'the Human Body Is Equivalent In Mass To 50,000 Crickets': In City...
What will the last humans subsist on as they escape a dying earth? Bug soup, if Generation Exile is any indication
Generation Exile, a city builder which just released on Steam in early access, has a killer plot: Earth is dead or dying, ruined first by ecological collapse and finished off by the gruesome genetically engineered things we thought would fix it. A colony ship is set to undertake the multi-hundred-years journey to a new world orbiting a new star, and the ship's huge compartments hold microcosms of Earth's biomes to feed the crew and repopulate the new world.
The only problem is that the engineered life forms, the Scale, have somehow made it on to the ship and now everything has gone very, very wrong. You and your people have hidden in the maintenance tunnels, but now the monstrosity is colonizing them too, so you've got to go into the biomes and build yourselves sustainable communities from the wreckage there—a landscape now populated by weird mutants that the Scale left in its wake.
How will you do that? By eating a lot of crickets, apparently. Like. So many crickets.
Yes, that's right, folks. Cricket mush is nutritious. It's packed with protein, fat, fiber, and probably lots of other things I didn't learn from a tooltip. So that's your first food source when you hit the surface for the first time: Cricket farms. Meals of cricket mush and unfiltered groundwater straight from a well pump.
Generation Exile cribs its gameplay from the smart kind of board games, combining simple mechanics into a more complex whole. The basic gameplay is pretty much from the tile placement genre: You have a set of buildings that cost various resources and require some kind of upkeep afterward—a water treatment plant might take prefab panels to build but needs technicians and filters to keep running. The trick is that structures, once you put them up, don't just vanish: Their deconstructed remains have to get hauled away. You need storage for all that mess—and mess your humans make—lest it further contaminate the already-unbalanced environment.
So every placement is something you've got to consider, plan, and think ahead on. Do you want that habitat there in 20 turns? Will it still be in distribution range once you upgrade to proper farm-raised foods from your cricket plant? Maybe not, if you're me, because you didn't quite plan ahead. Maybe those guys just eat crickets now. Those are the cricket-eating guys and they work at the soil decontaminator and the sal
Source: PC Gamer
