Dream Engines will let you build a sci-fi city and then watch it fly away

Developer Suncrash has revealed Dream Engines: Nomad Cities, a sci-fi city builder in which you'll design a settlement, defend against "nightmare-born creatures" and gather resources from the surrounding land. Once you've exhausted one planet—or when a dangerous threat overwhelms you—you can flee, blasting your city into the air and flying to another location.

It's that nomadic structure that most appeals to me: you'll keep all your core infrastructure, but temporary creations will be abandoned. The world is "full of strange science and dreams", so exploring is another reason to go airborne.

As well as managing on-the-ground resources, such as building materials, you'll have to keep an eye on your city's weight and fuel supply, both of which could ground you at an inconvenient moment mid-flight.

The game will go into Early Access first, but Suncrash hasn't said exactly when that will be. It will remain in Early Access for between a year and two years, and the price will likely increase as new features are added. The Early Access version will let you build your city, explore different locations and progress along a tech tree, while the final launch version will have a story-based campaign.

The dev team, who previously made Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation, say they have enough funding to finish the game without Early Access, but they want players to have their say before release.

You can watch a trailer for Dream Engines at the top of this post, and the Steam page is here.

Thanks, Destructoid.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.