This one I have been meaning to do a review of for a while now so this is as good a time as any. The game was developed by Eremite Games and published by Hooded Horse which released into 1.0 in December 2023 after an early access period. For the sake of clarity for this review, I only have the base game not the DLC and I paid for it myself.
Against the Storm is a City Builder with Rogue-like elements which when you read it will likely make you raise an eyebrow. Yet it works! The game sees you take the role of a Viceroy to the Scorched Queen of the Smouldering City you head out into the world, establishing villages in order to provide resources to the city so it can survive the storm raging across the world. The Storm features heavily as you might expect given the title though as with all my reviews I'll try to avoid too many spoilers about things.
I'll go over the embarking and world map later as those all factor into the meta-progression and I'd rather try and do that all in one go. So, for the main gameplay, you'll find yourself in a small clearing with your hearth and a warehouse along with some starting resources and villagers. The hearth is where the fire burns and helps your people fend off the effects of the constant storm waxing and waning around them. You'll usually start off with a woodcutter or two as wood is a key resource not only for building but as fuel for the hearth so your people don't lose hope. They are also the means with which you expand through the area into new glades to find the resources you need.
New villagers arrive in waves, every so often meaning you have to use what you have, you can't just build everything and grab every resource from the get-go. You have to decide what you need most along the way, shuffling people around as needed. The villagers themselves are from among many different species, from the farming proficient humans to the woodcutting beavers, they all excel in different areas though you can assign them to any jobs you need doing. The camps themselves are you first resource-gathering buildings and can be freely moved when the nodes in their area are depleted. Other buildings can't usually be moved such as production and farms etc. There are two things you will always need in abundance regardless: Fuel for the hearth and food for your villagers.
Glades, seasons and the hostility of the forest all play a part in how you manage your resources and complete your orders. Resolve is lower doing the storm season often meaning you have to burn extra fuel to stop your people from leaving. Where-as the drizzle phase allows your farmers to begin planting. Each season has different effects depending on the biome and other world map modifiers. Glades are how you expand, they are clearings you have to cut your way into to find more resources and deal with events, opening too many too fast can snowball into you losing due to hostility and dangerous events. Hostility decreases the overall resolve of your villagers, you can manage it in various ways, complex food, better housing more hearths to keep the forest at bay. So, be careful getting too crazy with all the woodcutters, you may end up triggering more events than you have the people or resources to deal with!
I'll give a special mention to the trading system here, as you found and succeed at more villages you can trade with the previous settlements as well as the city itself. All you need is a trading post and some provisions for the caravans. Then if you have something you don't need but another settlement does, you can trade it for amber and use that to buy things from the traders that arrive periodically. They sell resources, blueprints and even some cornerstone perks, so it's worth doing!
The world map is where you choose where to send your next caravan to found a new village. Each area can be a different biome and have different modifiers (both positive and negative) as you expand to reach the seals and reforge them. Doing so gives you more time in each cycle meaning you can go further and have even more towns to trade with and earn more currency to unlock even more in the Smouldering City.
This is where the first rogue-like elements pop up, you'll get sets of orders at regular intervals which are random, completing those orders gives you rewards in the form of Reputation which is how you get blueprints for new buildings, which are also random. Of course, in addition to the queen's favour, there is the queen's wrath, something which increases steadily over time and as a result of resolving or failing certain events, if that red bar fills before the blue one, that village fails. So, you expand, using the resources you find to get your orders finished and 'win' that particular run. You also get perks during a run known as Cornerstones, everything from a steady supply line of some resource to boosting production of certain buildings which really makes each village different.
The whole gameplay loop is so compelling it's hard to put down if you like city-building games. Though this isn't similar to Cities Skylines or Tropico, it is closer to the older settlers games. The rogue-like parts of the game honestly help make it such a fun game to play, even a failed village will earn you something, more currency for unlocks, and ups that also unlock more buildings. I would still advise sticking with the easiest difficulty for your first few Blightstorm Cycles to avoid frustrating yourself by getting orders you can't hope to achieve.
It also deals with one of the biggest issues city builders tend to have. Usually, you will hit a point where there is nothing left to build, no new buildings, the map is almost completely full, and only starting a new city is an option. By the time you even get close to that point in Against the Storm, the run is over and you are onto your next village and a new set of challenges which keeps things interesting long after most city builders normally would.
The graphics are honestly very nice. It's easy to see what is going on at a glance, and each race of villagers is easy to distinguish from one another. The different biomes give the already colourful game way more variety. It looks good, it's colourful, and it's easy to see what is going on. As a bonus, someone on a lower-end PC like me won't be worried their graphics card will melt.
The sound design is also quite fitting, a very calm almost ethereal sound track makes the game feel quite chill even when the pressure is on. The score shifts with the seasons too and the whole game just feels very relaxed because of it.
While Against the Storm is easy to pick up and figure out, the way blueprints and orders are handed out can sometimes dead-end you early on. The meta-progression does help a lot with that, though, so I'd say don't get frustrated if you lose a few runs; it'll happen. I failed more than one run even in the process of writing this, I selected orders which required a farm and related things, only for there to be not a single patch of fertile ground to farm on. Stick with it, your next village will likely do better!
Overall, I can highly recommend Against the Storm and it has been one of my favourite city builders for a very long time. So, if you are after something to chill out with, enjoy managing small villages and gathering resources, you will likely really enjoy Against the Storm!
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