Generation Exile is the new eco-conscious turn-based strategy sim from Sonderlust Studios, a Canada-based independent developer whose members include Nels Anderson (Mark of the Ninja, Firewatch), Karla Zimonja (Gone Home, Tacoma), and Marri Knadle (Far Cry 5 & 6). A talented gang indeed. The game puts you in charge of a scrappy band of humans living on a colony ship so huge it can harbour mountain ranges and lakes.
The ship puts me heavily in mind of the grandest and most luxurious vessels from Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, except that it’s a polluted and treacherous hexagonal wilderness that is closer in vibe to Scavenger’s Reign. Your job is to emerge from below decks, bolt together an outpost, and restore each sprawling biome before the colony ship completes its journey. Along the way, you’ll have to reckon with personality dynamics and branching dialogue quests redolent of 11-Bit’s management sims, and deal with some kind of marauding “entity” from the Earth you left behind.
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I had a quick go of Generation Exile’s early access build yesterday, and have bleary, late-night Thoughts that are very much not a proper review. I really like the premise, though I’ve seen it before in the likes of Ixion, and the glowing, bacterial aesthetics. The game operates according to the principle of a circular economy. Some of the resources at your disposal are finite, requiring you to dismantle structures (and reduce those tiles to unbuildable rubble) everytime you build something else. One mechanic I’m especially keen on so far is power. Rather than building nuclear reactors and suchlike, this sees you retiring the atmosphere scrubbers that surround your emergence hole to free up juice. The trade-off is that the surrounding habitat will grow less stable.
As with Terra Nil, the habitat restoration stuff is heavily shaded by real-world environmental clean-up strategies. When you encounter a body of water, for example, it’s advisable to install an algal bioreactor to purge excess nitrates. Then you’ll want to invest in a granulizer to process and store the resulting sludge. We’re a far cry from building Orc huts in Warcraft, aren’t we. Rather than there being a research component, you get new techs and building types once certain conditions are fulfilled.
When building in regions that have gone a bit sickly, you’ll have to complete a task check, which sees you assigning named, backstoried crewmates with relevant skills to offset a stack of crisis counters. The outcome of these task checks is to raise the odds of either a miraculous windfall of some kind – possibly an actual windfall – or a cataclysm, as illustrated by an icon of a meteor (I hope there won’t be any actual meteors).
There are also pop-up quests that might see you, for example, deciding how to deal with a renegade lifeform that has snuck inside a silo. The game’s writing is perhaps more New Weird than solarpunk, encouraging the player to embrace a certain level of hideous posthuman infestation rather than aiming to deck the landscape in squeaky clean windmills.
There’s plenty of terminology to chew through. I can’t work out if that abundance of terminology is why my opening playthrough ran out of steam, though it’s perhaps a question of overall presentation. There are icons for building states, and arching lines to indicate relationships, but I struggled to work out how to, for example, feed my habitats to produce adequate crew for technician training in order to run my vertical gardens, which I need to feed my habitats.
I think some of this confusion is due to end-of-day brain, mind. Again, this ain’t a review! I’m keen to play more and see if something clicks. Or squelches. Or stridulates. You can find Generation Exile on Steam.
