Schedule 1 Early Access Review

Whether you’re quitting your office job to grow a farm in Stardew Valley or setting aside your warrior days to work at a tea shop in Wanderstop, sometimes you just want to take a break and embrace a simpler way of living. I didn’t expect to find this same sense of cozy escapism in a game about manufacturing and selling drugs in a grimy city, but with Schedule 1, that’s exactly what I got. Instead of the GTA-like chaotic romp through the criminal underworld I anticipated, I found myself peacefully packaging homegrown ganja into tiny baggies, building bonds with my local community by handing out free samples, and experimenting with new and novel narcotic recipes while my expanding drug empire flourished. The 40 hours it took me to perfect my dope dealings did have some downers mixed in with the uppers though, as I encountered plenty of bugs and an unfinished endgame as of this Early Access launch – both signs Schedule 1 is still getting baked. But I overwhelmingly enjoyed my surprisingly zen time as a friendly neighborhood poison pusher regardless, and can’t wait to see how it continues to evolve.

This goofy, first-person management sim asks you to turn your burgeoning small business of peddling drugs into a massive enterprise that employs dozens of hardworking chemists, botanists, and dealers. After finding yourself down on your luck in an unfamiliar city, you do the only thing your scoundrel of a main character has ever been good at: slinging that OG kush, of course. What starts out as a solo operation where you’re growing maryjane in a crummy hotel room can eventually become a fully automated manufacturing and distribution process that moves large volumes of high quality narcotics. As you spread the tendrils of your illicit venture throughout the city, you’ll meet and build relationships with the extremely impressionable locals, learning their pharmaceutical preferences and supplying their fix, which unlocks new dealers to help push your product and suppliers who can hook you up with new raw materials – and that process of building stacks of cash and finding ways to improve, expand, and optimize your business operations is as satisfying as any of the best management sims I’ve played.

Running around town expanding your network by introducing yourself (and your product) to the locals, then converting them into repeat customers who text you for their next hit, is habit forming in more ways than one. And since you can improve your chances of converting a stranger into an ongoing customer by understanding the high they’re looking for and cooking up something to match that preference, you’re encouraged to try out daring mixtures back home to see what new flavors you can concoct. Maybe mixing adderall from the local gas station with crystal meth will result in an energizing product, or perhaps mixing your fancy purple cannabis with *checks notes* horse semen will be a good idea? Amusingly, the names of the resulting product variants seem to be randomly generated by mashing two vaguely drug-sounding words together, so you could end up selling a product called Dream Queef or Aspen Smegma – juvenile humor, I know, but just dumb enough to fit well with Schedule 1’s extremely silly vibe.

Even repetitive tasks like harvesting reefer and packaging it into little jars for distribution are oddly enjoyable. Watering crops, mixing ingredients, and breaking a freshly baked tray of crystal all feel really satisfying and lulled me into a contented meditative state that almost made me forget I was committing numerous felonies. Eventually though, you’ll develop the means to automate a lot of this and effectively never have to touch the production pipeline with your own two hands ever again, except to sell those goods (and even that you can mostly offload to your subordinate dealers). This is where Schedule 1 dips its toes into automation found in the likes of Satisfactory – a pivot that replaces the quiet meditation of bagging hemp with becoming an efficiency obsessed floor manager that appealed to my love of logistics.

What’s unexpectedly absent from this felonious undertaking is any kind of pushback from law enforcement, who act as a flimsy guardrail to keep you from doing your dealings out in the open more than anything else. They’ll set up street barricades that you can simply walk around, or try to arrest you if you deal drugs right in front of them – but they are woefully unequipped to actually catch you as they run slowly, won’t shoot you, and give up the chase almost as soon as you disappear around a corner. This seems to be an intentional move to keep things light while maintaining the illusion of your actions having real stakes, but you’ll never actually find yourself at risk of exposure. The cops don’t bust down the doors to your very obvious drug facilities, even if they see you run away inside them, and there aren’t any rival gangs or saboteurs to worry about breaking up your operations.

Theoretically, you could buy a gun and decide to go on a rampage around town harassing the cops, but you’re given no incentive to do so, and Schedule 1 seems to make you go out of your way to play this way if you want to. In fact, I never even got close to getting myself arrested, and never found any use for the baseball bat or revolver I had in my safehouse. I kept waiting for things to take a horribly violent turn, but as of now, that doesn’t appear to be the focus of Schedule 1, and I’d say it’s all the better for it.

Instead, you spend your time indoors harmoniously tending to your garden of hallucinogenic flora and cheerfully skateboarding around town to deliver your goods, and the surreal dichotomy between Schedule 1’s subject matter and how tranquil it feels to actually play never stops being hilarious. Honestly, it has a whole lot more in common with Animal Crossing than GTA, except instead of playing as a villager indebted to a malevolent raccoon, you’re the one putting the unenviable financial squeeze on your neighbors, like an entrepreneurial Walter White shouting “I am the one who Nooks.” You can even make your cozy schemes collaborative by inviting a friend to join you in co-op to help out around town! What’s more heartwarming than you and a buddy dealing bricks of cocaine on the streets together?

The main issue with Schedule 1 is a familiar one for many Early Access games, which is that I ran out of things to do somewhat quickly. After unlocking the last of the three currently available base drug types with about 20 hours of optimizing my business, I didn’t have a whole lot to shoot for other than stockpiling stacks of cash with nothing meaningful to spend it on. Sure, I could buy a better skateboard, a car to drive around in, or some legitimate businesses to launder my money through, but there’s little reason to do so beyond vanity after a certain point. Presumably, there will eventually be some kind of endgame added with more reasons to keep playing, but I was able to unlock all the properties, dealers, and suppliers that are here now in short order, then spent the rest of my time just grinding – until I took a look at the progression menu and saw there wasn’t anything in the latter half of it yet. The minimal story about your colleague showing you the ropes of becoming a drug kingpin drops off after a while as well.

In the same Early Access vein, Schedule 1 also has bugs, performance issues, and some of the other usual jankiness you’d expect, though none of it is particularly egregious – in fact, I’d say this is actually fairly above average compared to the many the work-in-progress games I’ve reviewed. I ran into some framerate issues and had my dealers bug out and stop selling product until I reset the world twice, but most of these problems were pretty minor and had minimal impact on the glee I felt while pulling off my criminal dealings.