Eat, Sleep, Bet, Repeat is a very simple game, if indeed you can actually call it that. Unemployed, and living in a filthy bedsit in a generic 1980’s British town, you need to take to the local betting shop to win big on the horses or football to keep yourself stocked on kebabs and pints of bitter from your nearby locals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGYHbtcbZjU
There is no real end game, hence the repeat in the title, and the sole aim is to use your miserly giro to ensure you have enough money to keep yourself fed and watered in the keeping of a 1980s layabout, in between sleeping in your run down bedsit, enjoying a 4 pack of special brew at the nearby beach or having a flutter on the geegees.
Key to success is checking the local paper for the odds, checking the historic performance of the horses set to race, in order to give yourself the best chance of winning. Lose it all, and you will find yourself trying to survive until your next cheque comes in to start the cycle over again.
The mechanics are very simple. Taking care of yourself is the primary concern; your mood, health, food and drink are all represented in bar form to allow you to know when you need to rest or nip down the local takeaway for a portion of chips or donner kebab. It is entirely possible to keep yourself in good condition by avoiding the bookies for an entire fortnight, so the need to actually place a bet is completely irrelevant, serving only to penalise you when you fail to maintain the miserly amount needed to keep your stats at the required levels.
If you are not familiar with horse racing, the performance sheet can be extremely confusing, filled with stats about their performance in previous races, where in the race they perform best and how they perform overall. Finally placing your bet, you can then choose to bet Each Way, allow your pick to romp home in 3rd and still get a return, or to win and hope that your pick wins the race.
Sadly, that is about as exciting as it gets. The monosyllabic announcer giving up to the second commentary on the race is a horribly irritating and 1990’s synthesised voice, which had the strangest twang of a Scottish dialect, which did make my scratch my head over the two or three races in which I let him ramble on. Far better to skip to the end of the race and get the results than suffer the aural pummelling that the awful announcer provides.
After two or three races, I barely paid any attention to the racing form either, just picking selections based on their odds, as undertaking the in depth analysis of the horses about to compete was utterly dry and lifeless.
As I said at the start, I couldn’t really call this a game. A glaringly satirical glimpse into small town life in Thatcher’s Britain, maybe, but definitely not a game. As such, I can hardly recommend anyone to pick this up, not unless you have some perverse need to see how a section of unemployed society endured their life of drudgery on a day to day basis.
If this title was a horse in one of its races, it would have been put down as lame before it made its way to the starting blocks. In fact, you would probably find more fun going to your local booky, and placing a random bet for the price of admission, rather than actually pick this title up.
At least then you may come away with something, other than a feeling that your time would have been better spent doing something, ‘anything’, else.
Midlife Gamer Rating: 2/10 Format: Steam Release Date: Out Now
Disclosure: Midlife Gamer were provided a copy of Eat,Sleep,Bet, Repeat by the publisher for review purposes. The title was reviewed over the course of 3 days. For more information on what our scores mean, plus details of our reviews policy, click here.
Tags: 80's eighties, betting, betting simualtor, horse racing
I had that TV in the 80s!