisible Hand warns you will have consequences, as that will tip the watchdog off to your malfeasances. Of course, you can do this regardless of what Geistnet says. For instance, you can cause the value of a currency to temporarily plummet and reap the rewards. Using your ridiculous coffers, you can send lobbyists to affect prices directly. Or you can use go out of your way to throw a wrench in the insider information. Maybe the price of oil is going to tank, or coffee is going to become scarcer, causing the stock value of a coffee chain to shoot through the roof. Then you’ve got the aforementioned Geistnet, which offers insider information on what’s going to happen to certain stocks. You can ascertain their validity by seeing how many likes each tip gets, but you run the risk of buying stocks for more when you wait longer. The left side of the trading platform has a Twitter-esque feed containing stock tips. You have a few tricks up your sleeve to accommodate this. As such, you’ll need to carefully time everything. However, there’s no way to automatically buy or sell based on stock price, which is a bit weird considering that the feature is built into all real-life platforms. You can also collect dividends on long purchases. You can buy stocks normally or short them. Once you get set up, you start with a certain amount of cash that can be used to buy and sell stocks. It’s far from bad, but it wobbles uncertainly between narrative elements.Īs a stockbroker, the game itself appears to be all about buying and selling. It’d be better if the story was funnier or more interesting than it is. Plus, by the end, The Invisible Hand makes it clear that its game systems are smoke and mirrors. The story is going to turn out the same either way. If you want to lobby foreign countries to influence the strength of their currency, hey, that’s on the table too. If you want to try and do things by the book, you can do that. You can supposedly play however you want. The game makes a big show of giving you the illusion of choice. One of these is Geistnet, a dark web resource that has the latest scoop on insider information.

The plot itself mostly concerns a watchdog group keeping tabs on Ferios, while you yourself use illicit tools to get a leg up on the competition. Before long, you’re neck-deep in company politics while you sink deeper into the ethics-free mire of big money. You don’t have relevant experience, but your relative knows a guy that knows a guy. The Invisible Hand begins with your unnamed character being hired by Ferios, an elite financial company. I honestly think I would have liked it more as a full-on game. The thing is, it isn’t completely upfront about this, which leads to some issues as the plot develops. In a country where so much of the citizenry lives paycheck-to-paycheck, who wouldn’t gawk at people who make tons of money by making tons of money? The Invisible Hand has a lot to say about the existence of shady companies that make money by gaming the system, but it does so while also pretending to be a regular game. The lives of wealthy stockbrokers are ripe for satire.

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