Flotsam

Flotsam bears its Flash-based heritage proudly, and carries many of those strengths and weaknesses. For experienced city builders, the entire game loop is obvious, and even for novices, the interface has been tuned to be clear and explicit. Simple graphics and detailed help tips provide suitable guidance. The actual construction is a little lackadaisical and that made me restart several times. While I think the goal is to incentivize a sprawling, makeshift construction, I prefer tighter builds and clear grids. Not knowing how the pathways work, what would snap and how, and how buildings would clip… well, like I mentioned above, restarts. Resource management has similar permutations. All drifters are at least competent at all skills, and complaints do not significantly inhibit performance. Except they do, because the day cycle means that a task executed too late in the day or just a little too slowly, does not complete, and the crew starves, dehydrates, is poisoned, or whatever. The combination of crew and map does make for significant variation, though most players will end up struggling with the RNG to find a combination that optimizes their strategies. In short, have fun, don't try too hard, let the drifters complain a little, chill out, and you'll do well riding the waters, picking up trash.

This has been in early access at premium price for five years. Either finish the game or make room for someone else.

The atmosphere is really great. It looks amazing and feels amazing. However: The content is really limited. Procedurally generated or fixed map you get the same landmarks over and over. When you manage to figure out the food and water problems you've seen pretty much everything from the game. I would say 10 hours play time at most unless you really really realllly like the atmosphere. There is no end game really, there is no progress. The game has really great potential, but it needs tons more work.

I like it a lot.