 City builders are not usually one of the genres I play. It's not that there isn't plenty to enjoy, it's that they often require more time than I can give. Narratives and characters are largely more fun to unpack personally. Sometimes, however, there comes a game so much fun, with mechanics that come together in such satisfying ways as to become obsessions. Because, my friends, against the storm certainly is an obsession. This game will see you take on the role of a viceroy of the Queen, tasked with setting up a series of settlements doomed by the destructive Blyth Storm that will eventually undo all your efforts. It's a bleak premise, but underneath it, you'll find such an addictive game. The gameplay loop is made up of managing a smorgasbord of different challenges. They will occupy your time for dozens or hundreds of hours and despite the fact that these objectives you chase after won't ever change in major ways, you are liable never to tire of them anyway. There's your settler's need for housing and food. They're increasing demand for luxury in the face of a forest more and more malevolent, the more of it you put to the axe. There are glades and the various resources and treasures and ruins to discover and then there's industry to build up from nothing and trade. And those might be the most engaging fun of all. Let's begin with how, against the storm, keeps the repeat act of building settlements from ground zero disengaging. At the start of every new settlement, you get to pick advanced buildings from tree or four choices. It's a role of the die as to which buildings you'll get but choosing between them. That choice allows you to shape a fresh strategy for each game, keeping in mind the types of villages you have. If you've lucked into having beavers in your game and you get offered a lumber mill, you are setting yourself up for a game of joyous wood chopping and easy lumber construction. So you'll want to keep the beavers happy as they chop and chomp away at the wood they're dealing with. It might not be so clear cut. Maybe you don't get any choices that would appeal to your beavers despite starting with the majority of such villages. You'll need to pivot, make do with less than perfect choices but in doing so you'll often find new and rewarding ways to make your settlement thrive. The way that buildings are unlocked makes the familiar puzzle have a great degree of variability. The discovery of various building ruins in the mystic layers beyond your settlement is like discovering extra puzzle pieces that fit seamlessly with the ones you got out of the box. And if they don't fit seamlessly you can choose not to bring them to working order and get a handful of resources instead. Resources themselves define the way you play. Some maps will have a surfeit of one resource whereas say the very next map you play will have none of that. This, all of this, demands a capacity to adapt to any given set of circumstances you end up with in this randomly generated series of maps you play through. Two of the great joys of discovering new glades consists of finding the ruin of a building you desperately need to go back to my original point or finding the ruin of one building that you didn't even know you needed but can make use of to bring your settlement that much closer to the grace of the queen. Because if there is one thing you're working for every minute of every settlement it is the queen's favor. Her impatience will grow and grow the more you lollygag and fail to deliver her various orders the less you do for the good of the capital. To only concentrate on the settlement's well-being is unwise. No matter how promising a cache full of resources is you've got to consider whether or not you could do without them. It's not all bad. Whenever one of these loot boxes is discovered in a glade and sent to the capital you get not only a bit of that all-important resource the queen's grace but favor but also amber. The monetary currency that can buy both upgrades and various resources with the merchants who will be visiting your settlement as soon as you get a trade post built that is. These merchants are themselves varied. And more can be unlocked as you progress through the city upgrade tree. Each offers different items thematically pieced together and each will only accept like items for you to barter with. So for example one merchant might be selling mechanical parts but not wood or food. And vice versa. There are many many combos. I think the building blueprints and cornerstones they offer are randomized either so as to not make anyone merchant more or less popular or appealing than all the others. Seeing a merchant appear in purchasing a really useful building blueprint off of them is so satisfying like stepping onto a d4 die just when you need to roll for the hit points you get after telling your D&D party you've chucked a full cauldron's worth of health potions down on your turn. If that scenario seems unlikely you clearly haven't been around the people I played TTRPGs with. Shall I tell you about preparing luxuries for your villages? They are many and varied. The different species enjoy different luxuries. The harpies are feral and cultured at once and love jerky as much as they love a good bout after a messy meal. So too with the other species. The aim here is to get what appeals to the most villagers species and there is a handy graph to consult whenever you start figuring out what would serve your lot best. Luxury buildings are expensive ventures resource-wise but they are well worth having as the bump to your settlers resolve is for a nice counter-way against the forest's hostility. This last one is yet another bar to keep an eye of a burden to try and contract as for each level of hostility negative consequences will kick in during the storm season. Fail to study these at your own discretion preparing to blunt the worst of what these have to offer is liable to get many of your villages to leave or even die. Which can work great if you pick the cannibalism cornerstone which has like 40 meat to your stores every time a villager dies. Yum! If this was all, five men developer Aromite Games would have had a solid game on their hands but the tons of upgrades you'll be unlocking over hundreds of hours alongside elements such as Blytrot and Rainpunk upgrades there are plenty more that you have to consider. Did I forget to mention the Rainpunk label? Here it's connected with upgrading buildings in order to increase their productivity and the resolve of those who work in the production building in question. Lots of pipes are involved and yes those are a resource too making pipes can be an adventure all on its own but it's far from the only cost you have to keep an eye on. Different types of buildings require one of the three types of water you can collect during the you guess the three seasons of the forest use the engines hard enough and eventually you'll get to experience the wondrous joys of Blytrot a disease that will slowly spread through your settlement until it suffocates your sacred heart. There's only one way to deal with it burn it with fire gods I love this game the world map allows you to place a settlement every three nodes or so accepting specific rewards you get that will see that limit increase to five nodes as you build up more and more of these ridiculous settlements you'll be faced with lots of overworld features positive and negative modifiers and special really challenging maps that see you reconstruct seals by following special wind conditions my first seal map offered me this excellent challenge that turned beyond frustrating because a lot of the seal objectives have to do with raindpunk stuff but I hadn't at that point unlocked the tech from the overworld death tree the final objective of three I got was as near impossible to find I spent more time than I'd like to admit going after it I think that final objective took me two hours alone and I was perhaps two or three minutes away from getting an automatic defeat from the queen's impatience while playing it I think if I had lost that one I would have genuinely genuinely quit this game as is hours upon hours of that particular experience burned me out against the storm for close to a week that said I'm now nearing my second seal node I'm 30 hours in and I'm eager to have scores of hours of fun with this game yet as I write this I just realized the chunky 1.2 patch has recently dropped it has a raindpunk automaton to operate your blightrot posts the ones that deal with the disease via inferno and that means one thing and one thing only I got to get me one of those thank you for watching if you enjoyed this video please don't forget to share it with your friends subscribe smash that like button and let me know if there are any games you would like me to take a look at I'm Philip Magnus you're not and I will see you again next time bye