Woman Simulator: a household chores game where you also monitor the husband's mood

This game does not launch today but on 25 September. So this is not a review, and I will limit myself to describing what the store page announces, because that is already plenty.

What the page says

You play a housewife and experience all the household duties firsthand.

Cooking, washing the dishes, doing the laundry, ironing and drying underwear and socks, mopping the floor.

And two details that change the nature of the object.

Your husband will check on you periodically.

You have to monitor your morale and your husband's mood. To relax after cleaning, take a bath. To cheer him up, flatter him.

That is the whole official description, or nearly. It fits in five sentences.

What we do not know

And that is precisely why this article is not a review.

The page does not say what register the game is playing in. A household chores simulator where a husband inspects the work and where you flatter him to raise a gauge can be three very different things.

A satire, in which case everything depends on the writing and on what the game does with the player executing the instructions.

A neutral management game that has not thought for a second about what it depicts.

Or something else again, which only playing will establish.

There are no reviews and no price displayed as I write, and the page gives no clue of tone: no visible irony, no framing, nothing allowing a judgement from outside.

What we will be watching on the 25th

Three questions, in this order.

Does the game have a point of view? A chores simulator can be an interesting mechanic, provided it knows what it is saying. Papers, Please is a rubber-stamping simulator, and nobody reduces it to that.

Is the husband's mood gauge a system or a joke? That is the central point. A game turning a spouse's satisfaction into a resource to manage necessarily says something, deliberately or not.

And is there an ending? A chores game with no horizon and a chores game that leads somewhere are not judged the same way.

Developed and published by Sebasa Games, announced for 25 September. We will come back to it when it is playable, because that is the only moment anything honest can be said about it.

What do you make of it before playing? The discussion is open on the InsertCoins Discord.