What if an urban planner wasn’t vaguely colonialist? Nels Anderson’s new project has an answer

Steam is currently flooded with city builders (I play Fabulousness, for example), and most are relatively similar. Therefore, for me, the excitement of starting a new city builder comes in the form of new art styles, interesting combat mechanics, and compelling storytelling. But former Klei Entertainment developer Nel Anderson’s new company Sonderlust Studiosbrings novelty to the genre with its first game, Generational exileannounced on Sunday with a trailer.

Generational exile is a beautiful city builder like any other, but this one has a distinctly anti-colonialist, eco-friendly aspect: instead of drilling your new land in search of raw materials, and ultimately destroying what it once was, Banned challenges players to use only the resources they had with them when they left their old world in the last-ever ship. That includes water, food and even air. The gameplay also includes turn-based combat, as well as the typical tasks of creating habitats and facilities, gathering resources, and keeping your residents happy.

Over email, Anderson, who works as creative director of Sonderlust, aptly explained to Polygon what the game is trying to do: many city builders, he explained, are “fundamentally extractive and the reward – if not the demand – grows infinitely.” That means that in order to progress in the game you have to constantly drill into the earth, cut down trees, mine caves, etc. Generational exileon the other hand, it forces players to interact with the new environment.

“Rather than simply ‘the numbers are getting bigger,’ we wanted to focus the problem-solving space more on finding balance,” Anderson said. “Rather than extracting more raw materials from the ground for refinement, progress could instead look like developing a series of anaerobic lagoons that convert the biological waste (which must be stored and managed anyway) into nutrients for the growing food or source crops for bioplastics. ”

Time will pass super fast and take into account different generations of your in-game society, which consists of procedurally generated characters, so no two games are the same. In fact, generating new maps and characters is an important part of how Sonderlust’s developers want to achieve that balance.

“While the player is of course interacting with the card portion of the game from a familiar bird’s eye view, they are not some disembodied force of will or an otherwise nameless and uncharacterized overseer,” Anderson said. Instead, player characters will have reputations and tailored interactions with NPCs “procedurally activated in response to the state of the game and the decisions the player has made.”

The premise is enough to pique my interest, but the lineup of developers and designers is even more impressive. Sonderlust also calls out its Chief Operating Officer, Karla Zimonja, co-founder of Went homeand some developers who worked on it Baldur’s Gate 3 And Far Cry5. As for the sound design, Ben Prunty comes out In the break will work with the audio team of CelesteEnable audio.

Image: Sonderlust Studios

The first looks at the game are moody, in a late summer afternoon kind of way, with an intriguing honeycomb structure of the city and lots of overgrown ’50s-esque buildings. The user interface also looks modern (and big enough to readahem) — a welcome change from the average city builder.

“Generation Exile’s art style is partly inspired by Fauvism,” says Pier-Olivier Desbiens, 3D environment artist for Sonderlust Studios. “It is a polygonal attempt at the bold colors and flat lines of movement, with a heavy emphasis on simplifying shapes and objects so that only the essential remains. The main goal was to create a world that feels familiar yet mysterious through the use of unusual, saturated color palettes.”

Generational exile doesn’t have a release date yet. When it releases, it will be available on Steam and other consoles to be announced.