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.
Somewhere in the middle, there is a sweet spot that began
for me with Tropico 3 and its expansion Absolute Power. These are the city
simulations which are complex and abstract enough to capture the sense of
managing the entire community, but still operate at the level of individual
building placement and assignment. For example, in Tropico 3, I can build a
farm, configure its fields, and select which crop to grow. In Cities: Skyline,
I can zone entire areas to the farming industry using higher levels of abstraction.
The chains of production are exceedingly important in these kinds of games, so
knowing that I have selected tobacco to grow on the farm implies that I should
also build sufficient cigar factories to make use of that product.
The peak form of this game would be the Anno series, notably
the return to form Anno 1800. These games allow the player to create global
empires best depicted from the perspective of Old World Europe, including
explicit colonization mechanics and international trade. (Not trade of human
beings as far as I’ve seen, but right up to that line.)
New Cycle hovers somewhere between the scale of Tropico and Anno, and might remind some of Banished. The majority of gameplay stays close to home, developing the camp from a collection of tents and a single makeshift windmill amid the trees to a forest of smokestacks and manufactories as far as the eye can see. Infernal furnace flames are dotted throughout the grimy city, and occasionally great sparks leap out of the coal-burning power plants, throwing shadows in stark relief.
There is an overworld map which can be explored using scouts. These distance provinces can be developed at the click of a button, from the otherworld map, and cause various resources to trickle into the main colony without further detail. Meanwhile, the player is mainly occupied with the development of a simple road network, building placement, production chains, technological advancement, and the refinement of explicit classes among the citizens, much like managing a city in Anno.
Having described the mechanics using such explicitly comparative terms, I am struck by the inadequacy of this mode of game criticism. I can’t help but think back to the so-called ‘debate’ between the supposedly antithetical positions of narratology and ludology that occupied the early years of this century in game studies. Were I to focus on these mechanics alone, I would have no way to describe the world of difference between the zany, circus-like banana republic communism depicted in Tropico and the soul-crushing darkness that pervades the experience of New Cycle. If a theoretical perspective forces us to gloss over this contrast, then what good is it?
New Cycle presents us with a world devastated by an apocalyptic series of solar flares, triggering a breakdown of general society, wars both nuclear and conventional, leaving the survivors to start over again. Humanity has a smattering of knowledge, such as the ability to construct windmills for electricity mentioned above, but by and large must research its way back to civilization. There is an air of foreboding about the whole experience, which is rendered in the somber color palette, the decidedly improvised look of the game’s early buildings, and the ambient soundtrack. The game’s music must be given its due: I haven’t been this affected by the score accompanying a strategy game, perhaps ever. The plaintive piano strikes against a somber chamber orchestral backing which almost always presents a pained sense of suffering. The atmosphere it most reminded me of is that evoked by certain gloomy metal bands such as Amorphis or the slower-paced examples of Opeth. There is a sense of pain and suffering here, but not anger. Resignation, perhaps.
The catastrophic overtones are not entirely unique to New Cycle. An anxiety about climate change has crept into strategy games and become one of the framing devices for several: Frostpunk is the standard-bearer, but another recent release, Against the Storm, also foregrounds catastrophic ecological collapse. Anno: 2070 inhabits a post-climate disaster world as well, though lacking in the desultory tone I’ve experienced more recently. The word 'survival' has been added to the genre pool—perhaps that is a clue.
The player and their fellows discover early on that all is
not yet over for the world of New Cycle—new signs of further solar flares are
observed. Vast wildfires illuminate the horizon (literally—rather upsetting to
experience in a city-building game). Atmospheric instability threatens the
seasonal cycles. To survive, this clutch of humanity must take shelter below
the surface.
The bunker is a vast structure, built down into the earth to
create a hermetically sealed and self-sustaining lifeboat for a precious few.
The game describes the minimum viable gene pool—a mere seventy-two couples—that
will preserve the species. Even in my tiny colony, I already have three times
that number of citizens.
I have yet to finish the campaign. As of now, I do not know how the story can end. Can I rush enough material and workforce that I can house a thousand people in the bunker? Will I even be able to finish the infrastructure for the 125 beds I have currently built?
When the next catastrophe comes, will I have led my colony
to safety, or will we still be desperately shoveling precious resources into a
giant hole in the ground?
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