Against the Storm review
What is it? A roguelike city builder about making the best of a doomed world.
Expect to pay £25/$30
Release date Dec 8, 2023
Developer Eremite Games
Publisher Hooded Horse
Reviewed on Windows 10, Ryzen 7 3700X, RTX 3080, 32GB RAM
Steam Deck Verified
Link Official site
The basic idea baked into a city builder is that I'm creating something to last. Every street, every house, every decoration is placed with care to craft cozy neighborhoods and shopping areas where people will live and thrive, theoretically forever. So when Against the Storm presented me with the premise that each of my handmade habitats would be wiped away by a terrible tempest as part of an unavoidable, cataclysmic cycle, I wasn't sure how to feel about it. But what has revealed itself in the puddles left over when the clouds clear is one of the most clever, engaging, and endearing strategy games I've played in years.
In the world of Against the Storm, some kind of horrifying, magical disaster has turned the once-idyllic fantasy countryside into a rain-soaked, ruin-strewn morass in which everything outside of the magically-shielded capital, The Smoldering City, is annihilated by hurricane-force gales every year. As the Queen's viceroy, your job is to set out during the brief windows during which the land is traversable to found productive settlements that will take you closer to a set of mysterious seals. By completing these seals, you will permanently lengthen the storm cycle and draw closer to understanding what happened.
Each new settlement site comes with a varied set of possible positive and negative modifiers, which could be anything from a ghostly presence that randomly kills unhoused villagers to a creepy species of tree that also gives you
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