Eremite Games' roguelite city builder puts a hard countdown on every settlement and turns competing pressures into the whole point.
Official art · via Steam
Against the Storm drops players into a fantasy world drowning under an endless, world-ending rain, and tasks them with building settlement after settlement to hold civilization together before the storm swallows everything again. Eremite Games built the loop around a hard countdown: each settlement runs on a ticking clock, and every choice, which species to house, which resources to prioritize, which blueprints to accept, competes for the same limited time and space. Hooded Horse published the full 1.0 release in December 2023 after more than a year in Early Access, and the game has since sold over a million copies.
The city-building mechanics carry weight because everything competes against everything else. Housing more Foxes means feeding their specific tastes and tolerating their aversions, and the same trade-off repeats across five other playable species, each with its own production quirks and morale triggers. Blueprints, resource nodes, and Glade events randomize per run, so no two settlements solve the same puzzle the same way, and the between-run meta-progression means even a settlement that collapses under the timer hands back permanent unlocks worth carrying into the next attempt.
A Metacritic aggregate of 91, built from eighteen reviews with zero unfavorable scores among them, sits alongside PC Gamer calling it one of the most clever, engaging, and endearing strategy games in years. Steam's player base lands at a similar rate: 95 percent Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 19,000 reviews, a number two post-launch expansions, Nightwatchers and Forsaken Fen, haven't dented despite adding new races and mechanics on top of the base game.
The opening hours ask for patience before they give much back. Against the Storm introduces a lot of interlocking systems at once, and the tutorial-heavy early stretch can drag before the pressures start to make sense together. The presentation doesn't close that gap either: the hand-painted world design reads as intentionally somber, but the near-total absence of voice acting beyond the occasional grunt or murmur, combined with thin accessibility options and no colorblind support, leaves the early hours feeling austere before they turn absorbing.
One of the strongest strategy games in recent memory once it opens up. Against the Storm asks for patience through a rough first few hours, then pays it back with a roguelite city builder that keeps finding new pressure to apply. Players who push past the early tutorial slog get the game nearly every outlet that covered it settled on: a genre standout.