To quote (a translation of) the Buddha, “Attachment is the root of all suffering.” I play city builders so I know how hard it is to abandon one’s intricate creation (or current city), even after the desire for a clean slate becomes overwhelming. I’ll usually only start fresh (on a new city) after an early bad decision finally manifests as a choke point or when I am convinced I can build it all again, better, faster.
Against the Storm raises some deep questions about the city-building genre via the juxtaposition of roguelite structure. Recently, I’ve had some incredible experiences with this kind of mash-up, including similar games, like The Wandering Village, but also further afield. Up to Par caused me to actually enjoy golf. You ‘die’ when you exceed a cumulative par and unlock slightly more aggravating obstacles as you progress. It’s amazing. And, have you seen Lets! Revolution? Literally, it’s the only way you could get me to play Minesweeper.
Somehow, in Against the Storm, I am always excited to start over, and I also leave cities behind with immense satisfaction. Rapid progression is incentivised by a surrendering of control, like allowing random elements to inform decision-making, as well as the painstaking and poignant unveiling of a gritty world. The aim is to please The Scorched Queen, in a race against her ‘impatience’, by fulfilling orders that shape how a city is constructed. I love how quickly and completely I acquiesced to the queen’s demands, designing the cities she wanted, rather than imagining my own. You can choose which orders to pursue, and get closer to a win by making workers extremely happy, but a willingness to obey has its rewards, at least initially. (The queen is less impatient when you’re paying attention to her, I guess.)
A quick introduction to your favourite new term: Rainpunk
Fun surprises are delivered over time. Several cities in, just when I finally had a handle on the game’s clearly differentiated species; humans (who like their ale), lizards (who love any meat-related activity) and beavers (who munch trees into logs 10% faster than the others), a whole new species of worker arrived. Each group needs specialised housing, food and goods, or their morale will suffer, especially during storms.
Another of my favourite things has been discovering ‘rainpunk’ technology, as wet weather is baked into most aspects of play. As well as each rain state having unique positive and negative consequences for workers , you can collect drizzle, clearance and stormwater, to be used in various risky, but useful ways. Levels can be won, and lost, in the handful of seconds it takes for the queen to finally lose her patience, so streamlining is a great idea, as long as you can outpace the resulting ‘blight rot’.
Exploration happens via cutting trees and revealing glades. In addition to discovering new resources to harvest, you’ll often be able to scavenge supplies, or repair a damaged building, if you have the available resources, always based on a binary choice. One time, I didn’t have the incense to bury some murdered lizards, so I had to loot them and ruin the morale of my lizard workers until the task was finished. Exploration and expansion, however, are capped at how much you can afford to piss off the forest.
The existential horror of a hostile, sentient forest
So, yes, the forest is … sentient? (I think.) It becomes aware of your settlement, and is increasingly hostile, depending on how long you play, how many woodcutters you have, how many glades they have revealed, and so on. Hearths calm the forest down, but you’ll likely be burning wood in them, thus cutting down trees, so it’s a very complex aspect to monitor and balance. The short explanation is that the forest also serves to limit your time building each city. One thing I haven’t figured out yet is why the forest likes you more when the queen hates you, but I’m very sure that will be explained in due time.
Any given biome, or tile, will be rich in some resources and without others. You also roll for which buildings you can unlock. So, if you’re missing fertile soil, or the farm, food production will be focused on meat, or foraging, instead of agriculture. (By the way, ‘meat’ is mostly leeches and snails, harvested from inside dead broodmothers, in case you were wondering about the evocativeness of the game’s incidental worldbuilding.)
This all means that you can’t develop only one strategy, which is good. But, I do wish they had leaned harder into this. So, for example, two species of worker get a buff from eating ‘skewers’, but skewers can be made from any of four of a first thing (insects, jerky, meat or mushrooms) and any of four of a second thing (roots, eggs, vegetables or berries), and at any of three buildings (butcher, cookhouse or grill). It’s great to have options and variety, but this undermines the great roguelite aspects of scarcity and luck. Also, is it reasonable to love a jerky and egg skewer, then also a mushroom and berry skewer, by virtue of its presentation and not its ingredients? Let’s not overthink it.
Many other clever details also support flexible play styles, like work camps being on wheels. So, when sea marrow is depleted in one area, you can relocate the stonecutters’ caravan for free. Thoughtful features like this, and a useful (but not overbearing) UI, demonstrate how intimately designers knew what players of city builders would want, before they crammed this well-worn peg into a roguelite hole.
Against the Storm made me feel like a queen
I can’t recommend Against the Storm strongly enough, but there’s one important caveat. It has very little explicit tutorialisation, which is probably why this ‘review’ ended up reading like a ‘game guide’; to explain (also to myself) how things actually work. My 14 year old son, who is usually great with anything strategy-based, gave up very fast. His million questions made me feel haughty and impatient, like a queen, in a way that makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it … Personally, I love learning via observation and failure, and there are lower difficulty settings, as long as you’re OK to progress slower. So, this is a minor detractor.
After several weather cycles (the time it takes to play a small collection of cities in one run), I do feel somewhat weird having not played more, before reviewing this. It’s not that I don’t understand it. I do. Very well. Simply, the richness here is designed to be savoured, and I desperately want to proceed at a pace that better balances novelty with perfectionism. To say I’m attached to Against the Storm, would be an understatement. So, take a Buddhist approach and suffer with me, knowing that this roguelite mash up has sweetened the ephemeral nature of city building, in every possible way.
Meghann O’Neill is a long-time indie games critic who has written for PC Powerplay and GamesHub. Follow Meghann on Twitter at @IndieGames_Muso.
Against the Storm review conducted on PC with a retail code provided by the publisher
Image: Eremite Games, Kotaku Australia
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