Cartel Simulator

Editorial Has potential

Cartel Simulator is caught in a frustrating developer-audience disconnect. The Steam version languishes at 0.9 while Patreon backers receive 1.0+ updates months earlier—a practice players resent as exploitative gatekeeping. Set aside the update politics, and the game itself has real merit: a solid crime-story VN with compelling dialogue, attractive character models, and engaging narrative progression that keeps players invested for 12–19 hours. The creative work lands for its audience. But the build is in rough shape. Achievements bug out and don't register; text glitches appear if you advance dialogue too quickly; late-game sequences loop infinitely; and world state is wildly inconsistent (characters available in impossible locations, dead characters reappearing, missing NPCs). The gallery doesn't capture all scenes. For a game billed as feature-complete, these aren't minor hiccups—they're a pattern of unfinished polish. If the developer were updating Steam in parallel with Patreon, the roughness might feel acceptable; instead, the version you buy here feels abandoned mid-patch. Community sentiment is split between those who loved the story enough to overlook jank and those for whom the bugs and neglect soured the experience entirely.