City 20 Is a Survival Sandbox That’s Both Bleak and Beautiful
City 20 is an upcoming survival sandbox adventure game that puts you in a quarantined secret city, one where nuclear work was done, after a radiological disaster of some kind has cut it off from the outside world. Waking up with your own past a mystery, you're tasked to survive among the factions of people that have formed in this little, localized apocalypse. The developers have tried to create a world inspired by classics like Stalker, The Road, and La Jetée.
So far so good, right? These are all things I like to hear. I recently sat down with a demo build of the in-progress game and got a look at how it's going so far.
The first thing that really strikes me about City 20 is the art style. It's confident and decisive, to my eyes inspired by comics or paintings, with very stylized characters: Broad hips, bowed legs, narrow shoulders. The colors meanwhile are muted, washed out. They're something between a set of slightly dirty pastel tones and the darker shades that have become pretty popular in the wake of Disco Elysium. Either way, the aesthetics as a whole are pretty confident and consistent, which I think is important and good to see as this sort of sandbox really lives or dies on how deeply the visuals can pull you into the unfolding story.
City 20 is supposed to be a survival sandbox, one where a realistic social and ecological simulation plays out over seasons of in-game time. Figuring out the politics of the different factions, how they relate, and how to gather the limited resources of the ruined city is supposed to be a major part of the game. The crafting and survival elements are important but relatively simple and basic, with the emphasis there on conserving resources and not overtaxing the environment—one example given by the developers is harvesting too many deer or rabbits, causing local foxes and wolves to become aggressive toward people.
In the demo, however, most of my time was spent figuring out what to eat and drink and where to get it from. Though I
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