This guide is actually more of a review of Against the Storm, although it explains certain basic concepts. It could alternatively titled as a guide to “Why Against the Storm is the Perfect Game for (players like) Emergent”. As a guide, you can think of it as guiding game devs to how best to appeal to players like me, using the perfection achieved by Against the Storm as a template or exemplar of sorts; yet in so doing, this guide thus also explains the features of the game.

Against the Storm is the perfect game that most ideally aligns to my sensibilities. On top of that, it is incredibly well done and executed flawlessly. It is of a style that I love most: economic (with saving graces), laissez-faire (“colony sim”) with no onerous micromanagement, enduring development strategy [more on these terms and their contrasts in my detailed review below]. It also has features that fit my playstyle and gaming needs: pausable, couch-friendly, rogue-like, well-tuned UX (further reducing the micromanagement). On top of that, it’s from indie devs who are actively involved in their community and are continuing to develop the game. Let’s go through each of these in turn.

If I were to give a quick overview of this game, I’d split it into 3 layers. The ground/bottom layer is where all the action is. In this game, you establish a settlement and play it over the course of an hour or two. The settlement experience has rogue-like elements, as the map details, events, and options you have (even buildings available to you) are all randomly, yet thoughtfully generated. You are routinely and occasionally presented a series of options and you try to make the best of them to adapt to the procedurally-generated terrain and events.



The game is in many ways a colony management or simulator game. You have a population that you need to keep fed and happy, lest they die or leave. You build buildings to harvest natural resources, and other buildings to manufacture or convert those resources into other types of resources. You have limited “blueprints” to choose from, though, so you need to be judicious in which ones you pick. You expand into the forest and discover “glades” where there are various resources. Glades include “events” you can interact with, typically by allocating workers to them and spending some resources for some benefit. Bigger glades have more resources, but also more dangerous events that need to be addressed in time to avoid certain consequences.





The game is essentially predicated on you generating enough “reputation” before time runs out (time is measured by the “Queen’s impatience” metric, and can be managed in various ways). Reputation is earned by accomplishing “orders” (up to 12 different objectives that emerge with time), completing glade events, and keeping your people happy. Gameplay is split into 3 seasons that cycle; notably, the storm season is what puts pressures and stresses on your people and colony – in Against the Storm, it often feels you are struggling against the storm. But surviving through it grants you the next year’s bonus of your choosing from the Queen, and a new influx of population.



The middle layer is your trail of settlements within the Blightstorm cycle. Once you complete a settlement, you leave it behind completely. However, you then move on to the next settlement. The (middle) game is typically predicated on you working towards a “seal” and eventually trying to challenge that seal through a settlement beside it that will be more difficult and feature specific objectives. You have limited time to do so in the middle layer, as there is a cycle which wipes out all the settlements and you then start anew from the Citadel.



The top layer is your permanent upgrades in the Citadel. As you finish each ground layer settlement (as well as each Blightstorm cycle in the middle layer), you are rewarded certain types of currency/resources to spend on permanent upgrades. These upgrades last the rest of the game. So despite you leaving the settlement behind forever as you move on to the next one towards the seal, and despite you reaching or not reaching the seal and the Blightstorm wiping away all the settlements you had built regardless, you are nevertheless gaining permanent benefits as you move through the game.

So the game is played in the ground layer where you actually build your settlement and once completed, you leave it behind completely. The biomes and modifiers you pick in the middle layer affect your next settlement and progress you towards the seal, and once you reach it or time runs out, all settlements are wiped out. And the benefits from completing games in the bottom layer and making a productive run through the middle layer, lead to permanent upgrades through the top layer, being the Citadel.



For board gamers, I might describe this game as a very elegantly done, long and rewarding legacy game. Each individual game session is impacted by the previous one (on top of being new and fresh due to the procedurally-generated randomness), and there is a "meta-game" being played on the higher levels. But even that doesn't really do it justice because of the many layers in which to play and have fun with the game.

There are multiple purposes to this review (and its length).

First of all, it’s a review of the game. If you’re interested in the game and want to know why and how it’s great, you can look around at various sections to see how Against the Storm magnificently accomplishes fantastic gameplay.

Secondly, it’s a review that analyzes in detail what elements are present in the game. If you’re asking yourself “is this game for me?”, you can see in this review what the game is and what the game is not. For instance, you may find in the “Laissez-Faire (“Colony Sim”)” section that this is exactly the type of game you like; or you may alternatively realize that it’s not the time-constrained heavy action RTS you might instead prefer.

Third, it explains why those elements work so well in this game, and is intended to highlight to the game devs (Eremite Games) as well others, the perspective of myself and any other gamers who are like me. For example, micromanagement kills games for me, and here’s how this game avoids that pitfall (and I’d like the devs to keep that in mind). As another example, I value enduring development and how it’s implemented in this game (and I’d love it if more devs thoughtfully integrated this concept into their games).

I invite and encourage all sorts of thoughts and comments. And certainly if you have suggestions about the game, please don’t hesitate to let the devs know, either through the game’s menu feature to submit feedback, or on their various platforms such as Discord.

This is an economic game, contrasted with actively militaristic and passively militaristic games. Actively militaristic games (like StarCraft) feature an economy whose only purpose is as a means to building a military and eliminating the enemy. Passively militaristic games (like Old World) feature both militaristic and economic options, where both play large roles, but there are ways to play and enjoy the game without solely using militaristic expansion. Economic games (like Against the Storm) do not really feature military except in “thematic elements” (e.g. in this game you can “burn down” certain ruins).

Whereas actively or passively militaristic games feature an antagonistic and oppositional approach to players, the difference with economic games for me is that you’re not going up against another player, where your success depends on or benefits from destroying them. You can just chill in your own colony and build it up, focusing on different areas and needs as they arise.

Furthermore, the other feature of economic games is not losing your stuff. What I don’t like in militaristic games is that you have to risk losing your stuff (that you worked so hard to build up over the course of the game), or otherwise make the other person lose theirs. In actively-militaristic games, losing or destroying stuff is the whole point. In passively-militaristic games, there remains a risk of losing your stuff. In economic games (as I define them), this is usually less so or not the case at all, whereby risks pertain to slowing your progress rather than nullifying all your efforts.



What Against the Storm does well is that it has a saving grace with your losses: you might lose some villagers if you can’t deal with threats effectively or quickly enough, but when that happens, it makes the game easier (as opposed to most colony sims where it’s typically a vicious cycle, like the death spiral of famine in Banished). For instance, increased Queen's impatience (i.e. running out of time) and decreased villagers (i.e. losing people) reduces the hostility of the forest and the penalties your colony faces. So you can easily rescue yourself or slow your growth, rather than losing your hard work. Furthermore, with this being a rogue-like with enduring development, even total losses result in gains: you build up your long-term colony development abilities with each village you complete (win or loss, although wins give more rewards of course). So this is a game where my hard work pays off, win or lose, and I don’t face the frustration of all-or-nothing that other games feature.

This is what I call a “laissez-faire” strategy game, where you don’t control each individual unit. Instead, you assign jobs, and the units go and do all the various work automatically, which you supervise and manage. Contrast this with (I’ll go with) real-time strategy games (RTS) and turn-based strategy games (TBS).

RTS games (like Age of Empires) require you to issue orders to each individual unit. Worse off, if you don’t, they just sit there doing nothing, making it a giant waste for you not to have issued orders. You better stress out and work hard to issue orders to each unit in order to make the most use out of them! Furthermore, the more you can micromanage the units, the better they’ll perform (like retreating at the opportune time, or otherwise repositioning). TBS games (like Civilization) also require you to issue orders to each individual unit, otherwise it’s a waste of the unit’s potential. On the plus side, there’s no stress, as there’s no time constraint in which to do so. On the other hand, it does require a lot of micromanagement and going down to the unit level.



I prefer Laissez-Faire strategy games since I don’t want to have to bother with issuing orders to each individual unit. Furthermore, I don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to do better in my game by micromanaging. A Laissez-Faire game like this is inherently built in a way that there are limited to no opportunities to burden yourself with such intensity. While expert play in Against the Storm (which I have yet to reach) may involve some elements of this, I can rest content that I get my full enjoyment of the game without having to engage in it.

While the previous section highlighted one of my key preferences for the Laissez-Faire style, I want to stress the importance of avoiding micromanagement. To me, micromanagement has been the death knell of my enjoyment of most games. When micromanagement is necessary, it’s inordinately onerous; when micromanagement is beneficial, it is frustrating (and disengages me from the game, since I’m intentionally no longer caring about doing as well, because it’s too much busywork to accomplish doing well).

I lose interest in games like Thea, RimWorld, and Surviving Mars because of the growing micromanagement, and this also prevents me from wanting to pick them back up, knowing what awaits me in the later game. Thea’s inventory management issues are well-known, making the end game a slog of browsing through all sorts of equipment to pick out the best ones for your people, and disassemble unneeded ones or save them for other people in your other parties (or future newcomers). RimWorld is an odd one for me, but the sweet spot for the game is ~4-8 colonists. But due to increasing difficulty (from colony wealth), increasing opportunities that I have difficulty turning down, and ultimately my inability to heartlessly banish well-meaning colonists just because I want to play a smaller colony, I end up with 15-20 colonists eventually which is far too involved to manage. Finally, Surviving Mars’s dome and colonist management in the late game is well known to be finnicky and onerous.



Against the Storm is well-designed to be of a style that wouldn’t even lead to too much micromanagement. Not enough planks? Plop down another Lumber Mill. Too many planks? Set a limit on your Lumber Mill(s). Furthermore, even if your settlement becomes a little too large, each settlement is finished (successfully or not) before it gets out of control in terms of management. An ideal balance!

One of the things I value most in a game is what I call Enduring Development, where the effort you put in gets paid off… forever. Every game instance you play, or every game session you do, advances and accomplishes things that you will benefit from in the long run. Contrast this with transient game sessions, where your efforts matter only for the one short game instance or game session; when you next play the game, you start over from scratch, and none of what you did before matters in any way (other than having been fun at the time, and perhaps better developing strategies in your own brain). Note: achievements don’t do it for me.

Most RTS games, for example, are transient. If you play a map of C&C: Red Alert, other than perhaps advancing a game campaign, all your progress is erased at the end of the map. The same is true of FPS and even TBS games. For example, Heroes 3 has you build up your towns, heroes, and creatures, but (excepting the campaigns) when the map is over, everything is gone. Next map, you’ll start back over from scratch. Even the heroes you worked hard to level up and make powerful and interesting vanish (if they show up in your next game, they'll be back at level 1).

Some games are like that, but are longer and will reach the end just when you really feel like a fresh start and trying something new. Old World is the best example of this. All your improvements, all your techs, all your characters and dynasties get wiped away from existence once you win (or lose) a game, and you start from scratch. But each game takes a decent amount of time so that you can have fun building up your stuff; your past gaming sessions help your future ones (for the same map). And just when you’re about to lose it all, lose all the effort (because you’re about to win the game), is also when you’re excited to try out a new nation, a new dynasty, and a new strategy. Starting from scratch isn’t a negative; but it still isn’t Enduring Development.

Other games are so long, that you might as well consider your one instance to take forever. These are the types of games I would categorize as Enduring Development. In Stellaris, when you find a star system and build mines to harvest minerals, you get +10 minerals per month… for the rest of the 100-200 hours you’re going to play that galaxy. You reap the rewards forever, essentially. Yet other games are truly forever, and it’s only one instance/map. In Satisfactory, you wouldn’t really ever restart the game, you just keep working on the one game. And when you worked hard in the early game to set up limestone and convert it into concrete, that concrete is still getting produced 100 hours into the game; you’re still benefitting. You might need more, and need to expand, but none of your work has disappeared.



It is quite a feat that Against the Storm accomplishes Enduring Development despite being a rogue-like. Most rogue-likes develop things across runs by giving you new powers and abilities which don’t change the gameplay too vastly. However, in Against the Storm, the Citadel upgrades are meaningful, and the different ways to engage with the gameplay that become available are both interesting and not too drastic usually. It is just the right balance where you do indeed feel that each settlement you complete is developing your Citadel and changing and improving your future settlements. Thus, every time you play the game, you’re building towards something.

A critical feature in games for me is whether they can be meaningfully paused. Typically this is naturally accomplished via playing only TBS games (where there is no timer). The key aspect is not to be time-constrained or time-latched. Time constraints can be upsetting at times, since success in the game is decided by how quickly you make decisions and how fast you can think. Some players like me prefer to be able to take their time to think strategies out, and execute them once ready. In that case, the game tests your strategic capabilities, not your quick thinking capabilities, and gives you an opportunity to devise interesting strategies, rather than demand immediate action (that you hope you can accomplish effectively).

There’s also an important note about “time latching” (as I call it). Sometimes life happens. Sometimes you need to put down the controller to deal with something. Maybe you don’t even like ensnaring yourself to your gaming desk for a continuous 30–60-minute gaming session. Games of the RTS and MOBA genre are examples where you (usually) can’t take a break without drastically harming the game you’re currently in (in which case, maybe you shouldn’t have started that game, and should have waited for a more opportune moment in real life where you could have an uninterrupted 30-60 minutes). Some folks are not able to have the luxury of shunning all interruptions, and some people don’t even like that kind of “meta-stress” tying you down to the computer and forcing you to finish the one game.

Most commonly this has been accomplished for me through the TBS vs. RTS divide. Since I don’t like being time-constrained in my strategic decision-making, and since I definitely don’t like (and most often can’t afford) being time-latched into a gaming session, I generally shun RTS games and play only TBS. But to me it’s the capacity to pause that is the most critical (I will ironically categorize games most people would call “RTS” into my TBS folder, because they can be paused endlessly). The pause feature (or lack thereof) can straddle types of games, though.

Interestingly, a TBS game like Endless Space 2 has some real-time features, such as the fact that the enemy moves on its own in the middle of your turn, and typically right at the beginning of your turn. If you can be quick about minimizing all your events, and (stressfully) quickly move a fleet somewhere, you can avoid a battle or a blockade (or perhaps cause one you want to happen, as the circumstances may be). The impact is rarer and fairly minor, but that’s an instance where you’re time-constrained in your decision-making. Conversely, an RTS game like Offworld Trading Company can be paused (at Manager difficulty and below), allowing you to plan out your land claims, production chains, and overall profit maximization. So there’s neither time constraints nor time latching in it, allowing me to enjoy it stress-free.



Against the Storm may look real time, but it’s pausable (and can be saved). That’s ideal, since I can devise which buildings to build where, how I’m going to respond to a new glade opening, or how I’m going to assign my workers, with no stress or constraint on making the decision quickly in order to be efficient. I just pause the game, figure it out, and proceed.

I almost never play at my desk. My preferred way to play games (and my preferred type of games) is where I lay back on the couch, relax, look at a strategic map on the TV, and make my moves. TBS games are ideal for this – sit back! Relax. It’s not going anywhere. In contrast, an FPS game like Overwatch certainly cannot be (effectively) played resting back on the couch. But then again, the main reason I don’t want to play FPS or time-limited RTS games is because I’d rather be sitting back on the couch, so I’ll look for a game that can do that.

Against the Storm can certainly do that. Its design is inherently “relaxing” in a sense, based on its laissez-faire style. Since you can also pause it, you can totally just take a relaxed approach in building out your settlement.

Rogue-like games are fun because they test your creativity and adaptability to different circumstances, which are perpetually generated in different ways. It’s not like a game you can “solve” in that you know where everything is; instead, a lot of the details and pieces of information are fundamentally unknown until the map is generated and glades (and other map elements) are revealed. Certainly, a rogue-like can still feel “solved” if designed in certain ways, and I’d say it’s difficult to avoid that.



Well, Against the Storm is the ideal version of the rogue-like, through the variety of options that can pop up for blueprints, cornerstones, and even the map itself (e.g. glades, biome). You can’t always plan for a Lumber Mill (for planks), Weaver (for fabric), and Brickyard (for bricks), because they might not show up, or might show up far too late to be of use. You might need to adapt your strategy accordingly. Maybe you’ll instead use a Kiln for bricks because better options didn’t show up, or you had other priorities. All these features keep the game fresh for each settlement. In fact, you’ll be looking forward to figuring out what kind of new challenges and opportunities emerge for a settlement that you can adapt to.



I think that’s a tall task, and it’s remarkable how well Against the Storm has achieved this. The rogue-like element is not annoying or insurmountable, but neither is it easy by falling back to tried-and-true strategies. It manifests in ways that add uniqueness to each settlement, and keeps you interested and challenged.

I have previously spoken about how micromanagement is the death knell of every game for me. Any time I have to do busywork that doesn’t meaningfully advance the plot or strategy, that’s annoying, especially if it could have been avoided. UI and UX design is critical in this, and I have noticed several elements that make Against the Storm friendly for users and eliminate the chores of micromanagement. Allow me to illustrate using questions I ask myself.



“The new building blueprint is moderately good at making training gear. Is this a good choice of blueprint?” – Hover over it, and you’ll see it compare the blueprint’s abilities against what you can already do. Arrow up shows you can already make training gear, but this building is better at it. A plus sign shows you can’t make training gear at all, and this blueprint will then grant you the ability to now do so.

“This building uses flour to make complex foods. Wait, do I even have any buildings that can make flour?” – Hover over the resource, and you’ll see highlighted in blue the buildings you can build that make flour (if you have any that you can build).

“This event will give me pickled goods. Who even eats those?” – Hover over the food resource and you’ll see the races that enjoy it, including highlighting in blue those races that are in your settlement.

This is an indie dev and the devs are quite active on various social media platforms, such as Discord. There are multiple feedback options, and the devs are responsive.

This game is beginner-friendly, as it slowly eases you into its game mechanics. But neither do you lose out on the fun of playing through at the lower levels.

The music is ideally devised and really gets you in the right mood. The music for the typical game is a bit more relaxing, and gets a bit louder and more intense during a storm. The music for missions where you work towards a seal is extra-enjoyable for me: I love the soft yet lingering danger feeling during the regular seasons, and then the extra-intensity (of the music) during the storm.

The graphics are ideal for this type of a game, and I love all the cute little creatures! There’s a good theme going for the game.

Honestly, I can’t really think of any, other than the cliché “too addictive because it’s so fun”, which is certainly the case here. The best I can think of is that the Enduring Development aspect may die out later on once the Citadel is fully upgraded - which, nevertheless, will take tens and hundreds of hours of pure enjoyment to get to that stage, so I will have definitely gotten a lot of fun from the game by that point. There's a chance that it might then lose some of its magic for me, since the only next steps are prestige levels, whereas I don’t like harder and more punishing difficulty levels (seeing as I prefer a slightly more relaxed game). However, the final state of the game will still be fun to try out settlements across procedurally-generated maps.

This is the ideal game for me, and if you’ve read through the review or parts of the review, hopefully this helps you understand what the game is about and what are those elements that truly shine (whether they’re your cup of tea or not). It is incredibly well-executed, and I look forward to how the game continues to develop. I’m also now going to be following Eremite Games to see what else they might cook up in time!

How about you? Do you find you're the type of player that likes similar things to what I've described here? Did this guide help you understand the various game elements present in Against the Storm and how they intermesh? Did it help determine whether this is the game for you? Please don't hesitate to leave a comment and let me know your thoughts!