Don’t sleep on the new solarpunk colony sim from devs behind Firewatch, Mini Motorways, Gone Home and more

Back in September, more than a few indie developers pushed back their release dates by a few weeks or months to get out of the way of the arrival of Hollow Knight: Silksong, which they feared would suck up all of gamingdom’s attention. And maybe that was the right call, but one side effect has been an almost comically packed release schedule on Steam through October and straight into this first week of November.

Case in point: on Tuesday colony builder Generation Exile dropped on Steam to a total of three user reviews, despite a seasoned indie team behind it. Studio founder Nels Anderson was previously the lead designer of masterful stealth game Mark of the Ninja before co-founding Campo Santo to make Firewatch. Generation Exile’s team also includes Karla Zimonja, designer on Gone Home and Tacoma, and Niamh Fitzgerald, lead designer of hit traffic sim Mini Motorways. Oh, and a soundtrack from FTL and Into the Breach composer Ben Prunty!?

Maybe the problem is the Steam page doesn’t mention that the game’s got capybaras in it. Or maybe between heavyweights like Arc Raiders and surprise hits like Dispatch and RV There Yet, a quieter game like Generation Exile dropping in early access doesn’t have much chance of catching the algorithm’s attention.

It caught our attention, though: last year we interviewed the Sonderlust Studios team for the PC Gaming Show, and the topic of sustainability—both for the games industry and the planet—were front-of-mind. That’s kinda what Generation Exile is all about, as you find yourself overseeing a colony ship with limited natural resources on a long interstellar voyage.

“You’re still having to provide the basics for your society: Food, shelter, clean water,” Nels Anderson said. “But there’s this kind of unquestioned assumption that lives in a lot of strategy games, but also in the world around us, where it’s like: ‘Oh, we need more resources? We can just keep extracting. We can just keep taking more forever. We can just keep growing and growing and growing.’ It’s simply not possible to keep expanding forever.

“That is both a thematic element of the game, but I think part of that has come from looking at the industry around us. We see the harm that’s caused by focusing exclusively on short-term gains, where all the goals are ‘what are the returns for the next quarter?’ or whatever. That single-minded focus on what’s immediately ahead of us—how can we extract as much value in the short term—is just not sustainable. … We want to anchor a lot of the city building, strategy game stuff in not just getting bigger and consuming more stuff, but finding more ways to be more efficient. More effective. To use only what you have around you, because that’s all you’ve got. And finding ways to grow and thrive, but in a way that is not just endlessly extractive.”

We’ll be digging into Generation Exile ourselves soon to write about how its ideas for a sustainable city builder come together. Its introductory 10% discount on Steam lasts until November 11, and there’s also already a roadmap charting the course for future updates in early access.