Recent reviews by Lex

Wait, I think I found something. Looks like, a datapdad?

Follows similar rules and conventions to the Surviving Mars game but with a deep-sea, alt-history, cosmic horror, post-genetic theme instead of an optimistic space exploration one. You will slowly crawl across the ocean floor, building small outposts under lights (which are necessary for construction/maintenance) for your crew to be ferried between. If you recall the stressors of actually managing transport between domes in Surviving Mars, the current build of the game has almost no transport management and what little it does is extremely straightforward/easy. You only need docks at each of the outposts, and a single transport ship that you get at the start of the game- the crew do not commute on any kind of schedule at the moment, but that may change in the future. You will see some reviews down below that say the game is prohibitively hard and I think it's true that it's a little unbalanced, but it's also meant to be played very slowly and methodically. I still recommend playing the normal scenario but editing it to have +4 of each colonist, the game has some balance issues but that ended up being what I needed to get a stable, operating base up and running in the beginning of it without constantly putting out fires. Worth it at $20, story is still as-of-yet incomplete so it will get longer, and the dev is promising and enthusiastic (I helped playtest a bit of one of their previous games.)

Most of the reviews of this game seem to be about versions of it from before this one. If you're reading this in December of 2019 though, hear me out: this game is pretty much the end-all be-all of town simulator games. It is extremely open ended, has a vast selection of mods, a far more advanced terrain generation system than I'd think possible and thus far has not had any trouble handling populations over 100 for me on a gaming PC that's 6 years old.

It's extremely pretty for its genre as well, and while the player controlling individual characters may seem "Gimmicky" it also gives you a direct power to control and complete tasks like hunting and gathering resources when you are in the early stages that can make or break your town. All in all as someone who played several hundred hours of town simulator games the Life is Feudal folks have made something that embodies everything I like about them. Play vanilla your first village to get a hang of it and then mod it to your heart's content.

I have a heart attack every time I hear footsteps in real life now

10/10 excellent immersion