This game about grinding mute lumps of shapeless flesh has made me realise I've been hornswoggled by capitalism

I am a stakhanovite, a hero-worker. My productivity is not measured in grams but kilos. My working hours have been divided and subdivided into ultimate efficiency: not a nanosecond is wasted.

That is, in Flesh Grinding, whose demo I've been mucking about with. Not in real life, where my working hours consist mostly of staring at a blank Google Doc and wondering if I'm a moron who could never actually write at all.

Anyway, Flesh Grinding, which releases in Q4 2026—not to be confused with Fleshgrinder, which releases in Q1 2027; good luck—is a labour simulator. It's also one of those PS1-style horror games that are so fashionable right now. But mostly it is a game about working.

Working, specifically, with flesh—great, distended chunks of the stuff that plop down from the ceiling and amass in shiny piles. You must pick them up, walk them to your grinder, then turn them to mince. You must do this until your IV drip runs out of fluid, at which point it is time to return to your home and upgrade yourself, spending the millilitres of blood you scrounged from your grinding on upgrades.

Hit your goal (a kilo of meat at first, then five kilos, and so on) and new areas open up with new machines—feed a lump of flesh to this thing and it will spit out IV-replenishing potions, that kind of thing, which add entirely new aspects of the fundamental flesh-grinding loop to think about and strategise for.

You're no longer just trying to run as quickly as possible between your flesh pile and your grinders. Now you have to figure out when in the process to stop at the new machines, how to run a perfect loop that wastes the absolute minimum amount of time you get each day on the factory floor.

In this way, it is exactly like real life.

No, really. Or, well, sort of really. I've definitely worked jobs that felt as grey and arduous as standing at Flesh Grinding's, uh, flesh grinder and attempting to maximise the return of each stifling second—to cram as much compensable work into every fragment of time I had before the inevitable burnout set in. It wasn't quite an IV drip of unknowable motivating fluid or an endless parade of shapeless flesh: it was writing freelance marketing copy, which was worse.

I'm rather impressed by Flesh Grinding for condensing this experience down into its sickly gameplay loop. It's a laborious work sim that nonetheless feels quite moreish, that tempts you to return day after day to make some new tweak to your routine or to test out a new machine.

That's what's really horrifying, I say. I mean, sure, the blood and strange ethereal figures and creepy grandmother and ever-multiplying religious icons are also, probably, scary to someone, but surely far less than the constant reminder that the trade you make for being alive is selling eight hours (at least) of your day, every day, to distant and unknowable forces, and all the wear on your body and mind that entails. And then you spend your off hours trying to compute how to come in the next day and do it all even more efficiently. What a horrible scam we've played on ourselves. What a, um, grind.