Things, in a word, are good.
And yet I keep coming back toOstriv, andWorkers & Resources.
Neither are out of early access yet.
Building games are doing well.
But they could be doingmore.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these two are from Ukrainian and Slovakian devs.
The solution is a distinctly socialist one.
Unemployment is bad in workers and resources because too much of it means people get bored and frustrated.
It’s this that makes it such an interesting game conceptually.
In fact they’re only ever referred to as “workers”, and only really matter en masse.
But the game nonetheless grants them a collective dignity by altering the terms of your relationship.
It isn’t yours.
And they don’t have to earn it.
If someone’s a “drain on resources” it’s because you failed them.
That obviously changes things more than a little.
Obviously, this isn’t meant to be real.
It’s this, not just the logistics, that make it a trailblazer for the genre.
Where public services aren’t an expense you grudgingly fund as little as possible.
Where walking and buses are the default, and not an afterthought whose only use is to alleviate traffic.
God, I am so unimpressed by managing traffic, and painting zones onto hideous grids of tarmac.
There aren’t that many that re-evaluate the core concepts.
Hell, many are still working off the incredibly specific ideological template that Sim City established 33 years ago.
Even Ostriv, my other fave, is a conventional villaging game in several regards.
Some of this is down to the detail put intobuilding.
That tangibility invites you to pay closer attention to the details and the physical lives of the people.
It makes you want to look out for them.
It’s the houses, however, that have marked Ostriv out as intriguing philosophically.
Specifically, the gardens.
They want homes, not “property”.
When you place a house, you might stake out garden space around it.
In fact, you’re free to’t influence what they do at all, because it’stheirgarden.
You represent the leader, see.
Your crops are the staples, the common things that work in large fields rather than small family plots.
You provide the flour, the potatoes, the famous Ukrainian sunflower oil, hemp and cotton.
In Ostriv, people can and will largely feed themselves.
It’s a village that works to support itself.
That’s what a village is.
It’s what any settlement should be.
That’s the whole point of humans coming together in groups.
you’re free to have those without also having everything neoliberalism shackles them to.
We just don’t yet.
I wasnt kidding when I said standards are high right now.
Even a partial list wont cover all the good stuff out there these days.
But its a start!
