Vile Monarch’s Floodland has a pretty serious message, this new game is geared towards a rather dark and nasty story. It is a good game about a harsh reality. As a result of irreversible climate change, the familiar world has been destroyed and most of the land is flooded. Now, the survival of humanity is in your hands. This is our Floodland for PC review.
You play the manager of one of the groups of survivors who are trying to settle in the ruins of the old world. You and your people will gather resources, unlock lost technologies, and build a new society as you try to keep the shattered peace between the factions.
Instead of amazingly beautiful cities or freezing coal shafts, you will find clusters of islands and swamps. These are where you will meet other groups of survivors during your own bid for survival. Along the way, you’ll gather resources and explore island after island. You’ll help those you can and eliminate those you don’t walk the path with. As the game progresses, you will have to take care of food, shelter, access to water, medicine, and other things that people need so much. People need laws too. You will consider them and accept them if they are required. But remember that every decision will have certain consequences.
Floodland is set in a world that has barely survived climate change. You have to take control of a young settlement on one of the scattered islands that make up all that remains of the world. You must build, guide, and manage your settlers or clan in incredibly harsh environments. For context, my initial few attempts ended in disaster on the first few targets.
The Vile Monarch development team includes many talents from 11 Bit Studios, known for Frostpunk and This War of Mine. The player is tasked with leading, supporting, and promoting a group of survivors who settle in any small area they can find. The group is determined by the choice of the clan at the beginning of the game, which also determines your socio-political views in the future.
Initially, you will need to collect garbage, wood, herbs, and berries for food. After a while, the focus shifts to building, and installing storage facilities, water purifiers, kitchen tents, and living quarters for their people. Then it’s on to wood, then to stone, then to the revival of all the surviving buildings and communications.
The art style is beautifully dark, intentionally keeping you at a distance to reinforce the feeling that while you’re in control of these people but you’re not really one of them. You have to make tough choices to keep everyone safe.
You live off the land, collecting everything you need to survive. When you open the research tree, you understand how far you need to go for the settlement to work and what difficulties certain buildings or laws will cause. Settlers die from poisoned food, accidents, and betrayal, so death is unavoidable. The community’s spirit will fall and people will want to overthrow you, and things like that.
Manpower is one of the most critical resources. In some buildings, only specialized workers can work. For instance, with some special buildings, only “engineers” can construct the edifice. It is often necessary to transfer specialists between enterprises several times a day to serve and develop the city as quickly as possible.
Random events will infrequently trigger, each requiring decisive action. Some of these events include the theft of food by wild animals, fights among the group, and the usual situations from the life of the camp. There are so many different events to see, but the ones I encountered in my playthrough seemed complex and deep enough to justify some reflection, which was fascinating.
Making another difficult choice, you begin, if not sincerely worrying about the fate of the settlers, then at least thinking about what people who are on the verge of survival are capable of. Each new law has its pluses and minuses, to which an isolated society instantly reacts, and it is no longer possible to cancel the adopted resolution. You can pass laws based on strict utilitarian discipline, or you can focus on moral values.
The gameplay mechanics become intuitive after about an hour of play, allowing you to spend far fewer resources and speed up your progress. Once you finally understand the mechanics, it will seem that the game has begun to repeat itself. But this is an illusion: there are different scenarios for replayability in Floodland, and in each one you can adjust the difficulty to your liking.
However, the game punishes you when it comes to using all your materials. At the beginning of the game, you need to develop a strategy for effectively using your materials, otherwise, you will not have enough for everything you need. As a result, it will take several days to slowly collect everything you need again. You don’t want to waste materials around or it could cost you your clan.
Try as I might, I can’t find any major flaws in the game itself, but I think it has to do with the genre. Existing features work as they should, progress is as intended, and the game is a joy to play. The only thing that confuses me is that playing at one moment you understand that you become immensely boring and monotonous.
At this point, the game was not running perfectly, there were a few episodes of low FPS and a few minor issues. The mechanics look deep and engaging, its graphics are solid and engaging, and the story seems to mesh well with conflicting decisions and anxiety to control.
As someone with no particular interest or experience in this genre, I’m happy to say that I enjoyed playing it. The way I see it, the fact that playing in a genre that I’m not really interested in made me lose track of time while playing and forced me to replay it several times tells me that it was a good game.
But for those who are passionate and experienced in such games, there is an opportunity to take it seriously and manage every little aspect of the game effectively.
Editor’s note: This game was reviewed thanks to a key provided by PR.
