Against the Storm

Against the Storm is a roguelite city builder set in a dark fantasy world where endless rain has destroyed most of civilization. You play as the Scorched Queen’s Viceroy, leading humans, beavers, lizards, foxes, and harpies into the wilderness to establish new settlements, recover lost riches, and support the Smoldering City, the last remaining stronghold against the Blightstorm. Rather than spending an entire campaign developing one permanent city, you repeatedly build new settlements across a larger world map, carrying resources, upgrades, and experience forward between expeditions.

Every settlement introduces a new combination of resources, weather conditions, species, building blueprints, perks, and dangers. Your population has its own needs and specialties, forcing you to balance housing, food, luxuries, recreation, and production while meeting the Scorched Queen’s demands. Success means earning enough reputation to secure the settlement before moving on to the next location, while failure ends the expedition without erasing the wider progress made in the Smoldering City.

What Makes It Different?

• Combines city-building management with roguelite progression
• Focuses on creating a network of settlements rather than one permanent city
• Lets resources, upgrades, and experience carry forward between expeditions
• Includes humans, beavers, lizards, foxes, and harpies, each with different strengths and needs
• Features six distinct biomes with their own challenges
• Uses hundreds of gameplay modifiers to change settlement conditions
• Gives you changing selections of building blueprints and perks during each expedition
• Includes recurring Blightstorms that threaten everything outside the Smoldering City
• Lets you explore dangerous forest glades for resources, treasures, and ancient threats
• Includes traders whose available goods change between visits

Every Settlement Has an Expiration Date

Building a successful town is only part of the job. Against the Storm places every settlement under pressure from the Queen’s expectations, the hostility of the forest, and the recurring storms closing in around you. You need to improve your reputation quickly enough to complete the settlement before impatience catches up with you, which makes efficiency just as important as long-term planning.

The species living under your command rarely want exactly the same things. One group may be better suited to particular jobs, while another may need different food, housing, or luxuries to remain content. Producing raincoats, ale, or pies can improve morale, but every production chain requires workers, raw materials, and buildings that might have been used elsewhere. Deciding whose needs matter most can shape the entire settlement.

The Forest Never Gives You Everything

Each expedition limits which building blueprints and perks become available, so familiar production chains cannot always be recreated. You may begin with a clear plan, only to discover that the buildings or resources needed to complete it never appear. Adapting means finding alternative ways to feed your people, produce goods, and complete objectives with the tools the run provides.

Exploring deeper into the forest can uncover valuable resources and rewards, but glades may also contain dangerous events and ancient threats. Additional objectives offer further opportunities for progress, although taking them on can stretch an already struggling settlement. Traders provide another possible solution, but their inventories change, making it difficult to rely on a specific item arriving when you need it most.

A Civilization Built Across Many Runs

Even though individual settlements are temporary, the wider campaign continues. Resources earned during expeditions can be used to upgrade the Smoldering City, gradually opening new possibilities for future journeys. Previously established towns remain part of the growing world until the cycle ends, giving each successful expedition a place within something much larger.

This structure allows Against the Storm to return repeatedly to the most demanding stage of a city builder…establishing a settlement when resources are scarce, choices are limited, and every new building matters. Once one town becomes stable, the game sends you back into the wilderness to solve a completely different set of problems.

Good If You Like…

Players who enjoy DotAGE, The Last Spell, or Stacklands, should appreciate Against the Storm’s combination of settlement management, randomized expeditions, and progression spread across a larger campaign.