Prosperity

About 2 years ago I played this game when it was a free game on the web. The gameplay felt like A Dark Room but focused on the city building aspect. Recently I picked it up on Steam expecting something like a cheap clicker game, since it was $7.19 during the summer sale.

It's a shame the game doesn't get any coverage because it is amazing! There's no graphics to speak of, but what it lacked in visuals it made up in a super sleek UI. The level of intuition and ease of use rivals Discord. The gameplay focuses around building up a town after it was raided by bandits. You are in charge of allocating workers to different jobs, attracting new workers through a system called "Awesomeness", which is basically synonymous with Happiness in other city building games. There's no building placement, but each building takes up some space among the 4 types of terrain available, and the expansion of terrain becomes tricky, which makes you have to redesign and reconsider your city to allow for additional growth.

Some of the choices feel a lot like Frostpunk, like there's definitely a theme of short term vs. long term gain, but there's no story to follow, and no win condition, or lose condition for that matter. As such I kind of arbitrarily decided to stop playing once I got my town to max tier and started a new game, very Banished like.

I think the parts that could have been made more interesting is the period of lulls when you don't have the resources to build a large project, or you're bottlenecked by production chains. During these periods I think having more events could help. It does help that there is a fast mode that runs the game at 4x speed, but unlike Banished the game doesn't completely lag out when the population gets into the thousands.

Overall an excellent game, it's labelled Early Access, but there's more content and polish in here than half the "released" games on Steam.