A roguelike city builder almost seems like a genre that shouldn’t exist. Surely the point of a city builder is to slowly piece a settlement together building by building, considering both your short-term needs and how everything will slot together hours later, and appreciating the complexity you’ve created as you watch it unfold. If you know that the city is finite, that you’re just going to start over from barren earth before long, what’s even the point? In one of 2023’s best PC games, which is now available on consoles, this clash of concepts is more functional and more captivating than it might seem at first, and it actually fixes a problem that haunts even the best city builders over time.
Against the Storm is remarkably grim for a game full of talking beavers. With little more than a change of lighting, the colorful structures and well-designed animal inhabitants of its world could be downright cheerful. But the world here is constantly awash in gloom, thanks to an unforgiving cycle of storms that’s rendered it almost uninhabitable. At some point in Against the Storm’s history, a magical storm developed that returns periodically to destroy everything except the capital city, with smaller storms between that just make life a bit more miserable. Your job, as an envoy of the queen, is to spend the time between those storms building settlements to enrich her before it all gets wiped off the map.
