Depending on who you ask, the apocalypse isn’t taking place, extraordinarily shut, or already right here. There’s already been at the very least one casualty within the type of common untimely evaluator Steve Hogarty, who has both been raptured or is away for 2 weeks. No different explanations are potential. I’ve crammed the time this week with post-global flood metropolis builder/Waterworld simulator Flotsam, a particular favorite of vidbud Alice L.
I, too, am a fan of metropolis builders, however that is extra of a metropolis… floater. Starting with little greater than a giant plastic jar of contemporary water at your metropolis centre, arising and down in an enormous and placid ocean, you ship your cheerful little survivors out to gather soggy trash from the ocean. With these uncooked supplies you construct out floating walkways, strap on little beds which are open to the sky, cobble collectively storage, and so forth and so forth, eking out a moist, strained existence from one space to the subsequent.
Flotsam is simply a few weeks out from its early entry launch, and continues to be naked bones in a whole lot of its options. But smash an affordable Prosecco on the aspect and ship ‘er down the slipway, lads, cos those bones are strong enough to hold plenty of meat if it arrives! Bleugh. I have made myself queasy with my own peculiarly mixed boat/animal body metaphor, so let’s transfer on — as certainly, your floating city should.
Mine is known as Costnerville, for causes that I belief want no rationalization. Costnerville may be very badly deliberate, as a result of assets on this game are very significant, and so unbuilding and rebuilding issues is sort of time consuming — rather more so in some other metropolis builder I’ve performed. My little Costnerians are desperately wanted on different duties, so buildings keep the place they’re put in Costnerville.
Anyway, your assets are finite in every space, being both floating wooden and plastic, fish, or stuff you scavenge from the islands or ruins poking out of the ocean. Once you’ve exhausted all of them, it’s a must to transfer on, as a result of the Costnerians are continuously consuming dried fish and consuming contemporary water, the ingrates.
Like most of those games, it’s an iterative technique of getting barely higher at doing the issues it’s a must to do. At first you possibly can solely acquire the flotsam that’s inside swimming distance of your city centre (your little folks will leap out and in of the water with joyous abandon). Then you get sufficient to construct a salvage boat or two, so you possibly can attain additional afield. With these, you possibly can discover shipwrecks and deserted cities, incomes analysis factors to unlock additional, even betterer buildings.
Now you possibly can construct giant storage areas, so you possibly can stockpile moist wooden. You construct creaking forests of drying racks to feed the workshops churning out firewood, in flip feeding the water purifiers and fish barbecues. I discovered it oddly evocative. I may nearly think about myself squelching round, grimly hanging up contemporary fish and step by step watching them crinkle within the salty air.
It’s a pleasant, bleak grind in opposition to an unnaturally vibrant backdrop. The huge, azure water glowing underneath an ideal sky, your little bastion of civilisation arising and down as an enormous whale flips its tail out of the water. And your complete time you’re muttering ohshitohshitohshit as a result of the final two areas you went to didn’t have any shoals of fish, so that you’ve had no meals for a very very long time now. You do dwell uncomfortably close to the waterline in all senses, at the very least till you handle to unlock the extra superior meals and water manufacturing applied sciences.
But whereas these fine details work properly, there are scant few of them proper now. The R&D tree for these new applied sciences is nearly embarrassingly restrained. You’ll discover that, whereas it’s a determined enterprise at occasions, you actually solely have two or three manufacturing chains to regulate. The Costnerians wants are depressingly few, and I’d hope that in time they’re demanding to do issues like get pissed on fish wine at a pub constructed out of previous fuel cans, or have a seaweed park to go to.
There additionally aren’t aims or the define of a narrative to observe, only a repeating paddle throughout the identical map that loops again on itself when you attain the far aspect. It’s a bit aimless, and also you’ll attain the boundaries of what you are able to do in about a day. And there are some little tweaks to be made, if I had my druthers. You can set a person’s precedence on duties, like “You, Fishhook McGarrity, will focus on construction” for instance, however you possibly can’t work the opposite manner round and prioritise a specific constructing when it’s underneath building, which I usually discover extra helpful.
But, very similar to my Costnerians wanting hopefully at a leaking water tower on the horizon, you possibly can see the potential right here already. Given time it may turn out to be one thing very particular. Like how a contemporary fish can turn out to be a salted dried fish value half a unit of meals.
