This year, I’m on a quest to play every single game in my Steam backlog. The rules are:
- I have to stick with the game for at least 2 hours.
- F2P, DLCs and multiplayer titles don’t count.
- If I own both the legacy title and the remaster, I only have to play one.
- I can only play one backlog title at a time.
Current backlog count: 55
Played titles: 1
Against the Storm is a furry game.
No, I did not know Against the Storm is a furry game when I bought it. I might’ve skipped it otherwise. I like base builders, grim stories and hardcore survival shit. AtS, on the other hand, is a cozy game (if somewhat grim at times) where you direct humans and anthropomorphized animals to farm, build, produce, discover, and trade.
On Steam, AtS is described as:
A dark fantasy city builder where you must rebuild civilization in the face of apocalyptic rains. As the Queen’s Viceroy, lead humans, beavers, lizards, foxes, and harpies to reclaim the wilderness and secure a future for civilization’s last survivors.
(Yes, beavers, lizards, etc. are there in the description. No, I didn’t read it. ‘Twas a Steam sale, m’lord.)
I may have missed the “dark” in “dark fantasy”, or maybe my standards are a little higher for what the word means. I didn’t quite get the sense of a looming threat with tangible gameplay effects so much as “VFX changed, it’s raining now.” Sure, the story tells me what the stakes are, but there ain’t much showing that I could see.
Speaking of story, there’s… not very much there, or at least nothing memorable in the first three hours or so. There’s a storm, a queen, and some magical MacGuffin to save your people from the storm (the queen can just smite you if you piss her off one times too many, but that’s the nature of your job as her viceroy, I guess). That’s all I remember without going back to a wiki, and it hasn’t been that long. Overall, definitely not my cuppa, and nowhere on the level of something like Ixion, say.
Gameplay-wise, this is a cookie-cutter base-builder where you plonk down buildings, roads, decorations, etc. so you can produce stuff to do things with. I’m not sure how difficult the game is supposed to be, but I rarely ran out of resources in my playthrough.
Production systems can get a little overwhelming — for instance, you’re told you have to produce 10 amounts of a thing, but the materials to produce the thing are either harvested from various sources or produced by other buildings (and, later, sold by traders). There’s no manual queueing required; if you have the right materials in your inventory, production happens automatically. What you do need to choose is whether a building creates thing 1, thing 2 or thing 3. If you’re not careful, you might end up burning resources on objects you didn’t actually need.
The other core mechanic is exploration. As your peeps cut down trees around your settlement, they’ll reveal hidden areas on the map (groves). Some have boons and resources, others have dangers you have to deal with. A fair few of the latter are on a timer. The way to deal with them is to produce certain quantities of certain items, which means you’re either going to easily hit the timer or you’re SOL because you’re lacking the item(s) you need.
Time played: 3.4 hours
Keep playing? Nah.
