Ridiculous History Demo

Although there are some foggy bits here and there, we seem to know enough about history to understand how society evolved and how it all came together. Starting from the earliest tribes and communities, all the way to our huge cities and countries, people have certainly come a long way. However, it would be nice to see what would happen if we somehow researched a different type of technology at various points in history.

Ridiculous History is a very intriguing strategy and time management game, in which your task is to make it to the year 2015 with as many points as possible. In order to score points, you have to research technologies from the ground up, or even start directly with robotics and artificial intelligence. Both chance and skill contribute to the overall gameplay, so it’s not completely up to you either.

To begin with, you start with a city and a few people, as well as a handful of choices when it comes to the things you can research. These technologies are randomly chosen, and it’s pretty annoying, because you can roll badly in the beginning and be stuck with long and difficult ones. Granted, you can use gold to reroll them, but you only have so much of it before you start showing a deficit.

The randomness is not a great idea, in retrospect, but there are others that make the experience better. You must also keep an eye on your population, income, military power and research points, and each research can increase these stats significantly. On the other hand, you can focus only on research and get to the point where you can research any technology in under 50 years, which allows you to finish the game before 2015 hits.

This is mainly because you can also build some structures in your city to augment your stats, such as banks, schools, airports and factories. They cost gold, but you can spend as much gold as you want without losing the game, because it is subtracted from your total score. Since the score can be a negative value as well, there’s nothing stopping you from buying everything, at least if you are not worried about the final result.

Ridiculous History is not quite there yet, but it can transform into a pretty successful game if some of the more glaring issues are fixed. More restrictions and less randomness would be nice, otherwise it feels either too easy, or like you don’t have any control over the situation.