Shown off at the PC Gaming Show the other day, Generation Exile is a sustainable turn-based citybuilder with some real talent behind it. It’s being developed by Sonderlust Studios, headed up by Mark Of The Ninja‘s lead designer Nels Anderson, alongside other talented developers like Karla Zimonja, who worked on Gone Home. Yeah, it’s definitely one to watch.
Generation Exile is set aboard humanity’s final bastion of hope: a big ship where all of its natural resources are dwindling. It’s up to you, a hand on a mouse, to click on these resources and bring the ship back to a good state. That’s the big switcheroo on the usual citybuilder, it being all about sustainability. You can’t just harvest resources from other planets, as you’ve only got the bits and bobs on your ship.
The dream, then, is to create a circular economy where you’re repurposing biological waste and growing new technologies in clever, non-destructive ways. That’s all while navigating “real-world ecological calamities and opportunities.” The trailer shows some interesting decisions that need to be made, like when your vertical farm’s yield exceeds expectations thanks to a rogue fungal growth. Do you aid the growth? Or do you isolate it for analysis? I would aid the growth because it seems nice.
When you start a playthrough, Generation Exile will procedurally generate it each time. Eventually these folks will “form families”, and interestingly, memories will “pass down through generations”, so choices you made back in the day are remembered in future playthroughs. And those people may not get along in general, so you’ll need to not only manage the rogue fungus, but Jackie who’s got into a fight with Mark, because Mark heated up some sustainably caught fish in their solar-powered microwave for lunch.
The game’s due out sometime in 2025 and you can follow the its progress over on Steam.