Bad Credit? No Problem! Review (PC)

The fact that I haven’t approved a loan in the past, I don’t know, three days, means that I’m putting the company’s best interests over the client’s happiness and business prospects. But I’m not in a flexible position to make swingling cuts. As much as it pains me to admit it, if I don’t make ends meet myself, then I won’t have a job to return to after the two-week probation period reaches its final analytical phase. With that, I have a moral dilemma: Do I save the firm money by purposely rejecting client applications, or do I do the “right thing” in the hopes that the client will make good on their promises to foot the bill in full when the deadline comes knocking? Frankly, I think that I’m morally bankrupt; the client can wait, because I have people to please and dreams to annihilate.

Bad Credit? No Problem! is a game that wants me to make the right choices, not just to benefit the overheads who pull the strings from behind the smokescreen of financial trajectories, but to appease the clients who just want to make a living from their preposterously ambitious paper dreams. The only problem is that it doesn’t tell me how to make both parties happy; it instead informs me that, regardless of how I choose to stamp the papers, something, or someone will wind up being given the short end of the stick. I can do one thing right, but at the risk of losing out on another potential client. The money will always flow, but the job, on the other hand, will have grind to a halt should I make the incorrect business decisions. A day in the life of a loan shark, I guess.

On the bright side of this rather daunting dilemma, the game itself does give you enough wriggle room to make a few mistakes. Granted, it isn’t as “cozy” or as laid back as it describes itself as, but it does give you a smidgen of leeway to right a few wrongs and, on occasion, earn a few extra bucks in the absence of your moral compass. And that’s good. Or at least, so I think it is. At this point, I’m not entirely sure what the right thing is or how one would go about fulfilling it. Swings and roundabouts, though, right?

100% APR, Guaranteed

Bad Credit? No Problem! presents you with a not-so-simple objective to complete: converse with the clients who visit your office, and decide on whether or not to offer them a loan. You can hear their stories, and rather humanely, you can resonate with their hopes and dreams. But the goal that you have to achieve, however, is about as humane as a tyrannical supervisor at a corporate headquarters. You can approve loans, for sure, but not without the risk of bumping into a few business obligations and moral dilemmas along the way. I suppose that’s deserving of an A for authenticity alone, to be fair.

The game itself is dressed up in a surprisingly sweet and simple pixel art style, which is unusual, given that the game more or less touches base on some morally dubious aspects of credit and banking. It softens the blow though, I suppose; it looks awfully inviting, what with its sprightly characters and colorful palette, but it also serves under the guise of a rather bleak situation. That’s a textbook job simulator for you, I guess.

There is something that I like about Bad Credit? No Problem!, and that’s the fact that you have the option to embark on two separate quests: Story Mode, which consists of a 14-day probation period, and an Endless mode, which allows you the chance to go beyond the initial probation phase to onboard more applications in a rogue-like fashion. Thankfully, the latter option adds a certain amount of extra weight to the vanilla experience, with a surplus of situations to analyze, characters to meet, and consequences to juggle. In short, it brings a lot of bang for your buck — and that’s always a treat when it comes to these smaller indies.

For the Good of the Company

If Bad Credit? No Problem! was just a quick payday loan-type affair, then I probably wouldn’t have much to talk about here. As it turns out, however, the game does feature a good amount of depth in its decision-making process, to the point where you not only need to analyze identification, tax information, salaries, and personal circumstances, but also a web of branching dialogue options that, depending upon how you navigate each title loan, culminate in one of several scenarios. There’s a bit of juggling to do in that regard, which can of course be both a challenge and a good way to wax that egoistical itch.

It’s a simple concept at heart, but the truth is, Bad Credit? No Problem! has a solid amount of content to shovel through. Is it always fair? No. Is it cozy? Eh, it’s not not cozy. It’s a puzzling affair, if anything, and so, if you do happen to enjoy games like Papers, Please, then you ought to have a vague idea of how this office presents its cards.

Verdict

Bad Credit? No Problem! waxes a good concept that’s oddly reminiscent of Papers, Please, with its moral dilemmas and consequential butterfly effects providing a well-established nonlinear narrative that can easily keep you second guessing your motives and obligations for hours on end. It isn’t all doom and gloom either, unlike your mentally taxing corporate job sim, that is. Granted, it has a few loose threads and some thought-provoking situations, but at no point does it brand you as an incompetent employee for making a bad investment. It doesn’t want you to, but it does make it so that you have some extra leeway in making ends meet. And that’s great, because if it didn’t have that extra slack, then I can imagine that it would have been more of an unhinged downward trajectory.

If you’re all for the idea of stamping a few loans and playing the corporate bigwig for a short while, then Bad Credit? No Problem! ought to have just the chair for you to park your backside on. Likewise, if you’re a fan of either Papers, Please or Civil Purgatory, or just about any other social deduction game that requires you to sift through credentials and make life-altering choices, then you will probably enjoy fumbling around with a few paychecks and applications here. Of course, it won’t give you a new lease on life, but it ought to make you appreciate what you already have: an absent loan manager who’s morally devoid of empathy or emotion.

…I passed the probation period. Go figure.