By Ashton Starr
Envision an ideal world 19 years into the future. Do we still need to work to survive, or is our labour voluntarily distributed where and how we want? Are we still electing blue- and red-striped political parties, or are we actively participating in the management of our workplaces and neighbourhoods? Will there be sex robots?
Video game developer Molleindustria, the creator of Democratic Socialism Simulator, Green New Deal Simulator and The New York Times Simulator, released another simulator that considers these kinds of questions. Future? No Thanks! presents a setting in which a diverse array of left-wing politics are given a moment to reform away from our current authoritarian-capitalist society.
Speaking to The Leveller, the solo game developer Paolo Pedercini behind Molleindustria, stated that “[t]o me utopia is a situation in which the traditional dilemmas of the left (anarchism vs communism, state centralization vs grassroots, reform vs revolution, equality vs liberty, and so on) can finally be openly debated and tested because the common capitalist enemy is gone.”
This is the kind of playground for politically creative thought and storytelling we were hoping for when we published a small list of video games for leftists 5 years ago.
Future? No Thanks! is “a narrative-driven, open-world adventure set in an ecosocialist utopia. You’re old, bitter, and scheduled for euthanasia. Enjoy your last day in a future that works for everyone but you.”
Set in Pittsburgh, 2045, in a disunited, post-“Civil-Civil War” United States. The northeastern states are still in a transition from capitalism, recovering from hundreds of years of environmental degradation, and moving towards egalitarianism. The player controls Harvey Huffstone, an elderly cisgendered white man who is bitter about this idealistic society, complains about gender equality, praises a Christian god and capitalism, and is trying to get laid.
Like any true adventure game, Harvey’s bucket list is a series of quests. He needs to talk to an array of characters, walk — or drive a very fast wheelchair — around a fairly small, colourful city, fetch the necessary objects and use them to complete his goals. It’s no Grand Theft Auto with a largely interactive open-world, but the engagements and dialogue choices are the highlights of this game, encouraging replay, with a couple of mini-games that play like short, psychedelic music videos.
Harvey has dementia, forgetting most of what happened since the Civil-Civil War, it’s a clever ludonarrative trick for the exposition and constant explanations of new social practices and economics. It’s comparable to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Moving the Mountain (1911) in which an American man is lost in Tibet for 30 years, then returns to a United States that has moved beyond socialism and adopted feminist gender relations.
Thankfully, Future? No Thanks! is fully voice-acted, and very well so. It is more elevated than a typical visual novel in which a player would meet non-player characters, loosely choose a topic or response, and then read a lot of text in between. The game itself is funny.Many of which Pedercini said are “friendly jabs at certain leftist patterns” like accurately depicting the struggle many leftists know of holding consensus-based meetings. Pedercini continued, “I think a bit of self-deprecating humor about the messiness of democratic processes can help make it more tolerable.”
What is exciting about the setting is its uniqueness as a speculative science fiction story based on a left-wing political project. Healthcare is universally accessible, as well as deathcare. Most of the aging population has no complaints, since surgery and pharmacare is free, “modern medicine doesn’t give us much to talk about.” There’s a four-day work week, a campaign that real-world anti-capitalist labour unions have been fighting for for over a century. Harvey gets an opportunity to sit in on the factory workers’ meetings and witness the friction and messiness of an honest attempt at workplace democracy.
Pedercini explains, “the main idea is that the people in the game are not perfect: they can be kind of dumb, excessively nice, or annoyingly righteous – all for comedic reasons – but society as a whole is better and smarter than the sum of its parts.” It’s only been a few years since the in-game revolution transpired, and the socialist groups are putting labour theory into real-life practice for the first time in the USA. Pedercini also explains that the sci-fi genre uses utopias “as societies in which citizens have the same set of beliefs, and live in harmony because of this homogeneity” without internal debate, as is commonplace in left-wing organizing.
Despite Harvey being an antagonist to a utopian society, playing Harvey as the protagonist is fun. Harvey is comparable to Larry of the Leisure Suit Larry (1987-) video game series — a character who is also desperately trying to have heterosexual intercourse. However, Larry never receives pushback to his misogynistic remarks, while Harvey’s politics are met with an immediate counterpoint, or good faith care — or pity — for his misunderstanding of this new society. At one point, Harvey is told “everyone has the right to be ourselves” and that he has “lost absolutely nothing.” Harvey is frustrating, since he is fully aware of his social positioning by saying that he “chooses to not be rich,” or commenting on how his racial or gendered privileges no longer exist, but he sees how free and fulfilling the world is now — he just doesn’t like it.
Pedercini explains that Harvey’s “antisocial and antisocialist actions are negligible in the bigger picture because society is designed to withstand them.” In fact, this low-conflict scenario is important “to envision how a better society could deal with dissent and leftover reactionary elements.” This understanding of the player’s avatar, as well as the unchecked remarks he makes, makes for much more interesting political science-fiction storytelling than what we have seen before.
“I get messages all the time from people claiming that my games contributed to their process of radicalization,” However, Pedercini explains, “what moves people is the ‘lived experiences’ of meeting comrades or getting screwed by capitalism. But the direction we move towards depends [on] how primed we are to certain ideas. Culture plays a big role in that.”
Future? No Thanks! was originally set to release July 22, but a review of it by digital storefront Steam classified it as an adult game — next to pornographic simulations of realistic sexual intercourse — while this game only has polygonal breasts and references to sex that happens off-screen. Aftermath explored the opaque review process Molleindustria has undergone, how it could take a few minutes or inexplicably weeks, and how Steam is a virtual monopoly for video game sales.
While sexual content is present in the game, the discourse around gender, sex and consent is something rarely seen in video games. Harvey has the opportunity to visit a brothel with sex workers, who explain the terms of service for contracting this kind of labour. There is important character development in this, and we are glad to know it was not cut from the final product.
As of publishing, Future? No Thanks! is available on PC through Steam so far, but the publisher expects to release it later this year on Epic and Itch.io.
The Leveller’s hopes for a leftist video game future is found in Future? No Thanks!, but there is also a very funny and philosophic entertainment within Molleindustria’s work. Similarly to our review of the 2026 Marxist film I Love Boosters, you won’t need an academic understanding of Murray Bookchin, Antonio Negri, or Karl Marx (a ‘cyberpunk’ translation of Das Kapital is already in the game).
We highly recommend the game not just for leftists to play through their dreams of operating a workers’ cooperative vertical marijuana farm, but for those who want to expand their creative imagination of a potential world that is within our grasp. Pedercini told us, “I hope this game is directed to both groups.
Editor’s Note: The author received a review copies of different versions for free by the developer by request prior to September 4, 2026. Game versions may vary depending on store and time of downloading. An earlier version of this article suggested the removal of a sex scene and that it was currently for sale on Epic games store — these have been corrected.
