I’ve had my eye on Synergy since we showed the city builder around at the PC Gaming Show in 2022. I’m a casual city builder anyway, but Synergy’s Moebius-style art really sealed the deal with its delicious pastel sci-fi charm. So far all I could do was look at screenshots, but Leikir Studio has now prepared a demo for Steam Next Fest. It did not disappoint me.
While Synergy doesn’t shy away from innovation, the foundations are very familiar, deriving from the formula established by classic Impressions games like Caesar and Pharaoh. Arriving in a new, utterly foreign land, your settlers begin with only a short supply of supplies and a firm determination to make a home for themselves in an inhospitable land. From here, houses must be built, resources gathered, and jobs assigned until you tick all the basic boxes.
But soon pleasant oddities begin to emerge. For example, all water is poisonous; It gives you your first production chain when your settlers collect, clean and store water for consumption. Gathering more resources, especially from unusual vegetation, also requires some extra steps that highlight the alien nature of the ecosystem.
Various plants produce fruit and other edible resources, but since your settlers have never encountered this type of vegetation before, they must examine it first. Sending out field researchers to do some surface analysis then reveals how the plants can be exploited safely. After all, you don’t want the inhabitants of your new settlement to go out and get stabbed by poisonous thorns.
Many of the herbs I encountered actually had more than one use, depending on how they interacted; Harvesting might give me fruit I could use in the kitchen, while pruning might give me sticks I could turn into tools. Building two berry picker buildings allowed me to send out crews for both pruning and picking, after which the plant would slowly regrow. In a pinch, all of a facility’s resources can be harvested even without certain buildings, but this comes at the cost of destroying the facility.
Some resources, such as tree trunks, can only be obtained by chopping down trees, which has a downside: These trees provide shade from the harsh sun, which helps increase the well-being of your settlers. Therefore, maintaining the balance of the ecosystem is a top priority while trying to balance resource needs with environmental quality. So you don’t want to get too greedy, but you also definitely need to maintain a healthy surplus of resources to protect your settlement from the vagaries of weather.
The change of season can bring new challenges, such as the dry season causing plants and trees to wilt or water to evaporate. A good stock can enable you to withstand these crises; Failure to do so can lead to disease, starvation, and eventually death. Good times.
Learn to survive
Research and exploration will help you establish a settlement that can solve these problems more effectively. Through the former you can unlock new buildings, quests and power-ups; the latter allows you to send expeditions that may return with new settlers, resources, and even vegetation that can be planted in the local area. You’ll eventually be able to create wells, irrigation systems, experimental laboratories, and schools while populating the environment with new vegetation.
Once you have an explorer’s hut up and running, you can access the world map and select a destination. In the tutorial, a narrative activity encourages you to visit a cave where “chaotic flashing light” has been detected, so these adventures can also have a story-driven component. While this event only presents a linear path, the language implies that other events will allow you to choose your approach.
When you create an expedition, you can choose its size: the larger the group, the more resources will be required, but at the same time, the more they will be able to carry with them and the faster the expedition will go. But it’s a risk, as I discovered when my explorers arrived at the aforementioned cave and were fascinated by the flashing light. They never returned home again.
This failed expedition is where the demo ends and leaves me desperately wanting more. My settlement has only grown into a decent-sized village, but it looks like we’ll eventually be running a metropolis full of different districts built around town squares, each of which grants specific buffs to the area and also demands certain prerequisites be met. Even if there’s a survival bent, this isn’t a game all about desperation and subsistence living. With the introduction of new technology and new plant life, you will be able to build gardens and fields and have clean water flowing through your settlement, allowing your settlers to thrive rather than just survive.
You can also start the beautification work by throwing down the decorations to give your new home a little more character – not that it doesn’t look stunning right out the door. Each building is rich with character; In fact, it gets richer when you throw in the workers who bring it to life, revitalizing previously dormant buildings as they make a living. There isn’t a single build in the demo that doesn’t look both strange and beautiful, but always features a cohesive art style that ensures nothing looks out of place.
There’s still the better part of a week until the next Fest concludes, and given the sheer number of demos going on after the event, you may even have longer to try Synergy, and you definitely should. There is no exact release date yet, but it is expected to be released in the first half of 2024.
For other city builders worth keeping an eye out for, check out Chris’ list of seven city builders he can’t wait to play this year.