In roguelite city builder Against the Storm, failure is part of the process

polygon.com:

I love city-building sims during every step of play — from laying down the foundations to planning a city grid, upgrading the complexity of buildings, and handling the bureaucratic elements of the late game. I’ve spent late nights playing Frostpunk and Timberborn, sucked into the fine balance of evading total town collapse. That said, if you had told me a week ago, “You’re going to spend about an hour making a settlement — and then you’re going to start over, again and again,” I’d have balked. But Against the Storm, the roguelite city builder that just came out of early access on Dec. 8, proves this formula is not only sensible, it’s fantastic.

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To be clear, there are other games with this unconventional genre pairing. In Cult of the Lamb, there’s a home base that functions like a sim game where cultists work, worship, and obviously make live sacrifices. You can leave this base in order to partake in roguelike dungeon crawls. But Against the Storm doesn’t have that separation of mechanics. They’re perfectly married in a way that keeps things fresh while also empowering you to add complexity in each subsequent run. Fifteen hours in, I can hardly peel myself away.

In Against the Storm, you’re the queen’s viceroy in a land with cataclysmic weather events — you’ve been tasked with building settlements out from