Steam is currently flooded with city building games (I play Mythical creaturesfor example), and most of them are relatively similar. So for me, the excitement of launching a new city-building game comes in the form of new art styles, interesting combat mechanics, and engaging stories. But the new venture of former Klei Entertainment developer Nel Anderson, Sonderlust Studiosbrings novelty to the genre with his first game, Generation Exilewas announced on Sunday with a trailer.
Generation Exile is a pretty city-building game like any other, but this one has a distinctly anti-colonialist, eco-friendly aspect: instead of drilling for resources in your new land and ultimately destroying what it once was, exile challenges players to use only the resources they had when they left their old world in the last generation ship. These include water, food, and even air. Gameplay also includes turn-based combat, as well as the typical tasks of creating housing and amenities, accumulating resources, and keeping residents happy.
Anderson, who works as creative director at Sonderlust, aptly explained what the game is trying to achieve in an email to Polygon: Many city-building games, he explained, are “fundamentally exploitative, and the reward—if not the demand—grows infinitely.” This means that to progress in the game, you must continually drill into the earth, chop down trees, dig caves, etc. Generation Exileon the other hand, challenges players to work together in the new environment.
“Instead of just saying ‘the number is getting bigger,’ we wanted to be more of a problem-solver about finding a balance,” Anderson said. “Instead of digging more raw materials out of the ground to refine them, progress might be more about developing a series of anaerobic lagoons that convert the biological waste (which has to be stored and disposed of anyway) into nutrients for growing food or feedstock for bioplastics.”
Time moves ultra-fast to account for multiple generations of your in-game society, which is made up of procedurally generated characters, so no two games are the same. In fact, generating new maps and characters is a key part of how Sonderlust’s developers plan to achieve this balance.
“While the player naturally interacts with the map portion of the game from a familiar bird’s eye view, they are not a disembodied force of citizen will or an otherwise nameless and uncharacterized overseer,” Anderson said. Instead, player characters have reputations and tailored interactions with NPCs “that are triggered procedurally in response to the game state and the player’s choices.”
The premise is enough to pique my interest, but the lineup of developers and designers is even more impressive. Sonderlust also calls on its Chief Operating Officer, Karla Zimonja, co-creator of Went homeand some developers who Baldur’s Gate 3 And Far Cry 5. The sound design was done by Ben Prunty from Into the breach works with the audio team of Sky blueTurn on audio.
The first impressions of the game are atmospheric, like a late summer afternoon, with a fascinating honeycomb city structure and many overgrown 50s-style buildings. The user interface also looks modern (and big enough to readahem) – a welcome change from the average city building game.
“Generation Exile’s art style was partly inspired by Fauvism,” said Pier-Olivier Desbiens, 3D environment artist at Sonderlust Studios. “It’s a igamesnewsal attempt to adopt the movement’s bold colors and flat strokes, with a strong focus on simplifying shapes and objects so that only the essential remains. The main goal was to create a world that feels familiar yet mysterious by using unusual, saturated color palettes.”
Generation Exile does not have a release date yet. When it is released, it will be available on Steam and other consoles (tbd).