"Lovecraftian Stone Age" town builder The Tribe Must Survive hits early access in February
What we do in and out of the shadows
Take the little boy with lancing white eyes from Playdead's Limbo, ruthlessly clone him a few dozen times (an extremely Playdead thing to do) and herd all the clones into a world redolent of Klei's Don't Starve, and you have something like The Tribe Must Survive. Developed by apparent Macbeth fans Walking Tree Games GmbH, and published by Starbreeze, it's a heavily horror-themed tribe management sim with a roguelike campaign loop, set in what the developers are calling the "Lovecraftian Stone Age", with flagrant disregard for my nerves. Does the Lovecraftian Stone Age feature any actual walking trees? We'll find out on February 22nd, when the game launches into early access.
Going by its Steam page, The Tribe Must Survive is all about savouring the experience of being crushed between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, you've got to worry about the dreadful Things that inhabit the shadows nibbling at the fringes of your campsite. On the other, you've got to worry about your tribespeople rioting or waging war on each other, even as the darkness draws closer and closer.
Each character in the game is a simulated personality with traits such as Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Conscientiousness, plus generic Needs such as food and sleep, and varying quantities of Discontent and Fear, which is affected above all by the strength of the fire burning at your settlement's heart. You can assign people to production facilities, but they will "generally only do what they want", and you might need to "manipulate" them using unspecified rituals.
The personality traits also feed into positive or negative interactions with other characters, as they mingle and move about camp. This eventually results in the appearance of factions, who may come to blows. In the event of such an "Inner Conflict", it's up to you to decide the victor. The losing faction may be totally eradicated.
Even as you're trying to hold the tribe together, you're also splitting them apart in order to explore the map. The Tribe Must Survive takes a lot of inspiration from the 4X genre, except that there isn't a combat or military component and as such, no fourth "extermination" pillar.
You can send tribespeople on journeys into the ominously named Outer World, where they'll face challenges presented as pop-up story choices, reminiscent of Stellaris. Once a region is sufficiently explored, you can found an Outpost there and create trade routes - both for basic resources once local reserves grow scarce, and for rarer goods such as Copper and Relics, which are needed for later village upgrades.
The outpost system is also a way of managing factional strife, in that you can pack one group off to the boondocks to reduce the tension. The R&D component, meanwhile, has you deciding whether to bet on new technologies or commit your tribe to mysticism, while picking from a familiar spread of governing ideologies - freedom at all costs vs tyranny in the name of survival, that kind of thing.
"Though the game is set far in the past, its world already has an extensive history," reads a blog post on the setting from last year. "Great cities have crumbled. Wondrous beings have fallen to extinction. Dire warnings have faded from memory. The cycle of destruction and birth keeps repeating itself. By exploring the world, you will find pieces of these histories, and perhaps learn to better understand what you are facing against.
"The gameworld is strongly inspired by the cosmic horror genre," it continues. "Worlds inhabited by beings whose true nature is too immense and horrifying for us to comprehend. You can expect to witness hints of these beings in the game, since even if they cannot be understood by mortal minds, their mere presence will inevitably impact the world." Among the game's incomprehensible beings are full-bore deities, whom your tribespeople may worship. Worshipping gods makes them more powerful, which I'm sure will have no unpleasant consequences whatsoever.
All told, The Tribe Must Survive strikes me as a fun time, given an appropriately misanthropic definition of "fun". If this kind of thing gets your motor running, there's also Abyssals (Steam link), a colony management game with a generous splash of Subnautica.