Dystopika (Steam, Windows) is a city builder in maybe the strictest definition of that two-word descriptor, because it steadfastly refuses to distract you with non-building details. The game is described by its single developer, Matt Marshall, as having “No goals, no management, just creativity and dark cozy vibes.” Dystopika does very little to explain how you should play it, because there’s no optimal path for doing so. Your only job is to enjoy yourself, poking and prodding at a dark cyberpunk cityscape, making things that look interesting, pretty, grim, or however you like. It might seem restrictive, but it feels very freeing.
Dystopika launch video.
The game’s interface is a small rail on the left side of the screen. Select “Building” and a random shape attaches to your cursor. You can right-click to change it, but you can’t pick one. Place it, and then optionally place the cursor near its top to change its height. Making one building taller will raise smaller buildings nearby. Reaching certain heights, or densities, or something (it’s not explained) will “unlock” certain new buildings, landmarks, and decorations.
Hooray! I’ve unlocked the headquarters for a megacorp with a very ominous name! (Please appreciate my efforts at public transit.) Credit: Kevin Purdy
You do get to pick out “Props,” like roads and trams and giant billboards and hologram objects and flying carports, but the game is similarly non-committal on what you should do with them, or most anything. You put things down, or delete them, expand them, connect them, and try things out until you like how it looks.
Enlarge /Frostpunk 2 has you planning and building districts, rather than individual buildings or roads. You make plans, and a particularly icy god laughs.
11 Bit Studios
I can’t remember every interaction I had with the advisers in Civilization games, but I don’t believe I ever had to send my guards to put down a protest one of them staged in a new settlement.
Nor could I ask any of them for “Favours” to scrape a few more heat stamps necessary for a new food district, indebting me to them at some future point when they decide they’ve had enough of some other faction’s people and ideas. In Frostpunk 2 (out today), the people who pop up to tell you how they’re feeling aren’t just helpful indicators, they’re a vital part of the strategy. To keep these people going, you’ve got to make some of them mad, some of them happy, and balance a ledger of all you’ve gained and demanded from them.
That’s the biggest difference you’ll notice in Frostpunk 2 if you’re coming from the original. The original had you making choices that affected people, but you were the Captain, in full control of your people, at least until you angered them enough to revolt. In Frostpunk 2, you manage factions and communities rather than groups of survivors. You place districts, not hospitals. Time moves in days and weeks, not hours. You play multiple chapters across a landscape in a world that is 30 years removed from its initial peril.
The challenge of Frostpunk 2 is no longer simply getting everyone through this winter. There is now some thought of what kind of people you want to be once you have enough fuel, food, and children. Are you in managed decline, or can you build something better, despite the world trying to kill you?
You’re still building a city in a radius around the generator, but it’s big hexes and districts, not buildings on grids.
11 Bit Studios
When your city gets built up, it can be mesmerizing to just watch it glow.
11 Bit Studios
Exploring the places beyond your city’s reach can be rewarding, and risky, of course.
11 Bit Studios
Each Faction has their priorities (Cornerstones). You can ask favors, promise things, and track their favor.
11 Bit Studios
A lot of the original Frostpunk feel remains in the game. Should we teach our perfectly pipe-sized kids how to weld inside the oil tubes? What could go wrong?
11 Bit Studios
A beautiful grid with brutal choices
Those are the big-picture changes to Frostpunk 2. At the ground level, the general feeling is quite familiar. It’s cold, it sometimes gets colder, and there’s a furnace to feed. This time, you need to do “Icebreaking” to unlock tiles for development, but you don’t have to worry so much about the exact placement of individual bits. Your colony or city will link itself up and look beautiful in the game’s grim Victorian cryo-future style. You have to figure out how to scrimp the resources to put an extraction district on the oil reserves, making enough heat for the residents to stop getting sick so you can then send them out to recover goods from a decimated wagon and then icebreak some more toward a food source, all while planning to build a research center and council building.
The research and political trees you climb are more varied and even harder to choose in this sequel. Early in Frostpunk 2, your explorers find a body in the ice with the insignia of the first game’s city on his jacket, and they ask you if it stands for Order or Faith. However you answer, you will have more than just two ideas to choose from. At the base level are two communities, Progress-focused New Londoners and Adaptation-minded Frostlanders. Then you get Order-obsessed Stalwarts, Faithkeepers, and their respective opposition, Pilgrims and Evolvers. Playing the game’s “Utopia Builder” mode after the chapter-based story mode brings in a lot more communities and factions. You know, for this fun thing you do in your spare time.
At the Council Hall, you will need to negotiate with these factions to get votes out of the 100 members, divided up by faction influence. Most votes need 51, but votes that change your power require 66. If a faction is on the fence, you can promise them something, like future research projects or other law changes. Break that promise, and they will work against you in the future. Radicals will show up inside each faction, requiring you to either appease them or find support elsewhere. You can look at all the players and “Cornerstones” (ideologies) at play in one of the game’s beautifully informative screens. You can ponder this while, all around you, the basic needs like fuel, materials, food, and shelter keep needing to be managed.
Your settlers can now lose faith in you not because they’re starving and freezing, but because of political factions. Huzzah!
Enlarge/ Are you enticed by this kind of orderly madness with a clean graphical layout? Then I suggest you… settle in.
Goblinz Studio
You can’t buy Mini Settlers right now, but I think you should play the free “Prologue” demo and wishlist the full game if you dig it. It’s not quite like any other city builder I’ve played.
Mini Settlers is “mini” like minimalism. It is in the same genre, but quite far from, games like Cities: Skylines 2 (a choice with some proven merit). Your buildings are not 3D-rendered with real-time lighting. Your buildings are colored squares, sometimes with a few disc tokens stacked on them, tabletop-style. Your roads don’t have traffic, but they have drivers (tiny squares) that take resources between nodes. When things go wrong, you don’t get depressing news about pollution and riots; some people just leave their homes, but they’ll come back if you fix what’s wrong.
Mini Settlers announcement video.
Mini Settlers is not the game to play to satisfy your long-running suspicion that urban planning was your missed calling. In the (non-progress-saving) Prologue-free demo out this week, the mines and quarries have infinite resources. There is no “money” to speak of, so far as I can tell. Apple farms must be placed near apple orchards and water pumps by water, and the rest is up to you. The interface looks like a thought experiment in how far you can get from traditional city sim HUDs, but then someone implemented it.
A larger-scale view of a developed settlement, one with much better road planning than I achieved.
Goblinz Studio
The game layers information about resources and needs, such that it never feels overwhelming.
Goblinz Studio
Natural resources and land formations require you to work around them in creative ways.
Goblinz Studio
Each circle is a node, and each square is a worker, shuttling resources from node to node, as best they can.
Goblinz Studio
The biggest challenge I faced in my couple of sessions was textbook logistics, at least from a suburban or small-town perspective. Having developed SimCity Brain throughout prior decades, I tried to keep my residential areas (City Center and the Homes you build around it) away from anything resembling production, like rock quarries and lumber yards. Instead of bolstering housing values or improving aesthetics, which do not exist, this gave me a huge set of supply bottlenecks to try and work through.
Houses wanted regular supplies of apples and water, but spacing out everything made a ton of extra transit work. Every road is a maximum of seven tiles, and each one gets a worker that moves back and forth between waypoints, dropping off goods to buildings or leaving them for the next worker on the goods’ route. I had wanted to create a simple town of people building wood houses and eating apples, and instead, I had a micro-scale Wayfair job interview scenario, complete with tiny warehouses and delivery times.
But, here again, Mini Settlers is different, even when you’re flailing. You simply remove the roads and buildings that don’t work and put them in better places. The buildings take a bit to build again, but there’s no real game timer unless you want to enable one for personal bests. You can even enable a background mode so that the calm simulation keeps running while you absolutely do your best work on a Friday afternoon.
The “Prologue” is not verified for Steam Deck, but the developers have an official layout for it. I think it will do in a pinch, but there’s a lot of thumb-taxing trackpad pointing remaining in a game that seems grid-based enough to do with more gamepad controls. As for performance, it runs great. At 30 frames per second, my Deck guessed it could keep going for nearly five more hours.
Mini Settlers is due out in 2024, seemingly for PC only on Steam, for the moment. The minimum requirements are a Core i3, 4GB memory, and Intel HD Graphics 4000, but “Integrated cards also work.” As the developers at Knight Owl Games note, wishlisting the game helps it circulate inside Steam’s recommendation algorithm, even if you don’t ultimately play beyond the demo. I am going to note a second time here that the demo does not save your game when you exit, which is not another design choice to keep you calm but just a demo thing.
Between this and Against the Storm, I am enjoying the recent broadening of the “city builder” genre. It’s happening, weirdly enough, by going much smaller.
Enlarge/ Kudos to the designer of this umbrella-shaded rooftop terrace at Colossal Order, perhaps the only worker who can imagine a place that isn’t overwhelmed by Steam reviewers.
Paradox Interactive
Under the very unassuming name of patch 1.1.0f1, Cities: Skylines 2 is getting something quite big. The sequel now has the modding, map editing, and code modding support that made its predecessor such a sprawling success.
Only time will tell if community energy can help restore some of the momentum that has been dispersed by the fraught launch of Cities: Skylines 2 (C:S2). The project of relatively small developer Colossal Order arrived in October 2023 with performance issues and a lack of content compared to its predecessor. Some of that content perception stemmed from the game’s lack of modding support, which had contributed to entire aspects of the original game not yet available in the sequel.
When Ars interviewed Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen in December, she said that modding support was the thing she was most looking forward to arriving. Modding support was intended to be available at launch, but the challenges of building the new game’s technical base, amid many other technical issues, pushed it back, along with console releases.
“[W]e can’t wait to have the support out there, so we can have the modding community ‘fully unleashed,'” Hallikainen said then. “Because I know they are waiting to get to work. They are actually already at it, but this will make it easier. … We just can’t wait to give them the full set of tools.” She noted that character modding, a “technically difficult thing to support,” would arrive further out, and indeed, asset modding is listed as “available later this year.”
The base-level modding support is now available, though in “Beta” and in a different form than fans are used to. Instead of working through Steam Workshop, C:S2 mods will be available through Paradox Mods to support console players. There are, of course, issues at launch, including slowdown with the in-game mod browser. Most non-incensed commenters and reviewers consider the tools themselves to be an upgrade over the prior game’s editing suite.
In addition to making mods, the in-game mod tools should make it easier to load preset “Playsets” of mod combinations. We’ll have to see how long it takes assets like Spaghetti Junction, the most popular mod for the original Cities: Skylines, to arrive in C:S2 so that all may experience the municipal engineering regrets of Birmingham, England.
Along with modding tools, Colossal Order issued some of its first proper DLC for C:S2. Beach Properties, an asset pack, adds both North American and European waterfront zoning and buildings, palm trees, and six signature buildings. There’s also a Deluxe Relax Station that puts 16 new songs and DJ patter on the soundtrack. The recent patch also contains a number of optimizations and bug fixes. Steam reviewers and Paradox forum members are asking why the beach DLC doesn’t contain actual beaches.
