I added this game to my wishlist randomly a year or so ago. It looked interesting, but not quite up my alley at the time. The reviews were glowing and very very weird. There was also the fact that the positive reviews had anywhere from fifty to five hundred hours logged in the game. I kept reading them and looking at the store page and thinking, "how on earth are people putting this many hours into a depressing-looking early access urban survival life-sim?
It went on sale after a massive update (genuinely it seems like it might have almost doubled the amount you can do in the game) and I thought why not? It's ten bucks. It rarely has more than a few hundred concurrent players but the players it does have love it to pieces. Let's just check it out.
Man. This game is MASSIVE. You get plopped into this dark, gritty world of concrete and plywood, given a broken down building and told to become a landlord. You have not much money in your pocket, no ability to clear the trash immediately from the building to begin repairs, and you need to find food, water, and somewhere safe to sleep until your building is liveable. You also start the game with a couple-few addictions to manage for plot-related reasons.
But honestly, it's not as bleak as it sounds. There's no combat. You just have to start small. You're told you can gather bottles to exchange for coins, and you can go help out the community greenhouse for better pay. Perhaps you don't want to do either. There's a telemarketing job available from the beginning, or you can just go around doing quests for the weirdos who also unfortunately live in Open Sewer, they have a surprising amount of money on them for people so chronically unhoused.
Either way, you'll scrounge up your pittance, get yourself some cleaning supplies and get to work clearing out the first couple floors of your apartment building.
The goal in the game is always the next upgrade to your tenement. You have your own apartment in the building, and you're only a few upgrades away from having clean water piped to your apartment. You upgrade the other apartments, you find residents to rent to, you keep improving. You buy and craft decorations, and find new inventive ways to make money. Maybe you want to run a distillery. Maybe you sell furniture on the side, or make pizzas for that strange guy across the sewer bridge. There are other less savory ways to make money if you wish. But you don't have to do anything other than get that next upgrade, however you see fit.
Especially now that I've got a basic safe apartment to sleep in with clean water, the game is genuinely a relaxing time. I wander around, gather resources, see if I missed talking to anyone. Save up some money. Get a couple small upgrades or one big upgrade and admire the progress. Maybe get a couple quests done. Chop some wood, make some planks. Craft some lockpicks. Pick up a shift at the restaurant. Read my magazines to unlock recipes. Yearn for the mines.
The game is very indie and as such has some... quirks. I play on a Rog Ally, and controller support is mostly functional, but there are things that require a mouse pointer so I occasionally have to switch to desktop mode. Sometimes doors will lock themselves behind me and I'll have to load a previous save, and while the translation is perfectly understandable, the localization isn't great and some explanations have a bit of broken English (although given the setting of kind-of futuristic/apocalyptic Eastern Europe, I've decided to believe it's intentional.) Settings may need tweaked depending on your device to help with stuttering framerate. And possibly the biggest con - updates take forever, and this game has been in Early Access for a long while. There's plenty to do and explore in the meantime, but I totally get hesitation toward starting an early access title you're not sure will ever be completely finished.
I wrote a novel but I can't believe how unknown this game is when there is SO MUCH to do. I know it doesn't fit everyone's definition of cozy, but the decorating, relaxing, no combat, exploration-rewarding gameplay with a dash of survival and life-sim is definitely my definition. I squealed when I found a double bed with covers that matched my bedroom decor. I got the third upgrade on the staircase and spent fifteen minutes just walking up and down them admiring the change. If this sounds even a little interesting to you, the 70-something hours I've already poured into the game promises you there's a gem worth admiring here.
