What happens after the apocalypse is over? It's a question that many have tried to answer, but one that the team behind one of Steam Next Fest's biggest city-builders are pretty well-placed to answer. From an hour with their latest demo, it seems that life is mostly pretty chill - as long as you're content with some…unconventional cuisine.
After Inc is a mashup between a traditional city-builder and a 4X strategy game, in which your settlement gradually spills out as you look for new resources to take advantage of. From extremely humble beginnings huddled around a fire pit in a bunch of lean-to tents, you can expand through the fog of war, searching for forests to provide building material, or settling grassland to convert to farms.
It's a relatively simple test of ensuring that your demand for resources never outstrips your supply. Water, food, and fuel are all important, but thankfully, it's not too hard to stay ahead of them, as long as you manage your Stamina meter, which affects how quickly you can perform certain actions. Stamina refills over time, and moves faster the higher your population is, giving you an easy resource to sacrifice if you need something else fast - sending someone out scavenging for food might not be as efficient as establishing a farm, but it might just get you through a tricky winter.
Elsewhere, city-builder staples like Morale and Authority help shape your hold over your settlement, as do random events. These can vary between an outbreak of food poisoning that needs curing or a winter storm that threatens to ruin food supplies. There aren't that many of them in the demo, so you're likely to see the same few multiple times - in one run, I lost the chance to discover the concept of pickling food three times, and I threw out a lot of bad supplies in the process.
That's partly because there's usually a pretty obvious best choice. If someone's suffering from food poisoning, it's usually best to spend a little extra water to maintain their health and the town's morale. If there's a chance you get a massive boost to your food production just by throwing out a little extra rotten chow, then it makes sense to take it. And if a pack of wild dogs provides a boost to both morale and your supplies just because you misinterpreted what 'hot dogs' were in the time before the Plague, then is it really wrong to eat them?
Morals aside, that 'best-case' approach tends to keep After Inc pretty relaxed, at least on its normal difficulty. Its largely pastoral, solarpunk aesthetic works nicely on a mobile-first UI that's made the jump to PC very easily, and the endless mode that will be available with the full game seems like a very chill way to keep a post-apocalyptic city running in perpetuity. Even fighting off the zombies that lurk in the fog of war is a pretty stress-free process - if you don't disturb them, they're unlikely to disturb you, and clearing them out of areas you want to expand into is simply a case of sending your fighters off to battle in some distant zone.
After Inc has found its way almost to the very top of Steam Next Fest's city-builder charts, currently sitting in second place behind an extremely pretty voxel-based builder that somehow seems to boast even better vibes than this demo. Much of that probably comes from the Plague Inc affiliation, and the mobile-first control scheme can't hurt either. It's likely far from the most complex strategy game you'll find in this latest round of demos, but it's a relaxing, tabletop-style approach to the post-apocalypse that I certainly enjoyed.
Elsewhere in Next Fest, you can play the RPG that inspired Undertale, featuring the work of Toby Fox.
