New Cycle entered early-access a few days ago and I was tempted enough to take a look at the latest in an ever-growing niche of mid-size city-builders. What I found was a startling, melancholy requiem for humanity, teetering on the brink of disaster, yet stoically carrying on, perhaps in vain.
New Cycle fits into a genre of colony-management
and/or city-building games that operate at the scale of individual citizens and
buildings. At the far end of the city simulation genre you have, of course,
SimCity and Cities: Skylines, which set as their target a mimesis of the North
American urban-suburban sprawl configured around freeway interchanges and
zoning laws. At the other end of the simulation genre is the Sims franchise,
which simulates the daily lives of individual people, their ambitions and trials,
along with the exact placement of dining tables and stairs inside each home.
