1920s showbiz sim Hollywood Animal is my long-awaited replacement for The Movies, now with added blackmail

My favorite management sim, The Movies, has been lost to the mists of time and the swamps of abandonware, but I finally have what may be its successor: Hollywood Animal. This game launched onto early access earlier this month, and I absolutely love the time that I’ve spent with it so far.

On paper, the two are very similar. Much like Lionhead's 2005 simulator, Hollywood Animal sees you run a film studio in 1920s America, having to make movies to survive the dog-eat-dog world of showbiz. But while The Movies had a tendency to gloss over the nastier aspects of the film industry – and also lacked more sophisticated systems in general, despite feeling revolutionary at the time – Hollywood Animal indulges in them. It doesn’t condone those more tarnished edges of the silver screen, but they are very much present – and all the more dramatic for it.

The ol' razzle dazzle

The grimiest example of this is the ability to offer services to prospective actors and crew. These can include the standard kind of swag that actors are offered, like fancy watches, but it can also include, er, less legal services, like heroin. You can also blackmail staff to make them sign a contract extension – and speaking of staff, one of my sound guys is a raging racist.

You have your secrets, too. You don’t start your own studio from the ground up. Instead, you take over a failing one, and your first film is all ready to go, having been left behind by the previous owners. There’s one sticking point – the leading man has died, and you don’t know what to do with his earnings.

Sure, you could pay his family, but the game, whispering into my ear like Satan in the Garden of Eden, noted that his family were already well off, and they’d surely be fine. So I just didn’t pay them, hoping they’d never bring it up. After a while, the secret faded away, and I got away with robbing a dead man’s family. You’ve gotta do what it takes to make it in Hollywood.

As the game develops, it becomes even more like my long-lost love. You can make screenplays from ideas that your writers have, but you can also create your own film from scratch, picking genres, story beats, and the roles of each actor. Sure, you don’t get to be as hands-on as in The Movies, and you don’t get to watch your finished film, but it’s pretty close.

And....cut

All of this isn’t to say that the game is flawless. It certainly shows its early access spirit. Difficulty, for instance, is far too high at present, and it’s very easy to overspend and end up flat broke. This is especially true given the outrageous salaries that cast and crew alike can demand.

Given that a good actor can make or break a picture, this can lead to a snowballing effect where you end up crashing out after making what should be your magnum opus, because you couldn’t afford the advertising. Likewise, you can very easily take a brilliant script and end up with a shockingly bad movie, which feels a touch unrealistic.

The UI, too, needs a lot of work. Currently, building upgrades are nestled away in the construction menu, and it can be very difficult to figure out what exactly you need to research to get each upgrade. Some research times are extremely long, too, and while you can speed it up with your dual currencies of dollars and influence, it’s hard to make that much of a dent. Sometimes, the terminology that the game uses, while of the time, also feels a little too close to the edge for my liking – one staffing research option is simply titled “illegals”.

The game reminds me somewhat of News Tower, the cheery 1930s newspaper simulator, which is one of my current tycoon favorites. They obviously share a setting, but beyond that, there’s a certain sense of grime to them both that shines a light on the issues of the era without getting too unpleasant. I can’t help but hope this might mean that tycoon games are making a proper resurgence, but time will tell.

In spite of the current flaws that I’ve mentioned, I do recommend checking out Hollywood Animal, especially if you were a fan of The Movies back in the day. I have hope that the issues that I’ve mentioned will be ironed out over time, and we’ll end up with an all-timer.

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