Ecological collapse and rising temperatures have left humanity scattered, afraid, and on the verge of extinction. That increasingly close-to-reality premise has formed the backbone of countless post-apocalypse stories, often tinted a muted brown and focused on harsh battles for survival. But a new post-apocalyptic city builder that exited Early Access in April puts a more hopeful and colorful spin on life after the end of the world, and it’s been slowly gobbling up my spare evenings for the past month.
Synergy handles things so much differently from its peers that even the standard genre label “city builder” doesn’t feel quite right. The term conjures images of stacking skyscrapers, laying out lanes of pavement and stringing power lines to control the flow of traffic and electricity through a metropolis of your making. The gorgeously illustrated Synergy is about what comes next, when all that extraction has finally led the earth to say “enough” and swallow up those neatly arranged roads once and for all.
