Eremite Studios and Hooded Horse’s bestest best city-builder Against The Storm is getting a free update and a new paid expansion, featuring a new biome, mechanics and faction. Details are thin on the ground, but we can safely say that it’ll involve bats. I know: bats! Let the wannabe Hunter S. Thompson write-ups abound. Back in the halycon days of New Games Journalism we’d have had a field day with this. Come now, help me word this introduction more appropriately: “we were somewhere around the Smouldering City, on the edge of the Blightstorm, when the DLC packs began to take hold…”
Against The Storm’s bats certainly seem to have plenty of fear and loathing. According to the announcement post on Steam, they’re “a stern and fiercely devoted people, taking pride in enduring what breaks others – they do not take failure lightly”.
Bats apparently “excel at metallurgy but find no particular comfort in any specific type of work”. Instead, they get something called Dedication, a passive ability that generates Resolve when members of other species leave or perish. So the more your population suffers and shrinks in Against The Storm, the more zealously your bats will perform.
If you’d like to test out the forthcoming additions, Eremite are running an open alpha – find details on how to get involved on Steam. It’ll run for the next 4-6 weeks. There are no dates yet for the final public release of either the free update or the paid DLC, but the post notes that “with this DLC, we’ll complete the species roster we’ve envisioned for the game ever since Bats were first introduced during the community vote a little over two years ago.” Which implies that there won’t be any more factions after the bats.
I need to give Against The Storm a proper go. Everybody sings its praises, and I adore the dark fantasy concept, but somehow it hasn’t stuck with me. Perhaps the addition of some nihilistic Draculads will be the charm.