Tangled Mess Games, the South African developer behind Desktop Dungeons, have released their next title – Volantia.
This new city-builder is an intriguing twist on the genre given that the primary gameplay mechanic is based on building your own ecosystem. Maintaining that ecosystem and the organisms within it is also a major focus.
The player is tasked with creating the basic landmass that their constructions will reside on, then they must continually expand and rebuild aspects of the ecosystem throughout the course of the game. It’s a neat shift for the genre overall.
The soundtrack and the art style are fairly simple, but in a good way, there’s a clear tonal shift towards simple and relaxing gameplay in Volantia. I like that a lot.
Transport yourself to a lush kingdom in the sky as you create, explore, build, and optimize a thriving new ecosystem amongst the clouds. Amidst the lush greenpunk landscape, rotate and conjoin fragments of land onto your floating island to stabilize it, and stop it from crumbling to its demise.
And while you’re thinking that this nice and relaxing game will be easy, think again. The landmass you’ve built your kingdom on is constantly shifting and degrading. You’ll need to find interesting and inventive ways to connect disparate landmasses to keep things from crashing down. This main problem and a handful of smaller mechanics make up the main puzzle-solving elements of Volantia.There’s plenty of challenge built into the game too. There are issues with resource and kingdom management that you need to tackle from time to time.
Volantia is available now on Steam for $12.99
