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New Cycle’s overview trailer reveals another city-builder grappling with the problem of hope in a fading worldDon’t reinvent the wheel, do reinvent mass production
Don’t reinvent the wheel, do reinvent mass production
Image credit:Daedalic Entertainment
Image credit:Daedalic Entertainment
NEW CYCLE | Official Gameplay Overview VideoWatch on YouTube
NEW CYCLE | Official Gameplay Overview Video
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.
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 rising public morale. “For the first time in decades, these humans feel hopeful and joyful for what the future might bring, all thanks to you,” the voiceover notes. The trade-off is that your people will become more demanding, the ingrates. They’ll ask for proper healthcare, warm clothes, an actual choice of things to eat, and entertainment of some kind. You can pass laws to give your citizens additional rights, or force them to work in the name of productivity.
All this happens against a backdrop of semi-random disasters such as additional solar flares, wildfires, meteor impacts and outbreaks of disease. It looks like you’ll also have to worry about hostile human factions with access to old war machines such as battleships, though the trailer doesn’t mention whether town construction has a military component.
Perhaps inevitably, city management games have grappled more directly with pervasive disasters such as climate change and overexploitation or late capitalist feudalism than many other types of strategy game. I think the genre is in a weird place right now - at once deeply nostalgic about the process of building up a big dirty industrial metropolis where humans exist as strictly individuated sets of quantifiable needs and outputs, and deeply anxious about where that process leads.
New Cycle launches into early access on 18th January. Here’s theSteam page.
