If things keep going the way they’re going, finding the real Needle In A HayStack Simulator on Steam will be just like the title. Several pretenders have emerged since the original was announced, prompting the devs to make sure the game stands out amid the fakery.
You can probably surmise what Needle In A Haystack Simulator wants you to do, but I’ll describe it anyway. There’s a needle lost in a haystack of around 5 million pieces of hay. You have to find it.
That’s pretty much it. You can find treasure in your search that you can sell for tools that’ll make the process easier, but really it’s just about bounding through piles and piles of hay. The release, from Studio Bitdot, managed to get a bit of online attention due to being so on-the-nose and perfunctory, in the way meme games tend to in the era of friendslop and streamer bait.
I mean, I want to play it to see how infuriating it’ll be, and if I can bring some friends along for the ride, all the better. The game itself is due out during the last quarter of this year, and since the Steam page went up, a bunch of others have appeared like a bad rash.
At time of writing, there are eight other games, similar in concept and title, available on Valve’s marketplace. Some have slightly different aesthetics, but they’re all based around the exact same thing – finding a needle that’s somehow become lost in an absurd amount of hay. When I say similar, I’m referring to games like:
- Needle In A Haystack
- Needle In A Haystack (yes, again, verbatim)
- Needle in a Haytask (behold, a lowercase “a”)
- Needle in a Haystack (two lowercase words in the title, dare we dream)
- A Needle In a Haystack (in case you were unsure of how many needles there are)
- Needle in a Million Haystacks (now we’re just getting silly, the world’s not ready for this much hay)
Bitdot has responded the only way possible, really: by slapping an “Original” bumper sticker on its Steam listing art. I mean, what else can you do? It’s not exactly an original conceit, though it’s certainly more original than the above, and these are indie devs with limited resources. You’re got to use what you’ve got. I know which one of these I’ll be playing, and it’s not one of the bandwagon jumpers.