Aspire to Greatness
I haven’t played a city building computer game in a long time. I honestly think the last time I did would have been one of the numerous iterations of the Sim City franchise in the late 90s/early 2000s. There I would lord over this virtual conurbation, micro-managing the residential areas, putting out fires literal and metaphorical, and marvelling at the wondrous, maddening world I had created. It was a sort of fun stress. Amberspire is the chilled out cousin to this style of game. Cities grow and recede in ways you can’t entirely control, buoyed on the tides of time and fate.
Amberspire is from developer Lunar Division. It popped on my radar after I learnt that Dr. Holly Nielsen was designing some of the narrative arcs for the game. I’ve followed Holly for a while and find their work on the history of play fascinating.
I was sent a key for Amberspire for review by the publisher.
Amberspire begins simply. A bit of background tells you that the planet you are building on is some sort of ancient mausoleum, a final reminder of a civilisation long gone. As Amberspire opens you have a small population, a couple of resource generating buildings, and some other structures in progress.
The game gives you a brief overview of how it plays, and then points you at an in-game manual. This is a wonderful artifact, but it feels almost transgressive to throw a player in at the deep end and basically say ‘see what happens’. When so many games come with extensive tutorials and hand holding, it is refreshing to find a game that just lets you just have at it. This element of discovery is at the heart of what makes Amberspire feel so unique.
One other reason I fancied covering the game was the tabletop adjacent mechanisms. Over the last few years we have seen numerous deckbuilding roguelikes pop up after the success of Slay the Spire, and it was inevitable that more inspiration would be taken from the tabletop world to the digital. From the poker inspired hit Balatro, to more turn based strategy games the links between the physical and the virtual have always been around but in recent years have beceome more obvious. Amberspire leans into this with dice being the way you generate resources. These six sided engines of uncertainty are given to you by resource buildings and on each ‘turn’ you’ll roll them.
Since you only start out with two of these dice generating buildings, accelerating your infrastructure is key to maximising your turns. New buildings require population nearby so maybe you’ll throw the occasional die at the Starport, letting more folk move in. The resource generators only have so far a reach as well, which means over the course of the game you have little pockets of industry dotted around the place. You discover that resource requirements change over the course of the game, but that the basic ones you start with still remain relevant. No tech is left behind, and you’ll need to manage each area of your city seperately. You can also build influence generating buildings as well, trading some of your precious resources to increase the stature of your city.
This is where the core gameplay loop of Amberspire resides. Your city starts at Tier 1 and you need a set amount of influence and population to move up each tier. When you do, new building types open up, your opportunity for expansion increases, and the universe around Amber starts to take notice.
You see Amber is not some far flung planet in the back end of the galaxy. The emergent implication of the setting is that it is of interest to many factions. As you grow, three of them will take an interest in your progress. These factions, like the rest of the game, are beautifully illustrated and run the gamut from feeling completely alien to reassuringly familiar. Each of them brings their own benefits if you work with them, but all will cause you problems.
I’d like to stick with the art for a moment as it is worth mentioning. As the population grows it builds houses, opening up spaces that have vegetation, maybe a little square to hang around. You can zoom in and see the people ebbing and flowing through the city like a tide. As you put new buildings down the design gets increasingly alien and strange reminding me a lot of the series Scavenger’s Reign in style. Where you start out feeling human and industrial, buildings progress to feeling like the influence of being in a strange place with unusual races has an impact on architecture.
As resources are rolled, sometimes a die will come up red and give you nothing. This gives no resources but adds to the weather dice you roll at the end of a round. A limited number of re-rolls can hold off the storm, but you have to take some hits. Weather can bring fog, flood, and rust all of which interfere with the growth and function of your city. Solutions to these can be built, but not all straight away, sending you back into that influence loop. Problem number one.
As you do rise in tier, you’ll get new buildings with different resource requirements, alongside new generators of those resources. Some of these will have a blue die face. These still give you resources, but tick up an event track when used. Three ticks and an event kicks off.
These events start out relatively harmless, maybe costing you influence to prevent a resource building being destroyed. As you attract factions, their influence is felt in the events, allowing you to form stronger bonds and gain their ability, or dismiss them and have them just stick around causing trouble. You are going back to that loop, hoping to generate enough influence before the event clock ticks up and potentially takes some away. Problem number two.
Generating that influence fast enough is tricky. You get buildings that allow you to trade resources for influence, but you can’t just over produce one-type and ride the mono-resource train forever. Every time you feed a resource to a trade building its value is reduced, and it only ticks back up if you don’t trade that particular resource for a turn. This forces diversification and encourages discovery. It is still problem number three.
All these problems don’t feel stressful though as they might have done in Sim City. Your population grows organically, opening up new areas of the map to place your buildings. As the city grows you realise you can’t zoom out to see the whole thing all at once. Your eye is drawn to particular districts. One turn you’ll gather dice to feed a ruster, pushing back against the decay that is preventing your spaceport from expanding. Another you’ll try and maximise the output of an arena, scooping influence into the bank to pay for that next event as time marches inevitably onwards. Areas of the city develop their own personalities, as you push outwards this bit of town is the one that fights back against the encroaching weather, while overhere is all your influence generators.
Amberspire has nestled its may into my brain. Not because it has the potentially addictive loop of a roguelike, but because of what it says about us and the way we grow. Your city isn’t some meticulously planned Utopia, of luscious urban dwellings and clear running industry. It’s messy and organic. People live where they want to live, and you must follow planting new buildings nearby their houses to get them built, inevitably leading to expansion in that direction. Your city is buffeted from outside forces which you can try and suppress but ultimately can’t ignore. Amberspire is a game that may be set on a world of the dead, but its soul is alive and distinctly human, with all the joy and sorrow that can bring.
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