Game Theory: Against The Storm is a bite-sized, addictive apocalypse

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

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You know a game has its hook in you but good when it’s a struggle to pull yourself away from playing the thing so you can do your job and actually write a column about it. But such is the case with Against The Storm, currently out on Windows (including via Microsoft’s Game Pass) after a long period in Early Access, and also living, more-or-less-rent-free, in our heads at the moment.

The second game from indie studio Eremite Games, Against The Storm’s premise is fairly simple, once you boil away a few layers of talking animal worldbuilding: The world is wracked by endless storms, forcing officers of the last surviving city to periodically head out into the wilderness, build settlements, and try to eke out a bit of civilization before the whole thing gets wiped out by another apocalyptic downpour. In practical terms, that means dropping into a new hostile environment each game with a pack of settlers, constructing some camps to start gathering resources, and building a new little town from scratch every time you play. Fill out your list of tasks—delivering trade goods, keeping your people happy, exploring, etc.—before the unseen Queen gets too pissed off at your incompetence, and you get sent on to the next colony site to start the whole thing over again.

Against The Storm is, in other words, an attempt to merge classic city-builder gameplay with the popular run-based structure of the modern roguelike; each new city you construct gets you resources that can be spent on long-term upgrades, which slowly layer more complexity into the base gameplay. Which quickly presents itself as both tricky and addictive as hell: The big twist is that while most of the buildings you get access to can make various foods, crafting resources, and luxury trade items, the selection you’re offered in any given game is randomized. This can have disastrous consequences if, say, you’ve promised the crown that you’ll give your people regular religious services—but never actually gotten the blueprints to construct a church.

While this might sound frustrating initially, it quickly becomes clear that the real enemy Against The Storm is at war with is player complacency. The game goes hard on the idea of not having each of your sessions—which can last up to three hours or more, if you’re not playing with accelerated speeds—play out the same; a strategy that kept your various beavers and talking lizards alive in one town might be a recipe for disaster in another. Meanwhile, the game keeps the pressure of its ticking clock on you: Your colony has to expand if it’s going to keep getting access to various life-giving resources, but each new glade of the hostile forest can have deadly events lurking within it—and things only get worse as you push out to the edges of the map, finding “boss levels” that push your resource management skills to the brink.

If there’s a disappointment in Against The Storm, it exists on a narrative and thematic level. The game’s most obvious inspiration—what with the hellish environments, and the life-giving hearth at the center of every settlement—is 11 bit studios’ beautiful, brutal Frostpunk. But where that game used its focus on survival in adversity to ask hard, pointed questions about humanity’s nature—tried to say something about why fascism and fanaticism can get their toeholds in the human mind—Against The Storm has no such lofty aims. You’re occasionally asked for a “moral choice,” but you’re really just picking from a set of rewards and consequences; the game is too focused on delivering compulsive pleasures to give more than lip service to the player discomfort its inspiration trafficked in to such gut-turning power.

And, hey, fair’s fair: We’ve played a lot more Against The Storm than Frostpunk over the last few weeks, because only one of those games is relentlessly, uncompromisingly fun. Eremite’s game pulls all the really good roguelike tricks, with lots of clever ways to bait you into trying a higher difficulty, a different starting environment, and above all else, just one more run. It may not be the most thematically rich apocalypse in all of gaming, but it is one of the most immediately satisfying.