It’s a great time in gaming for feel-good Armageddon scenarios. The Cede Kickstarter launched recently, giving green-thumbed gamers the chance to bring beautiful blooms to a gloomy doomsday. Now, with the gorgeously cell-shaded Flotsam, catastrophic floods have never looked quite so inviting. Let’s dive in, shall we? (Tip: Don’t dive in. There are sharks)
Your job is to manage an ocean community of survivors living on a ramshackle floating village. You’ll need to recycle scrap, garbage and the titular Flotsam to expand your settlement and keep everything running smoothly. Your calamitous castaway’s gotta eat, too, so catching crabs, crayfish and other crustaceans is a constant concern. Salt water is great for a cheap hallucinogen (or so I hear), but plays havoc on the system after the first few gallons. As such, the right buildings and resource management are essential if death by thirst is something you feel your villagers could do without.
Scrappy Survivors
The concept behind Flotsam came from the team at Pajama Llama’s love of city builders, but with the realization that the scale of games like SimCity and Factorio prevent players from connecting with the individual inhabitants of their miniature metropolis. Flotsam wants you to grow a relationship with each of your survivors. Random character generation makes each one unique with varied clothing, hairstyles and other personal touches. The team hope Flotsam will feature “enough challenge and events to build a relationship” with your villagers. As someone who still remembers the names of long dead Xcom soldiers, I’m all hands on deck for these kind of emergent micro-narratives.
Pyjama Llama are yet to specify a release date, but a two year development cycle with no land in sight suggests an effort to make sure Flotsam is absolutely shipshape. You can keep up with Flotsam‘s progress here.
