Tom & Jerry meets Rimworld in this complex city builder that's all about throwing off the yoke of feline tyranny
Truly all-timer videogames let you do three things: Toil under the yoke of an oppressive overlord, pioneer new frontiers, and eat enough cheese to feed Whitstable. With those facts in mind, consider me very curious to get my hands on Whiskerwood, the new city-builder/elaborate production chain sim from Minakata Dynamics, maker of Railgrade.
Revealed today, Whiskerwood is a sort of colony-management sim that replaces the age-old conflict between proletarian and bourgeois with the age-old conflict between mouse and cat. Your job is to oversee a load of rodent serfs—called Whiskers—who have been press-ganged by a bunch of cats (the Claws) into shipping out to the New World, where their job is to generate as much delicious profit as possible from the colony's exploitation. Oh, and, you know, keep themselves alive in the process. I guess. If they can help it.
It all sounds quite whimsically dystopian, and entails a lot of factory-sim and city-building stuff to keep your overlords happy and your workers alive. The Claws want stuff, and creating the facilities to extract it and finessing your production lines is vital to keeping them happy. But also, the gaggle of mousey workers the game starts you off with have their own wants, needs, and preferences. If you don't want them to keel over, or just lose their minds entirely, you'll have to keep conditions at least vaguely tolerable.
«Ultimately you are serving two masters,» the devs tell PCG, «The Claws desire only resource extraction. The Whiskers are hardworking and wish to rest at the end of the day—they cannot eat promises of freedom.»
The game design goal is a kind of push and pull between what your bosses want and what the workers need: The trees that grow across the New World would make for a valuable source of profit if you shipped the lumber home, but you also need something to build your workers' homes. Policies that might make your workers happier—shorter working hours, for instance—won't please your feline
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