Players Like...

❤ Rapidly Building and Losing Settlements

The game challenges you to repeatedly establish new settlements across a randomly generated world map, each with their own distinct challenges and resources. Unlike traditional city-builders, you must rapidly build up a town to meet the demands of the Scorched Queen within a limited timeframe, before the town is lost to the encroaching Blightstorm. This time pressure, combined with the randomized availability of buildings, resources, and objectives, forces you to constantly adapt your strategies and improvise solutions, rather than relying on the same tried-and-true approaches.

❤ Balancing Diverse Needs Across Multiple Settlements

A key aspect of the gameplay is managing a network of interconnected settlements, each populated by different fantasy races (humans, beavers, lizards, foxes, and harpies) with their own specialized needs and preferences. You must carefully balance the requirements of each settlement, ensuring they have adequate housing, food, and resources to keep their citizens happy and productive. The randomized blueprints available in each game mean you cannot simply rely on a predetermined build order, but must instead dynamically choose the most appropriate buildings and allocation of resources to address the unique challenges of each location.

❤ Persistent Growth Through Meta-Progression

While individual settlements are ephemeral, you can carry forward the resources, upgrades, and experience gained from past expeditions through the game's meta-progression system. By completing objectives, you unlock new buildings, perks, and racial options, which can then be leveraged to make subsequent playthroughs more efficient and capable of withstanding the escalating threats of the Blightstorm. This meta-progression element provides a sense of persistent growth and development, allowing you to gradually build towards more ambitious and challenging goals.

❤ Tight Resource Management and Optimization

At the core of the gameplay is a deep and rewarding resource management system, where you must carefully balance the production and consumption of various goods to keep your settlements thriving. This involves optimizing the placement and specialization of buildings, efficiently utilizing worker labor, and carefully managing the flow of resources between settlements. The game's time pressure and randomized challenges ensure that this resource management is a constant concern, as you must quickly adapt to changing circumstances and unexpected bottlenecks.

❤ Emergent Gameplay and Endless Replayability

The combination of randomized elements, diverse settlement populations, and the overarching meta-progression system results in a highly emergent and replayable gameplay experience. No two playthroughs are exactly the same, as you are presented with unique challenges, opportunities, and strategic choices that shape the development of your settlements and the overall progression of your campaign. This unpredictability and the need to constantly adapt to new situations are widely praised by players, who find the game's core loop to be both highly engaging and endlessly replayable.