Surviving the Aftermath is the latest game to shed its Epic exclusivity and appear on Steam, along with its 11th update. It's not quite finished yet, though, and will stay in Early Access until next year.
It's a follow-up to the excellent Surviving Mars, but this time developed by Iceflake Studios instead of Haemimont Games. It remains a survival management game, but instead of setting up a colony on Mars, you're trying to rebuild after the apocalypse.
When I played last year, just before it made its surprise launch on the Epic Games Store, it felt a bit more conventional than its predecessor. The flow of Surviving Mars and the complexities of providing the basic necessities for human life made it feel like a milestone in the nascent survival management subgenre, while Aftermath starts out a lot more evocative of more familiar city builders, though not without post-apocalyptic twists.
Radiation, meteor showers, deadly storms and understandably depressed survivors all create wrinkles as you try to get your town off the ground. There's the world beyond the town to explore, too, which gives you more opportunities to get resources at a time where everything is scarce. And like Surviving Mars, there's a good chance you'll lose some survivors, whether it's from illness or because a meteor flattened their home.
It's had plenty of updates since then, however, so this Steam version will probably be quite different from the one I played a year ago. Update 11's focus is on quests where you'll send your survivors out to search for people, explore dangerous locations and, apparently, make some tough choices.
Iceflake Studios is also hanging out in our forums at the moment, as it's this month's Studio Spotlight guest. If you've got any questions for the team, give them a holler.
