New Cycle's overview trailer reveals another city-builder grappling with the problem of hope in a fading world
Core Engage and Daedalic Entertainment have released a new overview trailer for New Cycle, their post-apocalyptic "dieselpunk" city management game. "New Cycle" is obviously a bit of a self-contradiction, and I suspect that's deliberate - one of the questions the video leaves you with is whether there is "a future beyond survival", or whether we are doomed to just repeat the processes of extraction and gradual building-up, resource overexploitation and encroaching disaster suggested by these 12 jam-packed minutes of in-game footage.
Don't have time for any dieselpunking today? Here's a quick breakdown from me: each game of New Cycle follows an arc of technological progression from subsistence farming to industrialisation and the invention of the train. It starts with you placing camps for wood-gathering and digging wells, while foraging for simple foodstuffs such as mushrooms and dealing with the associated problem of seasonal change.
Wood is turned into lumber at mills, and you can use the lumber for buildings, drawing out paths between them. All the while, you're trying to rediscover the knowledge of the world before - researching techs, in other words. The ambience is relentlessly brown and dingy, reflecting a planet ravaged by solar flares, but the buildings are meticulously designed, and there are lots of little NPC animations to lighten the mood: people pulling carts, hauling logs and later, wandering home drunkenly from the pub.
Among the lost technologies you'll recover is coal-powered electricity generation, used to light more advanced settlements and power other industries such as paper production, though there appears to be renewable tech as well in the shape of windmills. All of these things contribute to
Read more on rockpapershotgun.com
