Do not Feed the Monkeys

Do Not Feed the Monkeys is a voyeur sim built around a single, quietly brilliant tension: you have access to dozens of private surveillance feeds, you can see things people desperately want kept secret, and the game keeps asking what you plan to do about it. You play as a new recruit to a shadowy club of watchers who call their camera subjects "monkeys." Your job is to observe, log what you see, and, officially, not interfere. The entire structure is built around that rule, and around how often you will break it. From a strategy standpoint, the resource loop is tighter than it first appears. You pay rent. You need to sleep. Each cage (the game's word for a camera feed) demands research time before its secrets unlock, and you only have so many hours in a day before your character's health and finances start degrading. Managing which cages to prioritize, when to sell information versus sit on it, and when to risk making contact with a subject is genuinely a scheduling puzzle with meaningful stakes. The AI governing the subjects is scripted rather than procedural, but the writing is sharp enough that each feed feels like a small mystery with branching consequences. Some paths reward patience with wild late-game revelations. Others dead-end if you misread the situation early. The game does not hold your hand through any of this, which is almost certainly intentional. There is no tutorial segment that eases you in, you get a sparse introduction and a mounting list of subjects, and the rent clock starts ticking immediately. That sounds punishing, but the day-one learning curve is actually shallow. The real depth is in replay value: the first run you will miss roughly half of what each cage can reveal, and coming back with foreknowledge of which subjects connect to which storylines is a genuinely different experience. Moddability is basically zero here, this is a tightly authored, finite experience, not a sandbox. If you want infinite content, look elsewhere. If you want a focused, authored piece of simulation writing, the sealed nature works in its favor. The weaknesses are real. The visual style is functional rather than impressive, and a handful of the narrative threads resolve with less payoff than the setup deserves. The game also has a hard time communicating exactly how close to a deadline you are on certain subject storylines, which means you can accidentally lock yourself out of a resolution through no obvious fault in your decision-making. The time-management pressure is the core mechanic, but its feedback loop occasionally works against the player in ways that feel arbitrary rather than designed. These are friction points worth knowing about before you sit down. For strategy and sim players specifically: this is not a numbers game. There are no build orders, no tech trees, no faction modifiers. What it does share with the genre is the pleasure of information asymmetry, knowing more than the other parties in a situation and deciding how to use that knowledge. If you have ever enjoyed the intel phase of an XCOM campaign more than the combat, or if games like Papers, Please scratched an itch you still cannot quite name, Do Not Feed the Monkeys operates in that same uncomfortable headspace. It respects your time in the sense that a full run is completable in under ten hours, and it disrespects your comfort in every other sense, which is exactly what it is going for.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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