Against the Storm surprised me. Not only had I seen about 20% of my friends on Steam playing the game simultaneously, but its enormous amounts of hours played, in total, are what truly caught my attention. What can captivate a person to play a game for so long, and for so many different sessions?
I'm always looking for good value in my gaming escapes, and well, a mere 16 hours into Against the Storm and I know that I'm going to be hooked for a very long time. That's a good thing.
The game presents, on the surface, as a colony sim, but with a twist. There's a storm raging, which completely obliterates the world beyond the smouldering city, every couple of years.
So the gameplay loop is this: enter new forest region. Build a colony. Deal with worsening weather and the welfare of your colonists. Survive for as long as possible. As a result, you learn new technologies and new ... stuff about the ever-growing, ever-returning forest glades that hide treasures and terrors unknown.
With a beautiful art style that has excellent art direction (sure to age well) - this is a game that could have been released at any point in the history of 3D gaming, but it has taken a very special set of circumstances for it to come into being.
The first of these is the rise of the rogue-like, which adds repeatability by giving you bonuses for each subsequent play through or attempt to get through something. It's like old school levels, but broken down into favouring specific and balanced improvements to your repertoire.
You also don't get overwhelmed by complexity immediately. While the learning curve, as with all strategy games is pretty steep to begin with, Against the Storm gently holds your hand, a warm companion in the pelting rain as it it throws more and more complex situations toward you.
And those complex situations, sometimes have completely novel and unforeseen solutions. I had one objective where I needed to make beef jerky to satisfy the harpies in my colony. There was no meat. There was no butcher. This did not bode well.
Somehow, I found a trinket, which felt really powerful - "For every ten pies made, make ten jerky, too". It was the fastest I've ever built a bakery; and pleasingly, there was a substitution for meat in the pie recipe that meant the lack of meat wasn't a problem, and the magical recipe made the jerky that saved the day (and subsequently led to that colony's success).
Now I'm sure that's scripted to some extent, but it made me feel really good about achieving something in a round-about way. This makes it a very rewarding game to play.
With higher difficulty settings adding more stuff to try and get the environment to harm you - (and giving you more score / XP) - beyond the blight storm that wipes out colony progress every few years (like a season reset in Diablo) - you get incredible replayability, and I'm sure, extremely satisfying, strategic choices to make.
I'll be playing this one for a long while. Hopefully, deep into the winter. :)