PC Gamer’s Lauren Morton said All Will Fall is nearly all of her videogame things stuffed into a single package: It’s a building game, it’s a survival game, and it’s a physics game. And in just under two weeks, it will also be a game that’s in open beta, so you’ll finally be able to see for yourself what it’s got going on.
What it’s got going on from a narrative angle is the end of the world: The oceans are rising, humanity is dying, and you, the leader of a small group of survivors on a rusty boat, are given the job of saving a small chunk of what’s left by building a ramshackle city on one of the few small chunks of remaining land.
The problem—aside from the whole “humanity on the verge of extinction” thing, I mean—is that this isn’t SimCity, where you can slam down buildings on a happily flat Earth and call it a day. The nature of the drowned world in which you’re trapped means you’ll be building vertically as well as horizontally, and it all looks, well, pretty delicate. The Steam page says “you’re essentially playing Jenga with human lives at stake,” which is nicely illustrative and also a reminder that people—tiny, digital people—will be living in whatever sort of city you build, or dying in it as the case may be.
The good news is that shoddy construction standards won’t be solely responsible for the untimely deaths of your citizens—you’ll also have the opportunity to get Frostpunk on their asses now and then.
And in the end, we’re probably all doomed anyway: “Each colony you build will deal with unique challenges, foundation layouts, circumstances and random events—like storms, mysterious structures emerging from the ocean, political coups, unexpected newcomers, food shortages, and more. Learn from your mistakes, unlock new locations on the global map, and embark on the next dangerous adventure once the inevitable calamity comes to destroy the city.”
Ah well, I’m sure we’ll all do our best nonetheless. All Will Fall doesn’t have a release date yet but it’s set to come out sometime in 2025. The open beta will begin on June 9 as part of the upcoming Steam Next Fest, and will run until June 16.