Tag: indie games

Foundation

A City-Builder That You Just Might Dig

Developed by Polymorph Games and reaching full release on 31st January 2025, Foundation is a laid-back city-builder with a peaceful, pastel tone and a light-hearted approach. The game launched into early access on 1st February 2019 and, according to my Steam purchase history, I picked it up in March of 2019. It wasn’t much of a game back then – the UI was an ugly mess, the graphics were super-basic, the tech trees were incomplete, and much of the gameplay was totally unrefined. That’s the nature of early access, and it’s not something I mess with often, but something possessed me back in those care-free, pre-pandemic days, and now that the game is finally out, I definitely don’t regret buying it.

The main thing that Foundation does to differentiate itself from similar city-builders is its organic building placement. There’s no grid system, and the player doesn’t place roads, with paths occurring naturally on regularly used thoroughfares, just like the classic Settlers games. You can place any building absolutely anywhere inside your territory and your villagers will react accordingly once they’ve been assigned to the jobs there. Residential buildings are zoned rather than placed directly, with players using a paintbrush tool to highlight areas where the villagers can build their houses, and this same tool is used to highlight which resources should be extracted and even which areas your villagers aren’t allowed to tread.

Did you ever play with plastic farm animals and fences when you were a kid? This is that, but digitally.

Certain buildings are heavily customisable, from churches to inns to castles, and even the lord’s manor. When planning such works of architectural wonder, you’ll be selecting from various rooms, entrances, wings and decorations until you’ve got the layout you like, and once things are finalised your builders will get to work – if they’re not buying berries from the local market or sitting around on a bench, that is. The decorations will tend to increase your settlement’s “splendor” in one of three categories; labour, kingdom, and clergy, which will unlock new levels of building in these categories. Labour tends to encompass your market and your lord’s manor, clergy goes towards churches and monasteries, and kingdom grants you the ability to fortify your settlement and build watchtowers and castles. Fully upgrading these majestic works tend to be your end goal, and depending on whether you’re feeling regal, religious, or like a man of the people, you can choose an appropriate goal at the start of the game, or just do whatever you want and treat the whole thing like a big, medieval sandbox.

Foundation strikes an addictive balance between keeping things relaxing while still providing moderately challenging resource chains and progression requirements to get to grips with. It’s not difficult to get high level residential areas in your growing town, but it’ll take some time and provide you plenty to think about along the way. You might even need to partake in a bit of forward planning.

The higher-level residential buildings require nearby beautification, paved roads, and more. Fussy, these posh types.

The game’s visuals match its laid-back vibe, with cartoony villagers and brightly-coloured houses all nestled into a cosy, storybook countryside. At times, especially once I started to surround my settlement with a lovely palisade fence, Foundation’s visuals really took me back to my childhood days of lying on the sofa reading Asterix comics, and that’s a good thing. At the time of writing there is no day/night cycle, but you can manually change the visual ambience from daylight to rainy to night-time and to sunset, just in case you want to imagine the diminutive Gaul and his pals enjoying a lavish victory banquet under the setting sun right there in your village. There are enough boars in the forests to keep Obelix busy, that’s for sure.

While Foundation does enable you to build castles, erect defensive walls, and enlist soldiers, there is no combat in the game (again, at the time of writing), with soldiers instead sent out on missions, earning your settlement reputation and occasionally bringing back spoils. Your villagers will also appreciate feeling secure, with a decent level of local fortifications and patrols being prerequisites for higher density housing. If you want actual fighting, though, you’re probably better off with Manor Lords.

“If you find yourself riding alone through green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled, for you are in Elysium, and you’re already dead!”

Incidentally, the mighty Manor Lords, still in early access at the time of writing, is another game that I bought before its full release. While the two games go for completely different visual styles, and Foundation doesn’t seem to concern itself too much with historical accuracy, the two games have very similar mechanics. It’s not exactly fair to compare a game that’s fully released with a game that’s still in early access, but I will say that I enjoy Foundation more than I enjoy Manor Lords for now. Obviously, this could change drastically, but as things stand, I’d heartily recommend Foundation for those who’re still finding Manor Lords a bit short on content and goals, and don’t mind some cartoony visuals in lieu of Manor Lords’ historically accurate buildings and gorgeous rolling hills that look exactly like the views from nearby beauty spots here in sunny Somerset.

Foundation doesn’t go for this kind of realism, but if you like the idea of an organically growing cartoon village, customisable buildings and monuments, and a low-pressure, relaxing sandbox to lord over your bright-eyed little medieval peasants in, then you should definitely give it a try. It’s easy to pick up and quite difficult to put down. The gradual progress is addictive and the constant balancing act of keeping your villagers happy and your supply lines running makes it far too easy to just keep playing, even if you really need to be cooking dinner or picking up the child from her youth club or whatever. Yes, I am speaking from personal experience.

A sprawling monastery overlooks a developing town, and in the distance, the beginnings of a mighty fortress stand atop a hill.

If you remember playing the classic Settlers games, and occasionally miss its light-hearted, addictive style (and the way the roads and paths appear organically), then Foundation will definitely scratch that itch. If not, then give it a try anyway, you might find yourself fascinated by your organically growing medieval settlement, and become enthralled in the act of creating a beautiful little ancient Gaulish village of your own. Watch out for Romans, though, okay?

Into the Breach

Live, Kill Kaiju, Die, Repeat

As someone who’s eyes light up at the sight of a grid-based battlefield populated with adorable 2D combatants, I was predisposed to give Into the Breach a chance. If you’re not like me, and don’t instantly fall in love with anything that bears even a passing resemblance to Shining Force III or Final Fantasy Tactics, you might glance at the relatively small battlefields and limited number of units on show and decide to give this one a miss. I’m here to politely request that you reconsider that decision, as you’re missing out on a gem! A bastard-hard and thoroughly depressing gem, but a gem nonetheless.

Despite this guy’s confidence, you won’t be able to save everyone.

This indie-developed, mech-on-kaiju strategy game has been around since 2018, but I recently picked up the physical copy on Switch, and have found myself thoroughly absorbed into its time-bending, apocalyptic world. Your job in Into the Breach is to command a small squad of mechs as they attempt to defend the world’s population and infrastructure from an onslaught of giant bugs known as the Vek. Already on its last legs due to various natural catastrophes, civilisation has been brought to the brink of destruction by the marauding kaiju, and humanity’s last hope comes in the form of a group of time-hopping mech pilots.

The main aim of the game is to protect buildings and facilities from monster attacks, as these locations provide power to your power grid, and if your power grid fails, the timeline you’re in is fucked and it’s time to bail out. If this happens, your pilots will use their timey-wimey powers to zap themselves to a different timeline and try again. Each pilot is scattered across different timelines, too, so you can only keep one of them, and if you mess up and one of your mechs gets destroyed, the pilot is (usually) gone for good. Just don’t get too attached to these guys, okay?

While Into the Breach has a lot of the gameplay and strategy you’d expect from comparable modern retro tactical games like Triangle Strategy and Wargroove, there are a few mechanics that handily set it apart. One is the previously-mentioned timeline shenanigans, which lends itself to roguelike-style progression where repeated failures result in you being slightly better-equipped to take on the next timeline. Another mechanic that sets Into the Breach apart is the fact that it will clearly tell you exactly what the monstrous Vek are planning to do in the next turn, and will allow you to plan and manipulate them appropriately.

Chemical pools and conveyor belts are just a couple of the environmental hazards you’ll be dealing with. Oh, and see that knobbly squid thing in the bottom row? Take that out first.

It may sound like being able to accurately predict the AI’s every move would make a game like this pretty easy, but this is not the case. In fact, it’s this mechanic that takes Into the Breach further into board game or puzzle game territory. This removal of random chance or behind-the-scenes calculations makes Into the Breach pure strategy, akin to Chess, and will lead to difficult decisions aplenty. Expect to find yourself staring at the screen for minutes on end, sighing and rubbing your chin as you attempt to run through sequences of moves in your head to get out of a seemingly impossible situation you’ve found yourself in. You’ll often find yourself played into a corner where you’re forced to sacrifice something, and making the difficult choice between the mission objective or one of your experienced pilots is sure to produce lots of curse words and require a cup of tea or two. You’ll need a strong stomach, thick skin, and a really, really big brain to master this one.

The final goal of the game is to defeat the Vek at their hive, which is an area that opens up after liberating two of the four available islands. The difficulty scales as you progress through the islands, so taking the Vek hive out after island number two is your easiest option, but successfully completing a four-island run is a much more difficult goal. It’s a tough ask, and only letting you take one pilot with you to the next timeline feels harsh to the point of being insurmountable. Perseverance, experimentation, and the ability to stay calm and look for options under pressure are your best weapons to get there.

It’s often better to let your mech take a hit, rather than lose some of your power grid. Even if a pilot is killed, the mech’s AI will bring it back for the next mission. You’ll probably feel bad, though.

Once you’re up and running, understanding and upgrading your mech’s abilities, manipulating the Vek into harming each other, and successfully shielding civilians from kaiju attack becomes extremely satisfying. You’ll feel like a legendary commander when you pull it off, and you’ll become more confident as you start to understand the game’s way of thinking. However, Into the Breach is always capable of surprising you, and a power grid failure that results in hordes of titanic bugs burrowing out of the Earth’s crust to overwhelm the planet’s last defenders is always only a mistake away.

As alluded to earlier, Into the Breach can initially seem limited. The maps are small, you’re usually in charge of only three units at a time, and there are only five different environment types to do battle in. However, its difficulty, ingenious mechanics, variety of environmental effects and open-ended nature make for an incredibly deep experience that will keep throwing up new problems for as long as you’re willing to solve them.

The game does its best to make you remember that there are lives at stake. Try to focus on the mission, okay?

Tough, tense, and hugely atmospheric, Into the Breach is a strategy game for big time players. Great pixel art and some fantastically appropriate musical pieces all add to a high quality strategy experience, with unlockable mech squads and pilots, and additional, advanced options allowing experienced players to tweak gameplay to their heart’s content.

Climb into your mech, steel yourself for the horrors you’re about to witness, and give this strategy gem the chance it deserves. After all, you can always abandon this timeline and jump to the next if things don’t work out.

Played on Switch

RimWorld – Impressions

The Harrowing Trials and Tribulations of the Potato People

I held off on playing RimWorld for years after it first started showing up in my Steam discovery queue and my suggested YouTube videos. In terms of gameplay and premise, it was right up my street, but the visuals always turned me off. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some shallow ingrate concerned only with aesthetics, but a large part of the appeal of sim games for me is the visual interest of watching your settlement, theme park, zoo or other grow, and viewing the interactions of the denizens within. I can while away hours watching a junction in Cities: Skylines, for example, just observing as the traffic builds up, then filters through, then builds up, then filters through. Edit a junction or change a stretch of road, watch how it changes the flow. Watch the traffic build up, then filter through. I have a full and productive life.

Anyway, it was the hilariously and informatively presented videos of a YouTuber called ambiguousamphibian that finally caused me to take the plunge. 30 hours of gameplay later, here are my initial thoughts.

I really don’t like the visuals. Nothing has legs or arms, and everyone looks like a little potato person. Sometimes a colonist will have interesting hair, giving them some visual character, but then they’ll immediately put a hat on so that they look like a little potato man again. When they get shot or stabbed or scratched by cougars, cuts and slashes appear on them, giving the disturbing impression that they’re potatoes that bleed. I understand that the graphics are representative, and that rendering arms and legs would be quite an undertaking considering your colonists can and will lose limbs and then replace them with bionic implants, but I find it difficult to get attached to the little potato people, probably more so than if they were represented by icons or text.

If you can’t make out the text there, it’s saying that Cauchois’ brain is a mangled scar thanks to a shot from a revolver. This has … slowed her down somewhat. She used to be my finest builder.

The environment textures are very lacking as well. I immediately downloaded a mod that sharpens up the textures but you’re still going to be looking at basic, bare minimum visuals for the entirety. It’s fine, it is what it is, I wish there was a more appealing visual solution for a million-selling game, but I signed up for the addictive progression-based gameplay, the situations that can arise, and the stories that can play out.

RimWorld nails all of that stuff, especially if you’re brave and play on the harder difficulties. It’s the sort of game that generates water cooler talk. If you’re lucky enough to have a pal who also plays the game, you’ll be regaling each other with tales of tribal raids, cold snaps, giant insect infestations and killer guinea pig attacks for months to come.

A few years back, my wife and I used to play The Sims 3 a lot. We had completely different play-styles. She would create the perfect Sim, take total control of their lives, get them to work every morning, and try to make them as happy and fulfilled as possible (that’s if she ever got past meticulously creating said Sim’s perfect abode with the infinite money cheat). I would create a household of three or four, give them a mixture of good and bad traits, give the AI the maximum amount of control and just let events unfold, only intervening if I absolutely needed to.

There was another guy in this colony called Hella, but he died when a cougar bit off his arm. Said cougar ended up as lunch for the other colonists. It’s a harsh world sometimes.

RimWorld really rewards players who are somewhere in between the two. You’ll have to be in control to ensure your colonists survive the raids, harsh winters and other such dangerous occurrences the computer will throw at you, but rolling with the game’s mischievous tendencies to throw seemingly insurmountable odds at you is essential to really experiencing what RimWorld has to offer. It’s a story creator, and sometimes said stories may be tragic or hopeless, but they’re always fascinating. If you’re the type of player who would quit and reload if your favourite colonist got his arm ripped off by a passing warg, then this game isn’t for you. You’ve got to accept the rough as well as the smooth to get the ultimate RimWorld experience, and you’ll probably need lots of time to spare, too.

At only thirty hours and three colonies deep, I don’t really feel qualified to review RimWorld. I’ve not come anywhere near the endgame, and have barely scratched the surface of what this indie gem has to offer. However, I can say some things for certain already; this game is meticulously crafted, addictive, near-limitless in breadth, often melancholic in tone, and chock full of little potato people. It’s definitely got a-peel.