This 'physics-based survival city builder' stuffed all my favorite words into its title so I'm automatically psyched

ALL WILL FALL - Official Announcement Trailer | Physics-Based Survival City Builder | Steam Games - YouTube ALL WILL FALL - Official Announcement Trailer | Physics-Based Survival City Builder | Steam Games - YouTube
Watch On

All Will Fall—going by the full legal name "All Will Fall: Physics-Based Survival City Builder" on Steam—is nearly all of my favorite videogame things. I'm a build mode girl at heart with a survival game fixation and a fondness for Valheim's physics-lite building. It was designed with me in mind. Despite the dropshipper style keyword-stuffed store page name, the reveal trailer for All Will Fall does appear to be delivering on all of those little subgenre tidbits.

"The world is dying, overtaken by the endless ocean," says its store page. "You are the leader of a small group of survivors stranded on a rusty boat. You find a small land area, solid enough to serve as a building foundation. And now, step by step, you build a city."

Designing a city already takes all of my brainpower when it's down on the ground but over open water things get trickier. All Will Fall will make you build catwalks and scaffolds, precarious toothpick-looking bridges between a few sturdier concrete foundations. "You’re essentially playing Jenga with human lives at stake," it says.

Designing and expanding a structurally sound floating city would have been enough, but there's the management of said city to contend with too. It isn't just workers with resource gathering jobs to manage, it's the factions they belong to as well. You can make decisions to become more merciful or tyrannical, declare martial law, and ration food while dealing with deadly storms or political coups. So this isn't Minecraft-style survival we're talking—it's Frostpunk-style survival.

Along with its announcement trailer, All Will Fall opened up a public playtest on Steam that you can request access to if you'd like to give it a go. I got in immediately after requesting it so go grab a download if you're keen.

There's no release date set for All Will Fall just yet, only the year, but it's not marked as an early access game so we should be able to expect a full release sometime in 2025.

Best MMOsBest strategy gamesBest open world gamesBest survival gamesBest horror games

Best MMOs: Most massive
Best strategy games: Number crunching
Best open world games: Unlimited exploration
Best survival games: Live craft love
Best horror games: Fight or flight

Lauren Morton
Associate Editor

Lauren has been writing for PC Gamer since she went hunting for the cryptid Dark Souls fashion police in 2017. She accepted her role as Associate Editor in 2021, now serving as self-appointed chief cozy games and farmlife sim enjoyer. Her career originally began in game development and she remains fascinated by how games tick in the modding and speedrunning scenes. She likes long fantasy books, longer RPGs, can't stop playing co-op survival crafting games, and has spent a number of hours she refuses to count building houses in The Sims games for over 20 years.

Read more
doctors treat plague-stricken peasants in the medieval-ish city-builder Nested Lands
Nested Lands is a 'brutal' survival city-builder about guiding villagers through a plague-infested world, and you can play its open alpha right now
Two airships fire broadsides into each other's hull in Echoes of Elysium.
In this airship-building survival game, I faced an enemy worth punching trees over: 'The hubris of man'
A flying city fighting off small airplanes
High-flying RPG city builder Airborne Empire has launched on Steam, and it's testing my balancing skills in more ways than one
A castle being beset by horrors.
Cataclismo review
A city near a waterfall
I played a whopping 23 city builders in 2024, and here are my 5 favorites
A cloaked man ponders an offering of gold in a large chest in Streets of Fortuna.
This ancient city sim constantly simulates 1000 NPCs in a clockwork murder sandbox where you can poison someone's drink and leave 'confident that you've pulled off the perfect crime'
Latest in City Builder
A citizen of a city
Cities: Skylines 2 celebrates 10 years of Cities with more nuanced homelessness and six new DLCs
doctors treat plague-stricken peasants in the medieval-ish city-builder Nested Lands
Nested Lands is a 'brutal' survival city-builder about guiding villagers through a plague-infested world, and you can play its open alpha right now
A medieval city
'It may seem like a whole new game': One of my favorite medieval city builders just got a huge update with a ton of new features
All Will Fall - A concrete and wood ramshackle city in the middle of an endless ocean
This 'physics-based survival city builder' stuffed all my favorite words into its title so I'm automatically psyched
People swimming in a pool and lying on floats
Planet Coaster 2 isn't the financial success that Frontier needed, according to a report, which means there's more pressure on Jurassic World Evolution 3 to bring in the big bucks
A flying city fighting off small airplanes
High-flying RPG city builder Airborne Empire has launched on Steam, and it's testing my balancing skills in more ways than one
Latest in News
A True Kin knight stands in a ruin in Caves of Qud, flanked by bloodstained furniture and a freshly mortalized corpse.
Despite making a roguelike where you can have countless arms and legs, Caves of Qud's creators say the ideal form is a limbless sphere: 'We started in perfection and only moved farther from God'
Civilization 7 Great Britain - Modern Civ art (via YouTube)
As Civilization 7 struggles to keep up with Civ 5 player counts, a new patch is coming tomorrow with still more UI changes and gameplay tweaks
Metaphor: ReFantazio character art
Metaphor: ReFantazio battle director says turn-based RPGs can still be just as popular as action RPGs: 'I personally believe turn-based games have a long future ahead of them'
assassin's creed shadows review
Assassin's Creed Shadows streamer goes viral after confronting whining commenters: 'Normal people don't get upset about this sh***'
Assassin's Creed Shadows change seasons - An upper-body shot of Yasuke looking cheerfully up into the distance.
'This is just the beginning': Assassin's Creed Shadows dev team thanks fans for their support and promises more to come in the future
Geralt sitting on a wall wearing a Cyberpunk jacket modded by TheRealArdCarraigh
The Witcher 3 devs had to practically remake the game engine to make official modding possible