Review: Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator
Remember 2025? Remember the cute little games we played back then? Tiny rodent fellas completing picross puzzles to furnish their homes? Heartfelt stories about characters who are somehow pretty endearing, despite being half a head? I mean, ignore all the other stuff that doesn’t help prove my point – and then compare those to what 2026 has offered so far. Reality-bending machines and bloodthirsty roots that consume everything in their path. At least it's not going to get any weirder than that, right?
Oh.
Strange Scaffold are a development team which like to live up to their name — the strange part, I mean; I don't know that they've made any games about scaffolding yet. They're perhaps best known for the unsettling mono-buttoned Clickolding, but the rest of their catalogue is equally out there from ‘horror fantasy kidnapping simulator’ Life Eater, to ‘space warlord organ trading simulator’, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
And it's that last one from which, surprisingly enough, today's game has spun off – though evidently Strange Scaffold thought trading organs was a touch too mild, as they've eschewed the ‘organ’ part, like a sea cucumber (look it up), and replaced it with… babies.
Image: Strange Scaffold
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Developer: Strange Scaffold
Publisher: Frosty Pop, Strange Scaffold
Release: 29 January 2026
Retail Price (Steam): 18,99€/$19.99/£15.99
Before you get too worried, I should explain that you’re not actually trading the babies themselves, but rather stock in their simulated lives.
What do you mean that doesn’t explain anything at all?
Fine. When you start this stock-trading roguelike, you’ll be informed that in the year 3478, a company called FutureSee has developed terminals that allow people to, effectively, see into the future — it’s not just the game that’s named incredibly literally. Speculative markets no longer exist, because anyone can just look up exactly what’ll happen to a company. The only thing those terminals can’t predict are the lives of babies, with their infinite potential. So, capitalism being capitalism, that’s what the stock market turns to. And with you playing as any one of a handful of various money-grubbing aliens, that’s where you turn, as well.
Image: Strange Scaffold
You pick a baby, and the simulation of its life begins. You can buy stocks in it as you please; when something good happens to it their value will go up, when something bad happens to it, their value will go down. When it’s simulated life ends, they’ll drop to zero. Buy low, sell high, make sure you’re not holding when they die. Right at the start of the game you’ve got no real way to make an informed decision – you’re just going entirely on vibes – but you quickly unlock a selection of consultants who can give you helpful tips. That can be anything from the average share price of a baby to an estimation of how long it’ll live for, but it’s usually something you can use to give yourself a significant trading advantage, at the cost of a commission percentage.
There are a couple of other ways to make money: firstly, the heavily-advertised ‘baby shorting’ mechanic – but if you’re as financially illiterate as I am and you haven’t watched that movie, it might take you a little while to get your head around exactly how shorting a stock actually works. Even once you kind of understand it, I can tell you from experience that you might still struggle to pull any off successfully; for me they ended up being by far and away my least-used money-making scheme, and one I’m fairly certain lost me more money than they ever made.
Finally, each of the day’s four available babies will usually have a side-bet option, where you can gamble a few thousand credits on various outcomes. Those are things like whether a specific event will happen to it during its lifetime, or if its value will hit a particular high or low. Those previously-mentioned consultants can help a lot with these, too: if, for example, you already know a baby’s average value is going to be somewhere between 550,000 and 600,000, it seems pretty likely that the value will, at some point, reach 610,000. As long as you’ve got the funds, it can be a nice little earner – and earning is, unsurprisingly, the main point of this game.
Image: Strange Scaffold
There are currently six characters to pick from (though that number will be increasing in the very near future — more on that later) and for each of those characters you’ve got three targets to aim for, offering a bronze, silver and gold trophy. I would say that’s probably my first point of contention with the game in its current state: each campaign is a set number of days, but there’s no option – as far as I could tell – to close up shop a couple of days early. That means on a few occasions I’d have already earnt the gold trophy, and had nothing to do for the remaining days. There’s no real incentive to try and make even more: in fact, you’re encouraged not to, as doing so would risk losing what you’ve got and dropping below the gold trophy threshold. Instead, you sort of meander through the rest of the time, unless you want to try and grab an achievement or two – I did intentionally lose a million credits at one point as I could afford to do so and there was an achievement for doing exactly that.
On that, while I’m not saying Steam achievements should necessarily count for a huge amount, I think in genres such as the roguelike they give a decent idea of how much there is to actually do in a game. Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator launched with 40 of those, and I think it speaks for something that the only two I didn’t unlock were the one that was bugged at the time of playing, and the one which requires you to stay in-game for a single three-hour session. For reference, my total time played to complete everything else was a little over three and a half hours, across two sessions.
Maybe I’m just unusually good at the game and got through it really quickly – there had to be something out there I was good at, and a cursory glance at some of the user reviews on Steam shows plenty of players with significantly more hours on record – but it did make the entry price of $16.99/£13.59/16,14€, at a 15% discount, seem pretty steep relative to the amount of content that was on offer. That’s not to say that time spent wasn’t fun – it definitely is, as long as you’ve got an objective you’re trying to complete – but it certainly left me feeling like there ought to have been… more.
Image: Strange Scaffold
Which is actually where the interesting part of this game’s release comes in, because there certainly will be more. Considerably more: there’s sort of a semi-live service aspect, with – to quote Strange Scaffold – at least two months of free updates still to come. The roadmap for the first three weeks includes four new campaigns, a new game mode, and a daily challenge mode, meaning that three weeks after launch, Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator will have pretty much doubled up on the amount of content it offers, with plenty more to come in subsequent weeks.
I’m not quite sure how I feel about that. I have to admit I’m the sort of person who acts like they’re deathly allergic to Early Access titles, which this feels tangential to, so I might have a bit more of an issue with it than most. I’m sure there’s some sort of parallel someone cleverer than me could draw between investing in one of these space-babies and investing in this game: arguably it’s not worth it right this second, but it’s value should go up, and I think it will have certainly reached that point by the time those two months of additional content have been added. For what it’s worth, at time of publication, the first week of that will have already come out, so you’ve already got two more campaigns available than I did when I played. I imagine that I will want to go back and play those, along with the rest of the new content as it’s released on a daily basis.
Image: Strange Scaffold
The fact that not everything is out yet does make it a little difficult to stick a number on this review: to revisit ‘early access’ titles for a second, that’s precisely the reason I don’t review them – it feels unfair to pass a final judgement on a product that isn’t claiming to be the finished article. Were this a developer with a less extensive back catalogue, I would probably be more apprehensive about recommending it, but I do have faith that Strange Scaffold will see that the game grows into something significantly meatier over that two-month update window.
For all I know, things like that extra game mode which has been touted will revolutionise the title and make it a must-play which would get a significantly higher rating than this, but for now, Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator is awarded a solid 7.5/10 by IndieLoupe.com
The reviewed product was provided on behalf of the developer.
