I loved the game. I liked that it followed a story, where many similar building games don’t have anything comparable. It creates a nice atmosphere and the snow looks good IMO. Same for the exploration aspect. You get to make many decisions for exploration, research and building. I felt that most of my actions really mattered. The whole “law” system I didn’t like so much, mostly because there weren’t many options and you usually just have to decide whether you can afford to do the better option, or you just do the bad thing when you’re desperate. Enacting more and more laws always leads to more severe decisions, but nothing really forces you to enact another law if I remember correctly, so you can just not do the bad ones if you don’t want to. I remember the first game I started without changing any of the standard settings to be really easy, you definitely can win it and do right by your people. On harder difficulties you’ll at least have to send the children to work, and maybe make some other tough decisions, depending on your goals. Vegan runs are pretty annoying to do tho. Replayability is limited IMO, once you play through the 3-4 scenarios you’ve pretty much seen everything.

agree with what everyone else is saying about it being great and that you dont need to go full fash (and it very much presents that as being a “soft” failure even if you keep people alive)

just want to add that the last autumn dlc is excellent and theres an explicitly pro-labour path thats pretty good and lets you establish militant unions etc (the end of that path is very silly, but theres no reason you have to go there). the alternative elitist path is deliberately grim as fuck and shows exactly where that sort of path would lead in that sort of scenario

It’s been a while but I don’t remember the games politics being particularly coherent.

One of the tech trees was clearly fash, the other which was supposed to be the “good” one still included things like child labor and cannibalism.

I had fun playing it but I remember on my win screen some lib brainworms about “can you save your community without BEING STALINIST” or something like that

I really liked it. It’s a lot more challenging than most city builders, and when you finally manage to win no matter which tech route you chose you get asked “was it worth it” to survive considering how hard you had to work everyone, which makes the implicit goal to survive without doing any of the bad stuff. Once I finished it a couple times though I lost interest, because while it was fun to beat it doesn’t have any of the longevity of most city buildy games.