Minerva Rising is a post-apocalyptic city builder in which your city extends deep underground, divided into levels with their own resources, industries, and communities. You are an artificial intelligence with overall control, but watch out: if you alienate the population of any particular level by, say, forgetting to supply them with oxygen, subversives may rise up and cut your feed, blinding you to their activities.
I’m keen to know whether it’s possible for every level to lose faith in you and hack your cameras, reducing the game to a pile of “SIGNAL NOT FOUND” messages. I’m also imagining turning the feeds back on and discovering that everybody is having a massive orgy. Stupid sexy vault dwellers! You’ll go forth and multiply when Deep Thought tells you to, and not a second before.
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When solo developer Jonny Strellman emailed me about Minerva Rising, he framed it as “Frostpunk meets Silo”, Silo being that apparently quite good Apple TV+ show starring Rebecca Ferguson. (I assume if you’re reading this, I don’t need to introduce you to Frostpunk.) It’s got at least one thing neither of those productions has: in-game footage of Steamboat Willy, displayed on propaganda screens you might set up, if you want to buoy cave-dweller morale with thoughts of the copyright-expired world before. Alternatively, you can encourage them to fall in love with the caves themselves, which may harbour luxurious waterfalls and incandescent fungus.
Who needs the sun? Can’t get sunburn from a glowing mushroom, can you? Look, citizens of level 13: you’d better overcome your distaste for giant toadstools or I’m turning the power off again. Damn it, you stay the hell away from my factory reset button. “WELCOME TO MICROSOFT WINDOWS 95.” Balls! “[✓] SHOW THIS WELCOME SCREEN NEXT TIME YOU START WINDOWS.” Right, that’s it. I don’t appear to have any military options in this game, but I’m pretty sure I can redesignate your whole cave as a compost heap.
“Cut through new strata of earth and ethics each playthrough,” the Steam page enthuses. “No two games will be the same. One run might face blight and starvation, while another might be low on coal for producing power. Your decisions and the resources you find provide different challenges each time you play. Even if your people live to see the sun again, there are varied and sundry ways to get there.” There’s no release date for it yet. If you’d rather build cities in the other direction, check out Stario: Haven Tower.