Sitting at the intersection between health and commerce, the political and moral economy of the pharmaceutical industry has been a recurrent theme in literature and film—from John le Carré's The Constant Gardener to Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects. But it's a subject matter largely unexplored in video games. Big Pharma, the debut PC game from developer Tim Wicksteed, puts players in control of their own pharmaceutical corporation, allowing them to alleviate the world's disease burden while making a tidy profit.

Players start out on a small scale, making remedies such as antihistamines and creams to soothe rashes, but can then work towards loftier goals, such as developing vaccines for cancer or curing tuberculosis. These more ambitious projects pay bigger dividends. Indeed, the game calls for constant innovation or your company will stagnate and be pushed out of the market by more competitive rivals.

Unlike most real drug development, active ingredients are discovered by explorers who the player sends out into the virtual world. Once the ingredient is found, you import it to your factory and start making the drug. Ingredients have effects, which need to be enhanced to active concentrations, and side-effects, which can potentially be removed through further processing. Although the ideal drug would be one with high effectiveness and no side-effects, it won’t necessarily be the most profitable. After all, more processing is costly, and if there's a high enough demand, consumers won’t be deterred by the occasional bout of nausea or narcolepsy. The game does punish players by cutting a drug's profit if it causes too many adverse events, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the drug will be a financial failure.

Much of the game is a pleasantly addictive factory floor management-type puzzle, but the more conceptually interesting elements lie in the strategic business decisions that need to be made. I chose to develop a cure for genital warts over an antidepressant, because the market was bigger and the competitors fewer. And although it was the only medicine for gout on the market, I decided to stop production of my drug because it simply wasn’t profitable. Big Pharma never chides you for leaving people without effective treatments or harming them with side-effects, and it's only on stepping away from the game that you realise just how much your real-world self might disapprove of these decisions. In this respect, Big Pharma shows you how easy it is to be villainous once the debts are piling up and the next big breakthrough is the only thing that matters.

All this moral ambiguity isn’t to say that the game isn’t fun. I had a definite (and slightly embarrassing) sense of triumph when the game informed me that a scare over food additives had led to a drop in cases of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)—not so much because I was glad that fewer people were being afflicted, but more because ADHD was the target of my biggest rival's most popular drug. Indicators that show how many people your drug has cured can appeal to the gamer's more altruistic side, and fitting all the pieces together to bring about a complex drug such as a cure for dementia (you can’t blame the game designers for wishful thinking) is really rather satisfying. Even just sitting back and watching the mess of conveyor belts and machines all ticking along together can be a rewarding experience, especially when you wonder how you ever managed to build such a complicated production line.

Copyright © 2015 Twice Circled

Ultimately, Big Pharma is an enjoyable game about trying to be the best drug producer, but it only really hints at the murkier side of the pharmaceutical industry. With luck, other players will leave the game in reflective mood wondering whether, if this were real life, they might want to do things differently.

Big Pharma see For more onsee http://www.bigpharmagame.com/

Big Pharma Show full caption Developed by Twice Circled. Published by Positech Games, 2015 Copyright © 2015 Twice Circled