Review: Flooded

destructoid.com:

Don’t you hate it when you finish a hard day in the work mines, step blinking into the sunlight, and find out that the mountain you were on is now just a small island surrounded by ocean? So relatable. That’s how Flooded begins.

Flooded describes itself as a reverse city builder. What it means is that the world is currently undergoing flooding of biblical proportions, and you need to survive in small pockets of land, finish up your objectives, and escape before there’s no land left to dry your socks on. I wasn’t sure if this concept was really going to work for me, but now that I’ve played through Flooded, I realize that its design is not only palatable, but actually somewhat brilliant.

Flooded (PC) Developer: Artificial Disasters Publisher: Artificial Disasters, Surefire.Games Release: March 12, 2023 MSRP: TBA

You may think that Flooded is going to have some message about climate change and the environmental impact of humans, but it’s a lot more intimate than that. You follow a small group of miners as they attempt to survive the rising sea level. They’re not sure how it all happened, but they’re pretty sure climate change doesn’t work that fast.

Rather than try to build settlements and gain population, you work to achieve your objectives and move on before the oceans swallow you up. This means gathering resources and accomplishing goals as quickly as possible. Human lives aren’t really a factor here, so long as you tick all the boxes, you move on. Screw all those consumed by the ocean. They made the mistake of trusting my managerial skills. I have no sympathy.

The setup is essentially that you need to climb through 4 “eras” by completing goals and then spending a lump sum of resources to proceed. This might mean