Ancient city builder El Dorado has a free prologue, with some angry gods to appease

rockpapershotgun.com:

Basically the only sort of strategy games I like are city builders, so I was interested in the playtest for El Dorado: The Golden City Builder, which casts you as the leader of an ancient Mayan-ish city. The playtest is only the prologue, but the eventual goal is to take over the Yucatán peninsula, and if nothing else it's refreshing to see a city-builder that doesn't feel overwhelmingly European. It also has a complicated system of religion. Whereas in a similarly polytheistic game like Zeus, the gods would turn up to stomp on buildings and/or bless them, at fairly large intervals, in El Dorado I was getting a home immolated every few days. Building shrines that have an area of effect, and that require resources to run and protect your town, is its own supply chain in El Dorado. This is a very interesting idea that I liked.

But. The aforementioned deities are figures from Maya mythology, and the Yucatán peninsula is the bit where the Mayans lived, so I just find it a bit sus the word "Mayan" does not appear anywhere on the Steam page or in the press release materials. Sometimes said materials say "the Yucatán peninsula", and sometimes "the mystical land of Jukatan", which could well be an innocent translation mistake, but doesn't make me less sus. I've hedged my bets by saying "Mayan-ish" - just as an uncharitable person could say the devs are doing...

I don't know who specifically was involved in making this, so it is very possible that the devs (based in Warsaw in Poland) have familial links to Mesoamerica or South American indigenous peoples, and are exploring their own heritage. This game apparently gets into enslaving neighbouring cities and human sacrifices, so hopefully there's some sincere research going on in any case. I don't know enough to be able to make a call, and I didn't get close to the darker parts of the game, so I'd be super interested to hear from someone who does and can when the full game is released.

Whether or not it's correct, there is a