New Cycle's overview trailer reveals another city-builder grappling with the problem of hope in a fading world
Don't reinvent the wheel, do reinvent mass production
Core Engage and Daedalic Entertainment have released a new overview trailer for New Cycle, their post-apocalyptic "dieselpunk" city management game. "New Cycle" is obviously a bit of a self-contradiction, and I suspect that's deliberate - one of the questions the video leaves you with is whether there is "a future beyond survival", or whether we are doomed to just repeat the processes of extraction and gradual building-up, resource overexploitation and encroaching disaster suggested by these 12 jam-packed minutes of in-game footage.
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.
Wood is turned into lumber at mills, and you can use the lumber for buildings, drawing out paths between them. All the while, you're trying to rediscover the knowledge of the world before - researching techs, in other words. The ambience is relentlessly brown and dingy, reflecting a planet ravaged by solar flares, but the buildings are meticulously designed, and there are lots of little NPC animations to lighten the mood: people pulling carts, hauling logs and later, wandering home drunkenly from the pub.
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.
As Ollie noted in our Steam Next Fest demo round-up from June, it feels a bit like an expanded take on Frostpunk, but the lategame is more of a factory extraction sim. With as many as 40 resources at your disposal, you may wish to automate production with conveyor belts. You'll also need to appoint specialists and craftspeople to run the more complicated facilities. By this point in the game, you may also have depleted all the local raw materials and even used up available water supplies, forcing you to build railways to distant unexploited regions (it's not clear whether this involves a separate map where you'll build new furnaces, diggers and the like).
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.
Sin does a much better job of interrogating such topics in her column from October 2022 on the current state of town builders. You might also be interested in this, brisk Never Was piece on the philosophy of dieselpunk, a term coined by Lewis Pollak in 2001 to describe his role-playing game Children of the Sun.
New Cycle launches into early access on 18th January. Here's the Steam page.