The demo for this dusty survival strategy city builder was surprisingly brutal

image of dusty desert city from post-apocalyptic videogame Homeseek
(Image credit: Traptics)

Upcoming post-apocalyptic survival strategy game Homeseek, set to release in the late summer or early fall of this year, has a demo out on Steam that's surprisingly savage. You really just... don't get to save everyone.

In the world of Homeseek your region of Earth, at least, has become a dried-up dusty wasteland where water is precious and food is scarce. What little water you can find is often tainted, radioactive, or poisonous, and your little settlement is always on the brink of collapse.

Where in other games that's often just a thematic threat, Homeseek is broken up into missions, each of which has an objective, and resources are well and truly scarce. Just playing the demo gave me a sense of that: What little water we could pump from wells and food we could scavenge from bushes was often consumed that same day. The last few stragglers from the day's work often went hungry. 

By the time we'd found a way out of the valley towards a new home, one with hopefully more water, I'd say only about 20% of those who joined my settlement were still alive. Your settlement resources have a carrying capacity, and it's on you to find it. (I did not find it, clearly.) It's an attitude that the game embraces. "Remember, you can’t save everyone, but you can ensure that every lost citizen has contributed as much as possible before perishing," says one blog post by the developers.

It was frankly quite cool to see a post-apocalyptic city builder that's built a world where you actually want to turn away people seeking to join your village, or avoid contact with larger groups in order to preserve your resources for the people you have now. On the other hand, sometimes however you need to bring in new people so that someone can operate the water purification system you just built. 

As has become a staple in the genre, you can send out expeditions into the world around your village. That often means equipping them with some of your precious food and water for overnight journeys—which is really thematically rich. Sometimes people at home will need to go  hungry so you can send food and water with the explorers who'll be finding a future for the group as a whole.

I quite enjoyed the demo for Homeseek on Steam, and I hope that with some more polish and mechanics refinement, along with a clearer explanation of how its game systems work, it'll make a nice contribution to the survival strategy genre.

image of dusty desert city from post-apocalyptic videogame Homeseek

(Image credit: Traptics)

image of dusty desert city from post-apocalyptic videogame Homeseek

(Image credit: Traptics)

image of dusty desert city from post-apocalyptic videogame Homeseek

(Image credit: Traptics)

image of dusty desert city from post-apocalyptic videogame Homeseek

(Image credit: Traptics)

image of dusty desert city from post-apocalyptic videogame Homeseek

(Image credit: Traptics)

image of dusty desert city from post-apocalyptic videogame Homeseek

(Image credit: Traptics)

image of dusty desert city from post-apocalyptic videogame Homeseek

(Image credit: Traptics)
Contributor

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.

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
A hand holding a compass in the woods
Players are already finding creative solutions to Prologue: Go Wayback's grueling difficulty: 'You could just chug gasoline'
The view from a cliff in the forest
PlayerUnknown's upcoming game Prologue: Go Wayback! is full of grand ambitions, but there's still a lot of room for this survival game to grow
Holding a compass in the snow
'I expect a lot of people will hate it': PUBG creator Brendan Greene doesn't care if his new game is too hard for players to handle as long as it 'elicits a reaction'
The Last Caretaker trailer still
Humanity's last hope is a little robot with can-do spirit in The Last Caretaker, coming to early access this summer
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
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 mech awakens.
Mecha Break developer is considering unlocking all mechs following open beta feedback
Lara Croft Unified Art
Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics lays off 17 employees 'to better align our current business needs and the studio's future success'
A long bendy arm stealing money from people in a subway car
'You're a very long arm. You steal things. It's a comedy game,' explains developer of comedy game where you steal things with a very long arm
The heroes are attacked by monsters
Pillars of Eternity is getting turn-based combat to mark its 10th anniversary, and that means PC Gamer editors will soon be arguing about combat mechanics again
Image of Ronaldo from Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves trailer
It doesn't really make sense that soccer star Ronaldo is now a Fatal Fury character, but if you follow the money you can see how it happened
Junah beginning a battle in Metaphor: ReFantazio.
Today's RPG fans are 'very sensitive to feeling like they wasted time' when they die, says Metaphor: ReFantazio battle planner—but Atlus still made combat hard anyway