Homeseek Review – Thrive To Survive

Isn’t it interesting that strategy games, a genre that for time was definitively express its gameplay by putting players into some sort of combat scenario- as a commander of soldiers like most RTS games- have grown to express “strategy” in different ways?

I mention this because looking at the language developer Traptics and publisher The Iterative Collective describes their latest game Homeseek, it’s described first as a strategy game.

If you ask me, Homeseek is clearly part of the new wave of narrative-driven survival city-builders (or colony/settlement builders). City-builders are usually sandboxes where players can express and explore the boundaries of a simulation. Though recently, we see more and more city-builders go the theme park route, adding a narrative structure wrapped in a campaign. Frostpunk is a shining example of this subgenre. And Homeseek sure feels at home here as well.

Homeseek isn’t here to make you do the nitty-gritty city-building aspects of city-builder. But instead, it focuses on you carefully micro-manage your resources where a simple mistake can lead to peril and also pushes you into taking risks.

The result of this is a fascinating take on a survival city-builder. Ruthless at times, but the effort in balancing the many resource demands does feel rewarding at the end of the day.

Presentation

Homeseek is set in a desolate, arid post-apocalyptic world. So this isn’t a game for Anakin Skywalker and the sand-hating gang. You can barely see the citizens up close as the top-down, rather zoomed-out camera angle makes it hard to inspect details, which isn’t that much. But it makes up for it by having all the buildings visibly distinct. You not only can easily tell at a glance but won’t be confused between any of the different building types you will have. Even the upgraded versions look adequately beefed up so you can tell at a glance.

A lot of the graphics effort is focused on bringing its 2D art and UI to life. The art, used a lot in the story boxes where some decision needs to be made, are beautiful. The UI leans a bit more on style over substance. The glowing number and tactile buttons are cool, but they look too tiny on a 1080p screen.

The music is also pretty decent. The light use of melancholic violins peppered with the twings and twangs that makes up its drum beats helps paint the tone Homeseek is going for. The sound effect queues will catch your attention. From the little boop when you finished researching a tech, to the eerie violin scratch when citizens die or left the settlement that is as haunting as the iconic Kitchen Nightmare stinger. The use of only one voice actor doing narration is used effectively.

Homeseek isn’t really a game that will catch your eye graphically, so this isn’t a game that’ll people notice immediately. But the presentation does a good job of accentuating the core gameplay, which will make players play longer.

Gameplay

Homeseek, from my view, is a narrative-driven survival city-builder in the veins of Frostpunk, Ixion and others. A specific sub-genre of a sub-genre of a strategy game where it trades off the sandbox gameplay of a city-builder by having it be a theme park experience. What I mean by this is that the main campaign will have you complete objectives, and go through specific gimmicks only for that one particular level rather than just letting you loose free to build as you wish.

For instance, one level will see you have to balance the tension rising from threats of a rival settlement and the people of your own settlement. Making decisions that protect the interest of one party increases the tension of another so you must balance it out, and keep holding out until you can reach the victory point. Another requires you to send off a group of citizens (alongside a sizeable amount of resources) every day, so over time trying to get enough resources for the remaining people need transporting gets evermore tougher.

The city-building aspect is rather interesting. In Homeseek, you don’t need roads. You just build buildings. Though that doesn’t mean the game doesn’t have some form of busy work.

This comes from Connections. To collect food and water, there must be connection lines made with each building to carry these resources. For food, this is rather straightforward, just connect a farm or a bush to a Food Storage and you’re good.

Water Connections is a bit tricky. You need to get a Water Extractor or Water Collector to connect to a Water Storage, and this will require some additional resources to build pipes. The pipes themselves are automatically built, but it’s figuring out how to connect these that become challenging.

That’s because there isn’t just one water type, there are, like that one Final Fantasy VIII meme inspired by a sign on a supermarket, there’s four. Water and Water and Water Water.

At first, you’ll collect Contaminated Water, which can be drunk as is (though it brings health risks- sometimes fatal). And you can treat them in Wetlands or Water Purifiers to convert them into Poor Water and Clean Water respectively. Over time, you’ll find Salt Water, which can be collected but can’t be used immediately. That requires a Desalination building that’ll convert Salt Water into Poor Water or Clean Water.

So now the connection goes a bit longer. And if you’re running a farm, which requires any kind of water to work, the connection goes even longer. And on top of this stack of tricky towers, water pipes can’t pump water uphill unless it goes through an Archimedes Screw (which can only be built at specific parts of the map) or have it upgraded into an Advanced Water Tower. And connecting uphill boasts even more restrictions. Like, you can’t just connect a Water Storage to another Water Storage. And you’ll soon get into head-scratching moments as there’s very little room to build multiple of these massive buildings and still get an efficient connection between them all.

On that note, it’s not just space, resources in general are limited. Most levels will see you working a very finite set of resources and you must figure out how to beat the level before it becomes impossible to win. Scrap piles deplete and when that’s gone it’s gone for the whole level. Water in wells will dry up unless it rains again. Expeditions can net you some extra resources if you pick the right choices but those are not something to rely on.

And to add more problems need solving, the weather can have a severe effect on your food and water production. Duststorms block the sun so solar panels stop working. Droughts dry out rivers that would have been the source of infinite water.

This is where Homeseek shines the most, balancing the resource management aspect by micromanaging your workers. More workers assigned to a particular building an area will mean more output (and if the resource isn’t infinite, faster for it to deplete). Adjusting the right amount of workers so that you make just enough water and food at the end of the day is arguably the core gameplay here. And when electricity comes into play there’s more reason to ensure you get the numbers exactly right or you’ll trip a whole production line.

Get it right and you’ll see some surplus in the storage. Get it wrong, and you’re probably going to need to restart.

You can send a team of explorers out of your home and do an expedition. Or rather, you must. Story progression is more often linked with having you go outside. At each point of interest, you’ll required to make several decisions that may bring you good fortune or at worse, send good people to their doom.

However, all the decisions of these encounters are pre-determined, so if you spot a re-occurring event you can pick the best outcome the next time you are handed with the same choice to make.

Sending people on expeditions requires resources for them to just survive the trek outside (so they don’t get depressed and leave). If you’re lucky, you get to find more resources too, but they are too hard to come by often and of too little quantity to really rely on.

As fun as min-maxing resources like your life depends on it is (and in this case, for the citizens under your care, they kind of are), Homeseek is balanced a bit too tightly with little margin of error. It’s very easy to get into a spiral of no return where you just lose people all of a sudden.

Earlier playthroughs I have before the v1.02 patch saw people getting easily too depressed. And getting them not depressed is rather vague. The game says to get their food, water and shelter needs up. And even when they are all fed, hydrated and with a roof above their head I found myself losing 10 people as they all left the settlement the next day due to depression. In the level I was in, that’s a third of the population gone, just like that.

This was clearly an issue that during my time playing Homeseek, the devs have addressed some feedback and started patching things up. So now citizens are less likely to get depressed and desert you immediately in droves. But now I’m facing citizens that drop dead too easily as they had to consume contaminated water or food.

If the devs can continue to finetune the balance, Homeseek has the potential to be quite the fun challenge. As of right now, I still find issues where the game just declares Game Over without notifying me exactly what caused it. If everyone left and/or died, that’s fine. I have Game Overs where there are still citizens left which I find confounding.

Though my main gripe that is still yet to be addressed is the lack of several quality-of-life features. I needed a camera pan, right-click-to-cancel/go-back and left-click-to-camera-pan instead of middle-click. The Expedition menu is also a bit messy. You’ll need an extra click or two to really get your current expedition party moving, the events would scroll down too far and you have to scroll back up to read the consequences of your choice and you really have no idea how long an expedition member can survive when they ran out of resources.

Content

Homeseek features two story campaigns, with nine total levels/missions in total. Each one can be completed within the span of 1-2 hours, so a full run to completion can take about at least 10 hours.

Each of the levels can be played on its own, or you can attempt Survival mode, where you can play one of the campaigns as one connecting campaign where progression like research unlocks carry over, making it a bit harder. Or you can also try Endless mode where, contrary to the name, it’s about how long you can keep running that settlement for that specific level.

There are difficulty options to make it easier or harder.

The two campaigns have a different story, with the second one including new mechanics that make you slightly think more about your building decision. Only slightly.

Personal Enjoyment

As someone who enjoyed Frostpunk and Ixion, the existence of Homeseek is a pleasant surprise. I may not have heard about this game prior to its release, but this should be up my alley.

And indeed it is. Playing a city-builder with a purpose and a specific flavour, this one being barren post-apocalypse, sure hits me in the right place. I immediately understand what to do, what I want to do next right off the gate. If you’ve played survival city-builders before, you know what to expect from Homeseek. Even the linearity of it all.

And I do love the min-maxing micromanaging bits being the real star of the gameplay. Not having to build roads or manually lay down pipes may be weird at first, but keeping tabs on the colony every time and trying to play it at the fastest speed was good fun for me.

Though I do feel the punishing limits the game imposes make that there are only a handful of ways, or worse only one, way to win a level. And I feel like the water connection system is a bit too restrictive to allow players to make their oddball water network. It’s not a situation where the limitation breeds more creative opportunities, it means that there is a specific way the game is meant to be played, which sounds rather contrary to the spirit of city-builder. It’s not impossible to make a survival city-builder with a story. What I’m saying is that maybe loosening up some aspects of the gameplay could help a long way.

The story is interesting, though unfortunately feels like treading on familiar themes and beats. Even the plot twists were predictable, but at least the narrative feels grounded and believable.

Verdict

Homeseek seeks to find a home among the narrative-driven survival city-builders, and it does belong here. The story is interesting enough to get you to build temporary settlements and try your best to eke out a living in these dire lands in dire times.

It’s not without fault. The gameplay is a bit too punishing and restrictive for most players who may not be able to juggle the micromanaging demands, and it lacks some much-needed quality-of-life features to really make it an easy recommendation.

There’s a good game in Homeseek. It’s just swimming in Contaminated Water right now and needs to be converted to Pure Water before it’s safe for consumption by the masses. Fans of the genre, hardened through experience and can withstand a few quirks, should give this a try.

As for others, I say give it a few more months as the community of players guides the devs as they seek Homeseek’s best form.

Played on PC. Review key provided by the publisher.

7.6

Homeseek

There's a good game in Homeseek. It's just swimming in Contaminated Water right now and needs to be converted to Pure Water before it's safe for consumption by the masses. Fans of the genre, hardened through experience and can withstand a few quirks, should give this a try.

As for others, I say give it a few more months as the community of players guides the devs as they seek Homeseek's best form.

  • Presentation 7.5
  • Gameplay 7
  • Content 8
  • Personal Enjoyment 8

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