Video Game / CHANGE: A Homeless Survival Experience

"Oh, what a cute dog! Yeah, here."

CHANGE: A Homeless Survival Experience is a side-scrolling, point-and-click roguelike designed to simulate homelessness, and bring attention to the issues relating to homelessness in the UK. The game underwent 2 years of early-access development before launching proper in 2020, and can be found on Steam.

You start off as one of five backstories that leads to your homelessness: War Veteran, Addiction, Abandonment, Mental Illness, and Poverty.

The game has roguelike elements in the form of randomized city layouts, perk selection, challenges from the city, and, depending on the path you take, incredible difficulty. Your goal is to start a new life by saving up enough money and attaining enough paperwork to be eligible for rentals at the real estate firms. Along the way, you'll face the trials and tribulations of living on the streets of the urban United Kingdom; digging through trash for supplies, getting to shelters before they close, managing to reach your welfare office's appointments on time (at that specific welfare office, no less!), keeping yourself fed and safe from the elements, and so on.

Whether or not you resort to things like breaking into cars, starting fires on the street, or stealing from your fellow homeless may not entirely be up to you.

Proceed to these tropes to lose everything:

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Prostitution is not possible, but given how dark the game gets, many are in consensus that it's not really necessary.
• The Alcoholic: Joe. In a shelter event, he'll break down sobbing to you, worried that Maggie will leave him over it.
• Blatant Lies: "Tabloid Slurs" events can consist of the news companies alleging that homeless people are secretly living in mansions.
• Crazy Homeless People: Mostly averted. The bulk of homeless people you share the streets with are mostly just people, like you, down on their luck and depressed. There's one, a blonde, who's visibly disheveled and intoxicated on a regular basis. He'll occasionally rant and rave at you from a distance. Other homeless people will lament his presence.
• Deal with the Devil: Buying from the Bliss dealer has elements of this. Normal addiction can be destructive to your happiness, but Bliss addiction is a whole other animal, and his distinct red hoodie only reinforces this.
• Despair Event Horizon: Your happiness hitting zero prompts your character to resign themselves to a life of chronic homelessness.
  Maybe... this is what I am.
  I guess... this is it.
  I can't do this anymore...
• Developer's Foresight:
  • There's over a hundred different written scenarios that can happen that account for specific items of clothing/supplies, whether or not you have a dog, and some of your skills; all of these impact your mood for the coming day.
  • If you get a Game Over without a dog present, the page image appears with you holding change in your hand, but no dog.
  • If you give a euro to any homeless people more than a few times in a day, they'll go from thanking you, to being exasperated by your kindness, to pointing out this is weird. By the latter point you won't get reputation gains from it.
  • You have to be conscious of where you beg; if you beg with other homeless nearby, they'll (rightfully) accuse you of stealing their spot. And just to twist the knife a little further, the rate of successfully begging goes up dramatically around these spots.
  • Stealing from your fellow homeless will bite you in the butt.
• Drugs Are Bad: Three substances exist that you can get addicted to: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Bliss. While all three are great for short-term happiness injections, especially in the case of the latter, the addiction risk is far too great and harmful to make them worth it in the long run.
  You feel at peace. But the pain is coming...
• Dull Eyes of Unhappiness: As your happiness gets lower, the colors from the game fade. At lower levels, your character's perception of the world is functionally colorblind.
• Felony Misdemeanor: Since the game takes place in the UK, begging in front of a cop will result in the cop interrupting and scolding you. Do it enough times, and you'll get arrested or chased off from the area.
  • "Police Funding" events, interestingly, both exaggerate and downplay this, by making cops go after you for digging in trash, which is something that's illegal more broadly.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: If enough "Tabloid Slur" events take place, begging becomes way less fruitful, as people are incredibly hostile/standoffish towards the homeless.
• Homeless Hero: You play as one.
• Homeless Pigeon Person: A random event can happen during your run where a stray dog approaches you. Depending on how you go about this situation, you become one of these. Alternatively, if you choose the "Just You and Me" challenge mode, you can start with one at the expense of having far greater investment in the dog's survival.
• Humans Are Bastards: People tend to be really cruel to you if you're homeless. When begging for money, there's always a chance of people telling you to bugger off or smugly talking about how you got yourself into this, to get a job, and so on. Police can and will arrest you for begging in front of them, among other things like digging through trash. One random event even involves someone setting your shoes on fire while you're asleep. Yet, at the same time, there's still a myriad of little kind acts that can keep your character going. A high enough reputation earns you friends among the homeless, who take you into their loose-knit community. People will often randomly gift you bits of food or kind words when begging, or even just when they see you wake from your slumber. Even cops will show pity and give you money when scolding you sometimes.
  • Teens Are Monsters: A pair of teenagers standing in the rear of the sidewalk will always say either mean or Innocently Insensitive things to you as you pass them, reducing your happiness.
• It Gets Easier: Some criminal perks make getting caught committing a crime less punishing on your Happiness.
• Mistaken for Pedophile: A random event when sleeping on the streets will involve a child being lost. Approaching them will enrage their father, prompting you to narrowly avoid getting arrested by police that believe you over him.
• Moral Event Horizon: The game treats stealing from your fellow homeless people as this. If you steal from park camp sites when none of their respective homeless folk are present, they know it was you, and refuse to talk to you.
• Murder by Cremation: One random street event, if you have the Shoes item, involves you losing them because someone attempts this on you while you're asleep.
• Nice Girl: Maggie; she's the easiest person to befriend, and likely the first character you'll be introduced to regularly in any run. Despite Joe's fretting over her potentially leaving him, she demonstrates next to no signs of such a thing.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: City events involving waste disposal directly impact your ability to collect scrap for money, in a negative way.
• Police Are Useless: Mostly played straight, but one event subverts it; a drunken person begins attacking you and interrogating the reasons behind your homelessness, prompting a cop to intervene and arrest the man. The event restores your character's faith in law enforcement a bit.
• Safety in Indifference: The Heart of Stone and Emotional Wall perks protect you from happiness loss when people are unkind to you. A more interesting, meta example comes in how the begging system works; because time doesn't stop even when you're talking to someone for a beg, each interaction takes up valuable time in the day you could spend doing other things to survive; while the worst outcome is said happiness loss from people being mean to you, even the polite refusals are still worse than if someone just ignores you and keeps walking.
• Street Performer: Joe can be found playing a song of his own on occasion. Passing by his performance will raise your happiness.
  • You can get in on it, too! Getting a guitar unlocks the busking minigame and associated skill, allowing you to generate money passively, without running around begging people. This comes with multiple benefits, including the lack of risk of arrest by police.
• Truth in Television: An overwhelming majority of the game's elements are designed to simulate the struggles of homelessness, particularly in the UK.
  • Welfare offices take up 3 hours to do anything at, and drain your happiness the entire way. In order to maintain your welfare recipiency status, you have to show up on time to appointments made at incredibly inconvenient times at a specific office; if you don't live in a shelter directly next to one, odds are you're going to lose your welfare within a week of getting it.
  • Panhandling is illegal in the UK, and punishable with arrest and fines of up to 1,000 pounds. Thankfully, you don't get fined in-game.
  • Homeless shelters have curfews and will refuse you entry if you fail to get in by that time. They also open as late as 4:30pm, with curfews as early as 6:45pm. Some are lenient, some don't allow animals, and some have soup kitchen events that nourish you more. As the game goes on, however, these benefits start going away...
  • Your "health" is your happiness, and despite the health troubles you run into during the course of the game, a Game Over isn't death like in most games. When your happiness reaches zero, your character resigns themselves to spending the rest of their lives chronically homeless.
  • Sometimes, spending a night in jail is better for your character than sleeping on the streets.
  • Anti-homeless measures are an actual focused effort on the part of lawmakers in cities, most infamously in the form of anti-homeless benches, benches with special railings/studs designed to make laying down on them uncomfortable or impractical. Similarly, there's no legal protection for homeless people in regards to discrimination by business owners, and if pressured, businesses will refuse service to the homeless.
  • Waste disposal projects to make cities less polluted, while good for cleaning up your city, starves homeless people of potentially vital supplies and means of getting money.
• Uncertain Doom: Joe will disappear after a certain amount of time in-game, the last time you see him being an event where he's in trouble.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Bill will give you one of these, and shut you out, if you steal from anyone in the park.