Bressnath

The fen gives nothing back

You arrive with a handful of villagers at a half-drowned holding in the Vreldsath fens, in the years of the Rekindling. Every stand of timber, every stone seam and every fishing pool runs dry, and nothing grows back. Standing still is losing slowly — the only economy is pushing outward, to better ground and worse neighbours.

A town that works the way it looks

• Everything is carried. Villagers walk to the reed beds, the quarry and the fishing pools and haul every load home. Build close to what you need, or watch your people spend the day walking.
• Twenty-three buildings, most with upgrade tiers — lumber camps, fen farms, bakehouses, smithies, an eel wharf, a caravan market, a guildhall, watchtowers, barracks and a castle.
• Food and contentment. Three kinds of food, and a holding that eats well works faster than one living on fish alone.
• Trade that never pays for itself. The market will sell you anything you are short of — always at a loss.

No warning

Attacks come on a clock you cannot see. No countdown, no arrow pointing where from — you learn the rhythm by playing. Eight families of horrors wake in the Sundered Places scattered across the map, the mild ones close to home and the worst at the far edges. Hold them off with watchtowers, a castle and soldiers you have to feed and house, or march your army out and break the lairs yourself.

Dig, and find out

Ruin-caches lie buried across the fen, under a fog of war that forgets nothing you have seen and shows nothing you have not. What they open is not all written down: much of what unlocks what, you discover.

The wide-crossing way

There is one way to win. Finish the causeway — a raised timber road on driven piles, laid across open water. It is the biggest thing you will ever build, and the fen throws everything it has at you while you build it.

• A new, huge, generated fen every run.
• 100 achievements.
• No meta-progression: every run starts from nothing.
• Keyboard and mouse. English and Czech.

Set in the world of Orenvalt.