In this societal city builder you'll restore civilization after global climate change
In Floodland you'll rebuild cities, and society, after the world has been deluged by seawater.
Frostpunk continues to be an influence on new city builders, as you can see above in the first trailer for Floodland shown at the Future Games Show today. Instead of the fictional cold-pocalypse of Frostpunk, however, Floodland is set after the world has been deluged with seawater due to global climate change, a threat that is all too real.
As with Frostpunk, Floodland is more than just about building a settlement after a global catastrophe, it's about creating a functioning society that won't make the same mistakes as the past. That means establishing laws, and in Floodland there's a branching series of rules you can enact in your settlements. This includes sensible policies like water conservation, food quality control, and one that seems perfectly suited to our inevitable submerged future: swimming lessons.
Global climate change isn't the only realistic issue in Floodland. There are also COVID-like communicable diseases, and in the trailer you can see policies for social distancing, mask-wearing, and even settlement-wide lockdowns. (It'll be interesting to see how the virtual communities react to that, after witnessing how our real society did.) Other polices include a broad range of social issues, like same-sex marriage and labor laws, and plenty of darker options like declaring martial law and even engaging human experimentation.
And naturally, you'll have to go about with more traditional city building systems, like exploring the flooded world around you to gather resources, establishing a food supply (I'm assuming fishing would be a good way to start) and researching new tech to grow your post-world city. Floodland will arrive on Steam November 22.
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Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.
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