Mario, eat your heart out, there's a new hero plumber in town. DrainSim is an upcoming indie game that involves saving a city from flooding, and it looks a lot more exciting than it might sound.
The closest Mario got to actually doing some plumbing was fixing pipes in Beanbean Castle in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. Perhaps Nintendo thought unblocking drains wouldn't make for great gameplay, but then it didn't have today's realistic water physics on hand for the original games.
Unreal Engine 5 might be most used for epic action-adventure RPGs, but one dev is putting its capabilities for advanced realism to more practical use. In DrainSim, you have to use a range of tools, from humble plunger to submersible pumps, to save a city and restore the water flow, and it looks strangely satisfying (see our pick of the best game development software and the best laptops for game development if you're planning to build your own sim).
Made a simulator where you fight floods with insane water physics (Demo) from r/IndieDev
Developed by CodePeas in Unreal Engine 5, DrainSim features a day-night cycle and some beautiful realistic water physics. For each mission, you have to decide which tools to take with you based on advance intel, considering the time of day, type of terrain, and distance from your generator to electric tools.
A lot of effort has been put into the authenticity of the scenarios. If you're going to work late into the evening, you'll need lights. If the ground is diggable, you'll need a shovel. Succeeding in a mission leads to recognition and unlocks new tools and upgrades to boost your drainage capabilities.
DrainSim obviously involves water, lots and lots of it. The game's made possible by advances in water physics and 3D graphics in general. CodePeas says it used the Fluid Flux plugin for Unreal Engine (see the Fab Store) and modified it to support save games for the water levels and to allow calculation of water heights for the player score.
As inspiration, the developer cites firsthand experience of two minor home floodings as a kid, which required use of buckets and a pump. Research for the game involved watching documentaries on floods and canal systems and, yes, a lot of those drain unclogging videos that are so popular on YouTube.
What's interesting about the game is that modern graphics power is being used to support novel gameplay rather than to introduce more realistic visuals for the sake of it.
Perhaps it's because it satisfies our natural survival instinct, but having to break up terrain to release water looks immensely gratifying. The game's also a chance for those who spent their childhood intentionally flooding places in SimCity to make amends for their crimes against humanity.
You can download a DrainSim demo via Steam.
