A new political satire survival game which places the player in No.10 as the new prime minister has gone viral, topping UK mobile phone app paid games charts.
The game, No.10: Full Confidence, currently tops the chart for paid games on both the App Store and Google Play, pipping Minecraft into first place on both platforms.
Made by Sleepy Boy Studios, it is pitched as a "darkly comic political survival game where you cling to power through an endless parade of very British crises; strikes, scandals, a chancellor who's done something unspeakable, and newspapers sharpening their knives before breakfast”.
“Every crisis lands on your desk with a ticking clock and no good options: please the cabinet and enrage the backbenchers, throw the media a bone and watch the public turn, or make the brave choice and lose everyone at once, " a press release for the game says. "Keep the four factions of cabinet, backbenchers, media and public, just onside enough to survive another month in office.
“Lose them, and you'll be remembered in the way British prime ministers usually are: briefly, and unkindly. Hundreds of hand-written crises, a cast of rivals with their own designs on your job, and a fresh way to fall from grace every single time. It's the impossible job, as a game. How long can you last?”
Creator Benjamin Brewis has shared feedback with CSW from civil servants who have played the game.
A London-based official who has previously worked in the Cabinet Office told him: "Working in government I just love the concept as it is true to form in some scenarios. I think you could go even further with the absurdness. For a lot of the time in government the advice comes down to us and can change almost straight away."
Another Manchester-based civil servant told Brewis: "When I first started at a new role within government I needed a MacBook for the design software I use, but I kid you not, it ended up taking five weeks to deliver and I had to review designs with pen and paper until then. It’s these sort of small mundane things that the game really gets right even when the scenarios are clearly absurd in themselves."
Another civil servant said: "It’s so true for some of the scenarios in terms of silliness. We once went on lockdown because a drone was spotted near our building even though it was there just to take photos anyway."
Brewis also shared with CSW feedback from Conservative Party MP Alicia Kearns on the game.
Kearns, who is the party's shadow minister for home affairs and a former chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, told Brewis: "I think it’s great, I love that people want to put themselves in the hot seat. I made it three years, four months… my backbenchers did finish me off which I think is a pattern many people in the country will recognise. But I thought it was great.
"It is so true to life in that it starts with... Liam Byrne leaving that very famous note, “There’s no money left”. I love the way a lot of the issues coming up were real things, minimum service levels we have been debating in parliament over the last few years.
"I didn't like that sometimes the only options were to be corrupt. I sat there thinking ‘I wouldn’t do any of these things!’ But I love it… it’s like when a seaside MP says, ‘I want a national gull strategy because we are sick of gulls in our community’ and then you end up with the whole country for a week talking about: should there be a great gull cull of 2027? And I think that game really brings to life how the reality of the mundane or low level noise and how something small becomes a big national issue."