Ecological collapse and rising temperatures have left humanity scattered, afraid, and on the verge of extinction. That increasingly close-to-reality premise has formed the backbone of countless post-apocalypse stories, often tinted a muted brown and focused on harsh battles for survival. But a new post-apocalyptic city builder that exited Early Access in April puts a more hopeful and colorful spin on life after the end of the world, and it’s been slowly gobbling up my spare evenings for the past month.
Synergy handles things so much differently from its peers that even the standard genre label “city builder” doesn’t feel quite right. The term conjures images of stacking skyscrapers, laying out lanes of pavement and stringing power lines to control the flow of traffic and electricity through a metropolis of your making. The gorgeously illustrated Synergy is about what comes next, when all that extraction has finally led the earth to say “enough” and swallow up those neatly arranged roads once and for all.
You begin Synergy with nothing but a handful of people and a small pile of the last few resources they have. The point isn’t to build a trade network or expand, but simply to survive. The world is one of sparse vegetation, crushing heat, and poisoned water. Sending your villagers off to observe the various plants and rock formations around them will tell you what they can provide and whether they’ll do more harm than good. Your knowledge grows and you begin to organize your settlement into districts, earning bonuses for building certain structures within their bounds. Eventually you move on from just scraping by to building social spaces and healthcare. What once was a huddled group of tents becomes a small yet lovely community, with tea shops and public spaces along with the sawmills and water towers that helped it develop so far.
Synergy moves slowly. Growing from an unhoused group of survivors to an organized village with homes, communal kitchens, and tool-building forges takes a long time. For me, that’s a big part of its appeal, and not just because watching its gorgeous, Moebius-inspired world in motion never gets old. Just as progress is slow, so are the demands placed on you by your burgeoning civilization. City builders have a habit of inducing doom spirals, where a single resource shortage or a few misplaced buildings can cascade into the near-inevitable downfall of your simulated society. That never seems to be the case with Synergy, which grants ample time to correct your mistakes, learn from them, and move on.
Despite its harsh wilderness, Synergy is a gentle, altogether hopeful game. Yes, the world around you is all but trying to destroy you. Yet by banding together with your neighbors, you can overcome and learn to survive once more. Progress far enough, and you’ll start returning life to the land itself by redirecting water and helping native plants grow again.
One of the game’s premises is that the remains of humanity have formed small, disconnected groups that no longer trade knowledge nor resources. A key part of the game is based around sending expeditions into unknown territory, where you often find some new wonder or a previously isolated group of people. The expedition system is simple, providing a text description of your party’s journey and offering a choice of how to deal with any obstacles, but it works to give you goals beyond maintaining your own corner of the world. Maybe you find a lake you can only explore with the right gear and resolve to progress enough to build it and return. Maybe you find another group of survivors and set up a mutually beneficial trade with them. Just as your own settlement grows from bare subsistence to a self-sustaining community, your map of the world goes from a blank slate to one full of friendly neighbors and already-surpassed dangers.
Every step of the way, Synergy feels less about conquering nature than learning to live alongside it. It’s usually better to learn how to peacefully pick from plants than to rip them out at the root. The dry season will always roll around again to drain the lakes, and preparing for that becomes just another part of life. Synergy’s low-tech take on city builders never lets you forget that the environment should be a partner rather than something to exploit, and that outlook has made it one of my favorite strategy games this year.
