Amberspire

This is a great pocket city builder and good value for its price. The polished old-school visuals give it the feel of an early console game like Sim City but refined for modern resolutions. It’s also very old school in that it has an electronic game manual, presented like a game manual, instead of a tutorial. Gameplay has a good loop to it once you get to grips with the mechanics, and will the game does let you experiment and learn from your mistakes, reading the manual for the first few turns is going to get you past the initial hurdles.

Amberspire is the story of a city that, like all cities, is subject to forces beyond any one persons control. Whether its a natural disaster or a booming tea trade, everything that happens to your city and its anonymous inhabitants is nothing but a roll of the dice. It can be a difficult game to wrap your head around: a series of bad rolls can seemingly doom your city. I found it helps to consider the dice as something else: fate, luck, the will of whatever gods inhabit the mausoleum's spire. All three possibilities have their precedent in human history. And once I accepted I had no control over my city, I found I could control an awful lot. The dice may be random, but which dice are rolled when is up to you. Equilibrium therefore is the name of the game. Example: a bad event can be followed by an intentional slowing of tea production, refocusing your economy on less profitable but less dangerous goods. But once you've understood the basics of managing your city (and the random chance that comes with it) you might start having questions. Is the tea die an event die because tea houses are meeting grounds for dissidents, or is it merely that more social spaces means more opportunities for noteworthy happenings in general? What is the object of worship for the chapels that serve as such important buildings in the late game? What the hell is horizon and why can you send it through an ansible? The game won't answer these questions for you, prompting you to take the small bits of evocative worldbuilding and spin your own narrative to make your city truly your own. The truth is it took me a while to come to terms with Amberspire. That's why I'm writing this review now instead of in May when I first tried the game. But even back then part of me felt like I had missed something, that there was something to this game that I wasn't quite seeing. It took revisiting it while under the influence of a particularly nasty cold before I could go through the process of accepting Amberspire, and in accepting it begin to understand it. And hey that's not for everyone! It almost wasn't for me, right up until it was. Considering that the games I love the most are the often the ones I initially bounced off of, this bodes very well for Amberspire. So maybe give it a go, roll some bones and build a sunmirror why don't you. And for the sickos out there: you can buy a physical copy of the instruction manual, which is Very Cool.