Floodland is a city building game after climate change ends the world
On its Steam page, upcoming city-building game Floodland bills itself as “a society survival game set in a world destroyed by climate change.” The developer is Vile Monarch, a new studio co-founded by Kacper Kwiatkowski and Grzegorz Mazur, who also co-founded 11 Bit and worked on This War of Mine. When I strolled into my hands-on appointment at Gamescom 2022, however, I only knew to expect a then-unannounced city builder that would deal in some way with climate change – and I confess I was hoping for something a bit different.
We’ve written before on PCGamesN of how curious it is that so few games about building big, complicated things tackle one of the biggest downsides of doing so: the environmental impact. Whether it’s city builders, factory sims, or other industrial management games, there are very few experiences which present any reaction from the natural world to your pollution of it, or your consumption of its resources. That’s especially true if you want a realistic simulation; Factorio will send swarms of aliens to attack your factory as it belches out smoke, but where are the games that depict the processes and consequences of habitat loss, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and overall global warming as the player burns fossil fuels and goes logging in the wilderness?
Alas, that game will not be Floodland, but at least it aspires to show us the aftermath. Vile Monarch is clear that climate change “was a catalyst for a succession of events that led to the destruction of our world”. Soaring sea levels have replaced nations as we knew them with chains of islands, swamps, and isolated groups of survivors. I ask writer Alexander Stroganov why no one has attempted something so explicit before.
“The fact that it’s
Read more on pcgamesn.com
