‘Karen: An Outrage Simulator’ is The Most 2020 Game You’ll Play This Year

To describe 2020 as an unremitting dumpster fire would be charitable at best. Amidst the depression, anxiety, fear, and outrage that have permeated our everyday lives for months at a time, I realized I needed a good, hearty laugh. Thus I found myself purchasing a copy of one of this year’s more obscure games, Karen: An Outrage Simulator, a perfect encapsulation of how awful certain entitled people can be. 

I have never felt entirely comfortable with the “Karen” stereotype primarily because I know someone named Karen in real life. It may be a first-world problem, but I imagine it must be degrading to see your name used in aggressive and biting comments online every day. 

Personally, I have refrained from openly calling out people as “Karens” when I see them online. And there are plenty of examples, ranging from fussy coffee order mistakes to truly heinous acts of racism and animal aggression. All of these are worth calling out, holding these people accountable when they commit morally objectionable acts. Nevertheless, the term “Karen” is functionally useful as a cultural reference point.

Karen: An Outrage Simulator is a relatively simple game that puts you in the shoes of the titular Karen, who embodies the stereotype of the middle-aged white woman with a bad perm. The game has a sort of classic Super Mario Bros. layout of six different locations that are unlocked as you advance through the story. These six stages are all relatively brief scenarios in which Karen’s objective is to whittle down an employee’s emotional endurance. 

There are three primary ways to become, as the game says, “a master of manipulation,” and emotionally exhaust employees so that Karen gets her way. The game presents the player with dialogue options that are color-coded to correspond with the employee’s levels of confidence, patience, or guilt. By choosing the options that diminish employee’s confidence, you often select dialogue that insults and makes the employee feel incompetent. Choosing options that drive down an employee’s patience makes them give in more quickly to Karen’s demands. And of course, Karen can guilt trip an employee with one-day-expired coupons and so forth to get what she wants.

These three dialogue options succeed as a central game mechanic through the balance the player has to strike between each option. You are constantly managing Karen’s “freakout meter,” which fills up as you select dialogue options. If Karen’s freakout meter reaches maximum, Karen causes a viral-video-worthy scene of unbridled chaos and petulant entitlement. You can easily avoid these freakouts to quickly progress through the game, but there are individual achievements for having a freakout in each location.

Along the course of Karen’s brief runtime of about  30 minutes, she terrorizes all sorts of establishments. One standout location is the grocery store in which a timid employee politely asks Karen to follow store policy and wear a mask upon entry. I chose a few different options in the grocery store, role-playing as someone who thinks masks don’t prevent the spread of contagious diseases. Another favorite is the day spa, where a bride-to-be has such a positive experience that she extends her spa trip – effectively cancelling and rescheduling Karen’s own appointment. Raging at someone who is getting married that same day, calling her ugly names and belittling her on what would otherwise be one of the most important days in her life – her wedding day – was subversive and satisfying. And very Karen.

My absolute favorite location by far is the coffee shop, Starcups. As someone who has never enjoyed coffee and rolls their eyes every time they hear a drink order with multiple modifications, this was the perfect breeding ground for some proper Karen wreckage. In true Karen fashion, she walks up to the barista’s counter and orders “A grande mochaccino with almond milk, six pumps of syrup, java chips, six pumps of espresso, fresh non-dairy whipped cream, and double vegan fair-trade chocolate sauce, at exactly 95 degrees Fahrenheit.” Long story short, her coffee ends up with the wrong kind of milk, which escalates. 

The barista kindly offers to remake her drink at no additional charge. But that’s not good enough for Karen. Karen demands a refund in addition to her remade drink, which obviously puts the barista into a dilemma. After pushing on this barista’s surprisingly resilient patience, the situation becomes peak Karen. You have four identical options:

“I’d like to speak to the manager.”

In a moment of absolute hilarity, the barista adjusts his glasses with an anime-like sheen. “Maam… I AM THE MANAGER” is his perfectly cued response. As soon as the option (or lack thereof) presented itself to me in the dialogue box, I had an immediate suspicion that this barista was in fact the manager. Guessing correctly didn’t diminish the humor of this scene, rather, it enhanced it. In a moment of complete shock, Karen backpedals. Her options become more frantic and sketchy. It’s the briefest little justice: finally, a Karen faces karma.

The game never lingers on these scenes for more than a few minutes, and I don’t intend to suggest that this game has anything deep or profound to offer to the phenomena of Karens. However, there is one scene where an employee asks Karen, “Who hurt you?” which spirals into a flashback. In this flashback, a younger Karen works as a secretary in an office. Her suit-wearing boss chews her out in a hurtful, aggressive way that forever traumatizes her. 

I don’t think the game is trying to make Karen sympathetic by revealing this somewhat tragic origin story of her behavior, because the game is explicitly framing Karen’s actions as objectively awful. Karens may behave the way they do because of sentimental, human reasons, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that these Karens have developed actively destructive coping mechanisms to deal with their trauma. But I did appreciate the glancingly humanizing perspective that didn’t need to be there for this game’s core loop to succeed.

Ultimately, the concept of building a game around the contemporary notion of Karens is cheeky but wouldn’t work at any scale larger or more ambitious than what is present with Karen: An Outrage Simulator. The runtime of the game, as well as the limited scope of six locations that Karen encounters, contributes to the overall punchiness and humor of the game. I am reminded of the aphorism, brevity is the soul of wit, and Karen matches that pith perfectly. 

I would never pass along a serious recommendation of Karen: An Outrage Simulator. It’s just there for a quick, cheap laugh if 2020 is beating you down like a Dark Souls boss. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Karen gets any aspect of its game design wrong. It’s a fun game that could probably run on any PC, with an ironic sense of art design. Its story nails the quirky premise, and I think this game will hold up to scrutiny in a few years’ time because, if 2020 is any indication, it seems that Karens are multiplying at an alarming rate. May they encounter many managers along the way. 

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