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Against the Storm looks charming and cosy, but it’s actually the best and most fiendish city builder I’ve played in years

Personal Pick

GOTY 2024 Personal Picks

(Image credit: Future)

In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2024, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.

The purpose of a personal pick is to give some extra love to a game of 2024 that didn’t make it into our main Game of the Year awards—a game that, despite it all, we feel deserves some more attention. And yet, I’ve decided to cheat. Against the Storm did not release this year. Rather, it released December of last year—after we’d already locked in our GOTY picks for 2023. And that’s a shame, because—if it had come out a few months earlier—it would almost certainly have been a lock for one of our main awards. Simply, it is one of the best city builders I’ve played.

When I first started playing, I didn’t really know what the game was. I expected something cute and cosy—you get animal folk as your citizens after all. A chill time, maybe a little darkness and foreboding for flavour. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Against the Storm is devilish in its details, its structure finely honed to do away with the downtime usually typical of the genre. It doesn’t look like it at first, but there is an amazing amount of depth and complexity here.

A fantasy city in a rainy world in 3D style from videogame Against the Storm

(Image credit: Eremite Games)

The magic lies in its roguelike structure. You set out into the forest with a small caravan of civilians, and try to carve out a homely little settlement—keeping your people fed and entertained while creating goods for building and trade. So far, so standard. But wait: the forest doesn’t want you here. Each year is divided into three seasons, and while the first two are pretty chill, the third—storm—is where the forest exacts its revenge. As your town grows, so does the hostility of the forest, and thus the number of bad things that can happen during the storm. These modifiers are randomly rolled, and range from inconvenient, like villagers moving slower, to downright dangerous, like villagers dropping dead if they don’t have access to housing or complex food or leisure and services.


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