Technotopia

It's a shorter game, takes about 90 minutes to complete. It's fun, has an interesting setting and a good story and doesn't overstay its welcome.

High Quality of Life: The first game start was such a positive experience. No endless loading times, no endless publisher/developer screens. The design of the starting screen is so pleasant. The volume out of the box was set to roughly 1/3 of max volume, which was the absolute sweet spot for me. The game and its sounds actually pause when you ALT+TAB to a different window. The system requirements say: Stay hydrated :) Game concept: The game is a puzzle-citybuilder-deckbuilder mashup with a story (with the citybuilder aspect far in the background). You have 4 different types of basic blocks, which are associated with the 4 factions (government, elite, business, public). For every block you put down, which you do by playing 1 of the 3 cards you have, you gain resources for the associated faction, and you gain additional resources for building districts (4 blocks in 4 particular shapes) which are also associated with factions. Building 4 public blocks in a row will therefore also give you resources with the business faction. The factions require resources upkeep every 10 turns. If your resource value drops below 0 with any faction, the game is over. During the story, you get missions from the factions, which require to build your way to construction sites and to build on every block around those sites. When you manage to do that before you're game over, you get influence with this faction. Your goal is to collect so much influence with each faction that you can advance in the story. That being said, the elements that allege it is a citybuilder are really just a matter of designation ("Districts"), because in terms of mechanics, it's just another layer of puzzle-gaming. The game lacks the depth & freedom to qualify as an actual city builder imho. My experience The start of the gameplay was a little hiccup, as the introductory explanations went off on a timer. I had to yawn during one, so I didn't get to finish reading it because the next slide was already there. After that, the dialogue was connected to user input, thankfully. The tutorial is a start, but it could be clearer in some points, especially that you have to build your path to a person you are supposed to talk to. That wasn't clear enough in the tutorial imho. Every 5th day out of 10, an event occurs to which you get 3 different ways to react to. Your choice will either increase/decrease your amount of resources with one or more factions, or increase/decrease your upkeep. I need to...