If I can do justice to the hour I spent playing Afterworld, you'll see why it's the most exciting reveal of Gamescom 2026. Even if you don't like grand strategy games, which this is, Afterworld may be the first one you fall for. It's designed to be the "most approachable" game from developer Paradox Interactive (Crusader Kings, Stellaris), says game director Dan Lind, and although I've struggled to make sense of many of the developer's previous titles, I jumped into this one and intuitively had a blast.
By blast, I mean 'I made my settlers live in an irradiated factory and they started having mutant fish-people babies'. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, let's catch up on what Afterworld is – then we can talk about all the ways I was a terrible warlord.
Crawl out through the fallout
I played Total War: Warhammer 40K and saw a generational strategy game in the making
At its most basic, Afterworld is about ensuring your tribe survives in post-nuclear apocalypse America. But its most interesting dynamics are established before then. Beginning my preview, I'm asked to choose my tribe's origin story and how it handled pivotal moments in its history.
I picked a tribe leaving their underground shelter, which meant deciding how they navigated an earlier food crisis – cannibalism? Hoarding? – and whether a period of unrest was settled by ceding control to rioters or quietly killing its instigators. Each option has lasting effects on my tribe going forwards; the descendants of cannibals will still eat people, for example.
These identities keep evolving. Sending rangers out of the vault to find somewhere to settle, I discover an abandoned car manufacturer with water and wood within reach. It's more irradiated than its neighboring areas, but that seems like a long-term problem – what's a few spare noses among friends? Meanwhile, technology and belief trees are fleshed out through exploration. Finding the sea adds a research node for fishing, for example, while standing my ground against would-be bandits nudges my society further towards autocracy. Later, settling in radiation comes back to bite me in the gills as my people start giving birth to fish-human hybrids.
Even in this small window, I get the impression that Afterworld will be very dynamic between playthroughs. For starters, the societal side of the map – covering the whole of the U.S.A., with parts of Canada and Mexico – is randomized, with game director Dan Lind telling me that New York City can be a hole-in-the-ground in one playthrough, or ruled by mutant kings in another. When your society has taken root, you'll come up against Ancients – warlords who have been around since before the apocalypse happened 100 years ago – and decide whether to go up against them or fall in line, the latter letting you earn favor by working for them and following their rules.
"A lot of the dynamic playthrough comes from a lot of random actors, like the AIs and stuff, doing their thing [...] playing their own game," says Lind. "All the AIs have their own plans, right? Some may not have expansion plans, but a lot of them do. And when you have that combinatorics, a lot of agents doing a lot of stuff, and you also throw in things like beliefs and stuff that can affect each other, you get like an almost infinite soup where a lot of stuff can happen."
"And then a lot of it is creating those things, making them visible to the player, and also showing that they can become powerful," he continues. "So it's not just them like picking a different custom. It is because they picked this custom, they now become religious zealots to go on a crusade, and that's why they're coming to your town. A lot of our thinking about games is very much working backwards from cool stories that could happen, which is why I really like reading books and movies and being like, 'Okay, so this story happened in this book. How can we make this, the simulation of the game, output the story like that? What are the building blocks we would need?' And then breaking those down."
While Afterworld is unmistakably a grand strategy game (my jaw hits the floor when I zoom out and see its continental map), its depth is both accessible and in service to the game's overarching fantasy.
I'm reminded of two post-apocalyptic novels, Stephen King's The Stand and Robert R. McCammon's Swan Song, in the sense that seeing how new societies rise is fascinating. Both are influences, and Lind's face lights up when I mention Swan Song in particular – it's one of his "main inspirations" behind the game, and is featured in his introduction deck for new developers.
"It's the natural progression to grand strategy games – you scale up," says Lind on why he was drawn to that bigger-picture approach. "You're always looking for ways to affect the world outside and push your vision of what is true. And it's a great way to project what people think. You see this throughout human history – there are battles of will, battles of faith, right? So it's part of creating friction and argument. It's also a fantastic way to deliver lore."
Crucially, Afterworld is also much easier to get into than any other Paradox game I've played. I could just about manage Stellaris, but found Crusader Kings 2 and the Europa Universalis series were too menu-dense to get to grips with. Here, even just having characters and models to physically follow is a huge help. But it's tutorialized in a way that promotes discovery without being overwhelming. In similar fashion to society sim Dwarf Fortress, you're introduced to a few basic concepts at once (settling, migration, gathering) and the rest gradually unfurls as you prod in different directions – supporting your curiosity instead of smothering it.
Dwarf Fortress comes to mind because I've been playing it all month. But Afterworld also speaks to the part of my brain that snoops on every terminal email in Fallout and spends hours in Warhammer lore rabbit holes. To me, immersion comes from believability. The thought of seeing Afterworld's history being woven excites me as much as the finished tapestry – including the tribe of cannibal fish-people that would have conquered the surface, if only I had more time to teach them violence.
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