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Generation Exile, a turn-based city builder about managing a generation ship, releases a demo tomorrow—but it already has the best narrative choice of any game this year

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Generation Exile's demo is available until June 16.

I was already intrigued by Generation Exile, Sonderlust Studios' turn-based city builder about managing a colossal generation ship as it ferries the last of humanity through the stars. But the latest trailer for the game, which aired on the PC Gaming Show 2025, has sold me on it with one of the best narrative choices I've seen in ages.

Said decision appears just under twenty seconds in, relating to your ship's water supply. One of the choices is "Secure the water supply." Normal, standard, everyday survival city builder fare. The other choice, however, is "surrender it to the capybaras", which is just superb. If anything, it's too good, because of course I am going to surrender the water supply to the capybaras. I would surrender anything to those delightfully swole rodents. It needs another offbeat, animal-based choice to counterbalance it, like "secure the water supply for the pangolins" or something.

Beast-based decision-making aside, this is a very good showing for Generation Exile. The ecologically-minded city-building looks like splendid fun. The game is framed around building a sustainable society where nothing is wasted, where you'll construct buildings that restore the land as well as harvest from it.

Moreover, Generation Exile features procedurally generated NPCs who have unique personalities. These characters will then form families and pass down those traits to their descendants. And of course, the narrative choices will play into the stories of your citizens, having consequences both for the general management of your ship, and the fates of individual members of your crew.

Some of these dynamic sci-fi vignettes will be considerably darker than the capybara-flavoured decision mentioned earlier. The trailer takes a sinister twist in the middle, when one such character stumbles upon a corpse that looks exactly like them. You'll have to deal with ghost-like entities and stranger things still that have found away aboard your vessel.

Generation Exile doesn't have a firm release date yet, although it's still scheduled to launch sometime this year. There is a demo available right now, however, that'll let you get hands on with its interstellar city-construction. The demo is only available for the next week, scheduled to vanish into the cosmos on June 16. So get on it while you can.

Check out every game, trailer, and announcement in the PC Gaming Show 2025

Rick Lane
Contributor

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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