This new survival city builder feels kind of Dune-meets-Frostpunk

I like a city builder, me, and newly revealed Beware Of Light, from tiny indie studio Bajka Games, has a interesting hook (and a Ronseal-type name, which you know I appreciate). Your advanced colony ship has veered off course, and you've crashed on a dead, desert planet with no water or fossil resources like oil. It's sort of a hot Frostpunk, because you have to manage manpower, there are limited resources to distribute, and nobody is going to help. You must live. What do now?

I tell you what I'd do: die, is what. I'm not good in the sun, and neither do I have any practical skills. I mean sure, I can crochet a jumper if you give me a few weeks, but someone else has to make the yarn first, and there aren't any sheep on this planet. In fact, the Steam page notes that you make clothes by extracting basalt from rocks and melting it to make threads, which is pretty labour intensive. To make water you have to extract hydrogen from the troposphere. Presumably solar power won't be an issue, although apparently the planet, Ash, can hit you with storms, and is full of secrets, including "random comets, debris from distant planetary systems, and perhaps something else that's hard to come up with a rational explanation for."

There's no trailer to show of the game in action as yet, but as was pointed out by Edwin, the spiked, plated buildings have a sort of Dune look, and Dune is obviously having a moment right now. Many of the base bits look like insects, which is fun. I think there's a dash of Mad Max in there, and Edwin did also say that he sort of hopes it's a "Pitch Black RTS". Plus, the obvious comparison is The Martian, although that doesn't have much in common with Pitch Black. Hey, you know all those desert movies you like?

It seems much more sober than any of those IPs cited, though, and RTS elements are very unlikely. This is about survival against all odds, using the sort of "hard sci-fi" technology that makes Elon stand to attention (surely a point against it). The colony sim elements of this make it perhaps less my genre, and my tastes do tend towards the bucolic where city builders are concerned, but I'm intrigued, and will be keeping an eye out for a trailer to see how the business of slowly dehydrating works in practise. Beware Of Light is "coming soon" on Steam.