Keys to Redemption: A Slumlord's Salvation

So, this one ended up being much more difficult than I originally envisioned. Mostly because I didn't think about motivations and, like, normal people when I first came up with it.

With that said, I scrapped this three times already, so I'm just going to do the best I can with it, because I suspect the base idea is flawed.

The game starts with you as a young man being left your grandfather's old rundown house in the bad part of town. It ostensibly allows you to gamify fixing the place up, perhaps partitioning it to more units, advertising for rentals while setting prices and terms (no pets, no smoking, utilities included or not, etc, etc). It then allows you to screen prospective tenants (which is even more problematic, because this allows the player to be a super prick in some all-too-real ways, but moving on for now) agree to lease terms, and then manage the property and collect rent.

It would allow you to grow your little slumlord empire, picking up properties out of forclosure or tax or police auction, snowballing your earnings into more and more properties.

All of this is packaged and presented to the player as the ostensible point of the game, but it really isn't.

Each decision you make as a Landlord impacts your tenants in various ways (even little stuff like respecting 24-hour inspection notices or a tenant's attempt to use "right-to-repair" laws to fix things you've neglected, etc, etc) and the game starts hinting, in increasing fashion, the brutal impact you might be having on these people and their families.

This is where the game falls apart.

In my head, I wanted to create a path towards redemption, allowing different levels of self-realization and attempts to atone, up to and including simply deciding to get out of the Landlord business altogether and re-purposing these properties for altruistic purposes, abuse shelters, housing for the homeless, incubators for family-owned business startups, etc, etc.

But, there's a problem here.

Our leasing paradigm is pretty cemented and normalized.

Like, I realized much of the audience would never get the point and would simply continue growing their empire, at most making symbolic amends to any damage they might wrought.

And, short of pulling a deus ex machina and having an asteroid fall on their head if they're giant pricks, there wasn't much I could do about it without being super heavy handed.

Like, in real life, asteroids don't single out prick slumlords for poetic justice, the landlords simply become wealthy and live out their lives in relative peace and prosperity. 

So, I need to restart and come at this from a completely different angle, but I have no idea what that would be right now.

Like, I know the message I want to send, and I still want an entertaining game, but I don't know how to synthesize the two, so I suppose I'll have to let you figure that out from here.

Good luck!