Well, it had to happen sooner or later. The Trolley Problem is becoming a PC game but it’s much, much worse than we could have imagined.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the Trolley Problem and its many variants, it’s a thought experiment about ethics, choice responsibility. It goes something like this.. five people are tied to a tram track and there’s a runaway tram rolling towards them. You can pull a lever which will switch the tram to another track, but there’s one person tied to that track. What do you do?
We’d pictured a Trolley Problem game as some sort of warped virtual tram set, letting you drag and drop people on the tracks, challenging other people to make the call. But Trolley Problem, Inc., from solo developer Samuel Read-Graves, is instead a collection of ethnically challenging and really quite dark dilemmas.
Sounds fun, right? Not really, though we’re grimly determined to play it at some point. You’ll be able to share your choices with YouTube/Twitch viewers through the game’s streaming features, but don’t count on many laughs. One of the questions featured in the trailer has a dying dog laying on the tracks which, as animal lovers, really hit us hard. So hard, in fact, that we had to go and hug our cat.
Apparently, it’s “darkly comedic”, but we can’t stop thinking about that poor imaginary dog. You won’t have to wait long to experience the misery either. Trolley Problem, Inc. (narrated by Dead Ringers’ Jan Ravens) will arrive on PC this April 21st. You can check out the above trailer and wishlist it on Steam here.
