Build your settlement before the Storm.
Against the Storm is a post-apocalyptic Fantasy game mixing Roguelike and city building elements, developed by Eremite Games. Originally released in Early Access on November 1, 2022, the first full version of the game was released on December 8, 2023.
The world is wracked by a strange curse, which causes perpetual downcast weather and constant rain storms. As if that wasn't enough, every few decades, a cataclysm known as the Blightstorm occurs, which ravages the lands and leaves only the wilderness in its wake. The only known safe haven from the storms, where the sun still shines, is the Smoldering City ruled by the Scorched Queen. In between the Blightstorms the Queen sends out her viceroys to build settlements and gather food and resources to send back to the Smoldering City to prepare for the next storm. The player is placed in the role of one these viceroys, and must find a way to delay the Blightstorm by closing the seals scattered across the land.
Each mission takes place on a randomly generated map where you have to build up a settlement and generate enough Reputation before the Queen's Impatience gets too high. Once a settlement is complete you leave it and pick a different location on the world map for the next one. After enough time has passed, the next Blightstorm cycle will arrive which forces everyone to retreat to the Smoldering City and resets the world map.
The games provide examples of:
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: If you're short a single penny, you can't get a discount. If what you trade is worth more than what you get, they don't give you change. Trying to buy currency adds a 25% tax, meaning you need to store up amber to buy Cornerstones or they'll cost more in goods. It gets even worse on Prestige missions, where traders think you're short-changing them and now you can only sell things for half their market value.
- An Arm and a Leg: Its noted that the most powerful of the Viceroys, the Queen's Hands, are all missing an arm. Becoming a Hand yourself by completing the Queen's Hand Trial reveals why. The ceremony for becoming a Hand involves shaking the Scorched Queen's hand, and since she's a Phoenix covered in flames, the handshake burns your entire arm off.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- Your people take the fastest route they can to get around everything that's been built. If this is impossible, they just cut straight through whatever buildings or environment is in their way. Especially useful for woodcutters.
- If you're unable to find/win on any world modifiers that give Machinery and/or Artifacts for Smoldering City upgrades, any seal fragments you have at the end of a cycle are converted into such, in addition to the usual Food Stockpiles.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Threats lurking in forbidden glades include the Drainage Mole and the Giant Stormbird, giant wild animals who can summon earthquakes and storms respectively.
- Black-and-Grey Morality: The Scorched Queen is a ruthless, expansionist politician, although in all fairness every bit of the City's support network is completely destroyed every few years and the land regenerates thanks to the Blightstorm. She is also resolutely opposed to the Sealed Ones and will help you directly when fixing their Seals.
- Bizarre Seasons: Since it is always raining, the seasons are marked by changes in the rain: Drizzle is for planting and has some positive effect on the settlement, Clearance is for harvesting and has no specific effect, and Storm brings terrors and an array of random hazards.
- Bones Do Not Belong There: In the Scarlet Orchard biome, you can excavate the bones of giant arachnids, which don't have bones in real life.
- Busy Beaver: Beavers are one of the villager species, they specialize in wood working and enjoy engineering. They are also very hardy, matching Humans for base Resolve, and as such will be among the very last villagers to abandon your settlement if things go bad.
- Changing Gameplay Priorities: At the beginning of each settlement, your primary focus is merely survival: getting your settlers into food production, getting them shelter, and starting to explore to supplement the meager supplies and resource nodes you start with. Generally, once you've stabilized, you'll then start focusing on completing Orders, so that you can get the Reputation bonuses to unlock new buildings. After the midpoint, your goal is either: 1) advanced production to boost villager Resolve as high as possible, or 2) constant exploration to find Glade Events to complete for Reputation, as (except on the easiest difficulty level) orders alone will not provide enough Reputation to finish.
- Comfort Food: Each species has several Trademark Favorite Foods that raise their resolve; each of these complex foods requires some kind of processing.
- Cosmetic Award: Some of the deeds/achievements in the game only unlock new decorations for your settlement.
- Difficult, but Awesome: Once you have completed several settlements and leveled up, you'll unlock the Rainpunk Foundry, which allows you to use the various types of rainwater to enhance your production in several ways. However, the rain is not benign: using it will result in the appearance of Blightrot on your buildings, which corrupt your Hearth. A fully corrupted Hearth is basically a death sentence for your settlement, causing massive Resolve penalties (resulting in villagers leaving) and even killing villagers at times. The only way to get rid of Blightrot is with fire. You can ignore all of this by playing on a lower difficulty, or by not using Rainpunk technology, but the excellent bonuses that you get from using the rain to boost production could be the difference between victory and defeat.
- Do Well, But Not Perfect: Completing glade events and orders will provide Reputation points, and having high resolve will provide Reputation over time, where each full point of Reputation you get will reduce the Queen's Impatience by one point; if you don't have any Impatience, you miss that bonus. In addition, each full point of Impatience will reduce the hostility of the Forest, which can be very beneficial in the early-to-mid game as your settlement grows. As a result, sometimes it's worth not getting a Reputation point by completing an order or event, or by doing it in a way that angers the Queen, in order to gain a short-term advantage.
- Easy Logistics:
- If you have multiple warehouses then your villagers can access any resource from any warehouse without needing to move it. Additionally, while villagers need a house they don't actually visit them, and simply rest at the closest hearth for all their needs.
- Averted with general production however. End products all require some kind of gathering or farming, and may require intermediary steps as well. Coats, for example, require gathering plant fiber or reeds (requiring a Harvester camp), refining that into Fabric (one of many possible buildings), and then refining that into Coats (usually a Clothier or similar building).
- Everyone Has Standards: God Save Us from the Queen! aside, every so often one of the requests the Scorched Queen requires you to resolve Glade events with empathy.
- Fire/Water Juxtaposition: In a world of endless rain, fire is a precious resource. Every settlement is centered around a hearth that gives villagers hope and scares the forest.
- Fox Folk: The final species unlocked, Foxes specialize in Scouting to complete Glade Events more quickly, and enjoy working with Rainwater. They have the lowest base Resolve of any species, and are the hardest to please, as Rainwater buildings are difficult to buildnote , and their preferences generally require more infrastructure that you just might not havenote . They also are massively susceptible to hunger, taking more Resolve penalties from it than any other species, but unlike the others won't suffer from global Hostility resolve penalties.
- Fungus Humongous: The Marshlands biome is covered in mushroom trees called mushwoods that yield wood because they're covered in "leathery bark". There's also a chance for a Forbidden Glade in certain biomes to contain a massive mushroom that can be harvested functionally forever.
- God Save Us from the Queen!: Downplayed. The Scorched Queen the only person (and that term is used loosely) that's able to protect anyone from the horrifying power of the Blightstorm, and she's a fairly good ruler besides. That does not mean that she is benevolent, it means she can be a real Mean Boss when she feels her representatives aren't up to snuff: each map has you in a race against time to make your settlement self-sufficient before the Queen's patience runs out. If she runs out of patience, the settlement immediately fails, with the implication that the Queen either killed everyone or let the forest claim them. Additionally, while the forest hates your settlement, it fears the Queen's impatience, which is one of the only things that can lower Forest Hostility. She also burns off the arms of people she selects as her Hands, but this doesn't seem to be something she has a choice in — the ceremony involves shaking her hand, and since she's a phoenix made of fire...
- Harping on About Harpies: Harpies are one of the villager species. They specialize in alchemy and enjoy working with cloth. They are fickle and have low Resolve, but their preferences are somewhat easy to satisfy, making them relatively easy to please. They are also unable to fly; the curse that caused the Blightstorm also grounded them for some unknown reason.
- Haunted House: Haunted ruins can show up as glade events. Clearing the haunting allows you to either restore the building for your use or scavenge it for resources. In many cases the restored building has better performance than its normal counterpart.
- Humans Are Survivors: Humans have a higher base resolve rating, meaning they are often the last to desert a colony when things are bad.
- Intelligent Forest: The forest is at least semi-intelligent and always aware of your settlements and actions, and in particular hates woodcutters and glades being discovered while also fearing the fire that burns in hearths. The longer a settlement lasts, the more its Hostility grows and the worse the storm gets on settlers as a result.The forest always watches.
- Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My!: In this world, humans live alongside anthropomorphic beavers, lizards, harpies, and foxes.
- Lizard Folk: Lizards are one of the villager species. They specialize in hunting and cooking meat while preferring to work in warm buildings. They are as fickle as the Foxes and Harpies, but are the easiest low-Resolve species to hang on to, as their preference for warm buildings and relatively easy access to their preferred food makes them easy to please.
- Lost Colony: As you spread out from the Smoldering Citadel, you may run into ruins, which are the remains of previous colonies, or abandoned settlements, where a less-capable viceroy provoked the Queen's impatience. Both offer bonuses to your colony.
- Lost Technology: Some Glade Events involve old equipment that is malfunctioning and needs to be repaired or disabled. In some cases, such as the Rainpunk Foundry, you can restore it to functionality giving you a special building that is superior to the normal buildings.
- The Lost Woods: As a result of the Blightstorm, the world is constantly changing every thirty to forty years and, as a result, settlements are always located in an unexplored region of the vast forests that cover the kingdom. The people know that there's plenty of resources out there, but they don't know what they are, where they might be, or more importantly, how dangerous it is to get them. The only way to find out is to venture into the unknown...
- The Marvelous Deer: While cutting through glades, there's a chance of encountering a treasure stag, which are considered to be forest spirits. You have the choice to either capture or release it; capturing it gives you some rare rewards, but also a curse, while releasing it gives you fewer rewards.
- Necessary Drawback: Everything has a tradeoff of some kind, even if that tradeoff is just not having something else.
- Species-specific housing provides an extra boost to Resolve for the species, which combined with standard housing bonuses will nearly double the Resolve gain, but the species-specific houses generally require a lot of advanced resourcesnote , and only hold two people, while even the most basic shelter costs a pittance of lumber and holds three. They can also be upgraded with several bonuses, but the player has to decide whether the resources needed to do so is worth it or not.
- Using Rainpunk technology will allow you to vastly increase your production, but causes Blightrot, which can corrupt your Hearth and kill your villagers if not handled properly. In addition, Rainpunk tech requires additional infrastructure that can tie up your villagers.
- Opening Glades provides access to additional living space, new resources, and Glade Events that can offer lucrative resource trades, otherwise-unobtainable buildings, and ever-important Reputation points. However, opening a glade always increases Forest Hostility, making it more difficult to keep up Resolve (especially during the Storm season), and knowing that there's a Glade Event doesn't mean you'll have the resources to deal with it, which could spell the death of your settlement if it's particularly bad.
- One Cornerstone available is the Mist Piercers, which allows you to see exactly what each Glade contains before you open it. While this allows you to plan around and prepare for the more dangerous events and takes away a lot of guesswork to make your job much easier, the drawback is that every new Glade discovered increases the Queen's Impatience by a full point, forcing you to open Glades much more carefully lest your game end quickly, and limiting your options for dealing with high Impatiencenote .
- Not the Intended Use: Once you've built a trading post, traders will arrive, offering to sell and buy goods, perks and blueprints. They generally arrive once a year, but you can call them early for an increasing penalty in Queen's Impatience. Because Impatience reduces Forest Hostility, it's entirely possible to call traders one after another to drive up Impatience and push back Hostility, though this can be dangerous if you have no way to reduce Impatience and drive it up too high.
- Our Kelpies Are Different: The river kelpie is a giant horse with fish-like skin and gills, which can be found in forbidden glades. It has the power to mind-control people.
- Perpetual Storm: The world is beset by eternal rain called the Blightstorm, which periodically washes the world clean.
- Planimal: The Coral Forest biome contains trees shaped like coral and mussels; cutting down the latter has a chance of yielding meat.
- Punk Punk: The game uses the term Rainpunk to refer to certain equipment that utilizes the magical rains.
- Randomly Generated Levels: Each settlement map is randomly generated and the world map randomizes after each storm.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: The Scorched Queen isn't that awful to work for really, drastic measures aside. Her impatience takes in-game years before she decides to pull the plug, and her impatience drops when you start making progress. Hell as you climb the ranks, her impatience rate generally slows down, meaning that as you prove yourself more and more, she's more understanding if you're struggling.
- Refining Resources: A core part of the game, your villagers can collect basic foods and resources from resource nodes but these need to be refined or cooked to provide better foods, building materials, service consumables and trade goods. Also notable is that every building can refine three or four resources, but they're not all good at it. Buildings can refine at a one, two, or three star rating: the better the rating, the faster the building refines it, and the fewer resources it uses. This results in things like the Kiln, which is used to make coal from wood (three star rating), also being able to produce Skewers of meat (one star rating) in a pinch. Three star ratings are ideal, but usually only available to specialized buildings, which have one star ratings in other production possibilities. Two star rating buildings usually have two stars across all their production lines. The absolute worst rating, however, is "Wasteful", which is a red circle: these buildings have terrible production speeds and generally use twice or more as many resources to make the same productions as a proper production building, but they're labeled as "Essential" and therefore always available, while specialized buildings are randomly available.
- Roguelike: Unlike most city builders, you're not expected to spend a long period of time on a particular settlement — rather, a chain of numerous smaller settlements — and your options are almost always randomized. You start with a few "essential" buildings and resources, and additional buildings are provided when you gain Reputation points or complete some glade events or orders, but they are randomly provided from a list of three or four possible buildings, and you can only choose one. Cornerstones, the modifiers that affect your entire settlement, are provided once a year, and you have to choose one from a list of three or four. New settlers also show up about once a year, and are a random assortment of three-out-of-five species for that settlement, which makes it difficult to settle into any particular strategy. In addition, completing settlements successfully gives you food provisions, machinery and artifacts, which are used back at the Smoldering Citadel to unlock new options for future settlements. Nearly all of them give a minor bonus, such as -2% speed to Queen's Impatience gain, but they also unlock new buildings for the random shuffle, new species, new options for your embarkation choices, increasing the amount of stuff and people you take with you to new settlements, and even guaranteed resources. While this makes things easier, settlements generally get harder to build as time progresses.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: The world map contains a number large, glowing seals that may or may not be connected to the Blightstorm Cycle, which also hold "the Sealed Ones" at bay, who are only seen as a single large, moving eye in each physical seal (creepily enough, this includes when the game is paused). Legend says that the seals would last forever, yet various seal fragments found in expeditions have brought doubt to this claim in-universe; it's up to the player to try and plan a chain of settlements toward these seals, and attempt to fix them by the time they arrive each cycle.
- The Phoenix: The Smoldering City and its Queen are highly associated with them, representing the city's cycles of construction, destruction by the Blightstorm, and rebirth, as well as fire as a counterpoint to the constant rain. The cutscene at the end of the Queen's Hand trial reveals the Queen is a phoenix Beast Woman herself.
- This Is Gonna Suck: There are many Glade Events that increase Hostility or reduce Resolve while they are being cleared, and the game doesn't hide that fact. It may let you prepare yourself somewhat, but getting hundreds of Hostility while clearing a Merchant Shipwreck, for example, isn't going to be fun no matter how informed you are in advance.
- Thunder Equals Downpour: There is an audio cue of thunder a few moments before the storm season hits.
- Timed Mission:
- The Queen's impatience constantly grows, meaning that you only have so much time to bring a village up to run itself. While this timer can be extended by fulfilling missions, increasing your reputation and taking advantage of certain modifiers, your time will always be finite.
- To a lesser extent, you only have so many years to make settlements before each major storm, though reaching the timer just resets the map.
- Most glade events have a timer attached to them and failing to complete the event before the timer runs out will result in something bad happening, whether it's a one-time permanent modifier (even if you clear the event afterward) or a repeatable stacking modifier. Averted with Benevolent Ghosts and Treasure Stags, where the timer running out just means you miss out on their bonuses.
- Some orders are timed, giving better rewards than normal but having to be completed within a specific time limit.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change:
- It's possible to start your settlement next to "world modifiers", which give some benefit or drawback, while promising greater rewards as a result. Most are fairly simple — "start with 50 hostility", "no fertile land", etc — but the Fishmen Ritual Ground changes the entire game: envoys refuse to go near the area, and, as a result, you get no orders. Orders are the primary way of getting difficult-to-obtain resources and Reputation points, plus a major source of new villagers outside of the yearly influx, and so not having access to them makes the game considerably more difficult: the only way to increase Reputation is by getting high Resolve (difficult to do until you've expanded into several glades) and Glade Events (difficult to do as they require resources you might not have easy access to).
- Settlements next to Seals still play like normal, but filling the Reputation bar doesn't win the game. You need to both find the seal itself — with every glade containing a marker pointing toward its general direction — and reassemble four parts for an Ancient Guardian that'll finish the job.
- Video Game Caring Potential: Certain glade events let you choose an "empathy" outcome. These include feeding giant wild animals, putting ghosts to rest, and sparing the various Treasure Stags.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: If you're desperate, you can raid a trader. You'll mange to steal about half of their stock and a cornerstone... but (A) you'll piss off the queen with impatience, (B) some of your settlers can die, and (C) word will spread about your banditry and traders will go out of their way to avoid your settlement. Only do this if your life is more of a Hell than what you're about to give the trader.
- Winter of Starvation: Every year, the third and final season is The Storm, which doesn't have snow but is exponentially and supernaturally worse. In the cold and dark, crops don't grow and you can't plant anynote , the negative environment modifiers for your run activate all at oncenote , and worst of all, everyone is at their most miserable, taking a whopping 4 damage to their Resolve per Hostility level (which indicates how much the forest and its gods hate you), which sometimes convinces them to abandon your settlement and make a run for it.
