Video games normally shower you with money. Defeat a few monsters, sell the twelve swords inexplicably concealed inside your trousers, and you can buy an entire town’s inventory before lunch. Even games that begin with an empty wallet rarely expect you to remain poor for long.
Some games are considerably less generous. Their shops stock tantalising upgrades while ordinary work pays a pittance, or their currencies must also fund basic survival and character progression. You can usually become wealthy with enough grinding or one particularly devious strategy, but that rather proves the point. Until then, every purchase feels momentous, and buyer’s remorse can be genuinely fatal.
The Sims
The original The Sims is much less interested in fulfilling fantasies than its increasingly permissive sequels. Your first job pays terribly, household essentials cost a fortune, and your new homeowner somehow forgot to buy a toilet before moving in.
Making matters worse, keeping a Sim fed, rested, clean, entertained, and socially functional consumes most of the day. Promotions require both skills and friendships, while bills continue arriving regardless of whether your fragile digital employee has stopped weeping. Buying a better bed feels less like decorating and more like escaping poverty.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
Henry begins Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 without the armour, status, or savings expected of an RPG hero. Food, accommodation, repairs, training, and presentable clothing all cost groschen, while respectable early work pays like medieval minimum wage.
The economy becomes easier to manipulate once you master crafting, theft, or the ancient art of removing expensive armour from dead bandits. Before then, even learning a useful combat technique can require serious saving. Nothing reinforces Henry’s reduced circumstances quite like considering horse theft because a teacher wants 100 groschen.
Hollow Knight
Hollow Knight scatters Geo generously enough that individual enemies seem profitable, but Hallownest provides an impressive number of ways to separate you from it. Die once and your savings remain with your Shade; die again before defeating it and they’re gone.
That danger matters because mapping the kingdom costs money. Maps, pins, charms, benches, and essential shop purchases steadily drain your funds, especially early on. A difficult journey back to your Shade therefore becomes more than recovering progress. It is a tiny debt-collection mission against your own corpse.
RimWorld
RimWorld measures colony wealth in silver but provides no salary, quest allowance, or conveniently respawning bandits carrying loose change. Colonists must produce something worth selling, whether that means sculptures, textiles, livestock, drugs, or a questionable number of human-leather hats.
Even a thriving industry cannot guarantee immediate payment. Traders arrive unpredictably, accept limited goods, and carry finite quantities of silver. Becoming rich also increases colony wealth, which encourages the storyteller to send more dangerous raids. Capitalism is difficult enough without several dozen pirates noticing you’ve had a good harvest.
Persona 5 Strikers
The Phantom Thieves bring an unusually large party on their road trip, and apparently nobody establishes a shared equipment budget. Weapons and armour are expensive, restorative items are always useful, and keeping every character current rapidly consumes the money earned inside Jails.
You can improve matters through Bond skills such as Extortionist or repeatedly complete junk-collection requests for Ichinose. Until those options begin paying out, visiting Sophia’s shop becomes an exercise in choosing favourites. Friendship is magic, but it will not buy everyone a new weapon.
The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom
Hyrule is covered in ancient treasures, valuable minerals, and monsters carrying useful body parts, yet Link rarely encounters anybody willing to pay him for saving civilisation. Ordinary exploration produces relatively few rupees, while almost everything desirable has a price attached.
Armour purchases and Great Fairy upgrades are especially ruinous, and selling gems feels wasteful when those same materials have crafting and upgrade uses. Cooking meals for profit works, as does dedicated hunting, but both require deliberately becoming what is essentially a small business owner. Ganondorf can wait; Link has overheads.
Bloodborne
Blood Echoes are simultaneously Bloodborne’s money and its experience points, forcing every visit to the Hunter’s Dream into a financial argument. Levelling up means fewer supplies, while buying Blood Vials, Quicksilver Bullets, or equipment delays your next stat increase.
Then there is the small matter of death. Lose a fight and your accumulated Echoes remain behind, sometimes inside an enemy; die again before retrieving them and your savings disappear permanently. Grinding is always available, but needing to repeat Central Yharnam because a boss consumed your entire healing stock feels like soul-destroying.
Somewhat ironically.
Pathologic 3
Nobody visits the Town-on-Gorkhon expecting favourable market conditions, but Pathologic 3 makes financial planning particularly treacherous. Supplies are scarce, useful objects must be scavenged or bartered for, and prices shift as the town’s plague and civil disorder become increasingly severe.
Revisiting earlier days lets the Bachelor correct disastrous decisions, but knowledge does not produce an unlimited budget. Medicine, ammunition, and stabilising consumables continue competing for limited resources across each revised timeline. Apparently, even bending chronology cannot persuade a shopkeeper to accept exposure as payment.
Papers, Please
Papers, Please pays five credits for every correctly processed entrant, transforming bureaucracy into the least exciting performance-based bonus scheme imaginable. Every discrepancy takes time to investigate, but rushing risks citations and eventually fines that erase much of your day’s income.
At home, rent, heating, food, and medicine must be paid from those meagre wages. Refusing a bribe may leave your family hungry; accepting one can implicate you in something far worse. Few games make money harder to earn because few make earning it such an efficient machine for producing guilt.
Final Fantasy 13
Most Final Fantasy games reward battles with gil, allowing a little grinding to solve almost any cash-flow problem. Final Fantasy 13 simply declines to participate. Regular enemies provide Crystogen Points and components, but scarcely any direct income, leaving Lightning’s party surprisingly destitute.
Several components can be sold, although doing so sacrifices materials needed to improve weapons and accessories. The best dedicated valuables appear infrequently or relatively late, and effective farming requires considerable effort. You are tasked with defying divine beings and overturning your assigned fate, yet purchasing every weapon remains the less realistic ambition.
