Watch On
Truly all-timer videogames let you do three things: Toil under the yoke of an oppressive overlord, pioneer new frontiers, and eat enough cheese to feed Whitstable. With those facts in mind, consider me very curious to get my hands on Whiskerwood, the new city-builder/elaborate production chain sim from Minakata Dynamics, maker of Railgrade.
Revealed today, Whiskerwood is a sort of colony-management sim that replaces the age-old conflict between proletarian and bourgeois with the age-old conflict between mouse and cat. Your job is to oversee a load of rodent serfs—called Whiskers—who have been press-ganged by a bunch of cats (the Claws) into shipping out to the New World, where their job is to generate as much delicious profit as possible from the colony’s exploitation. Oh, and, you know, keep themselves alive in the process. I guess. If they can help it.
It all sounds quite whimsically dystopian, and entails a lot of factory-sim and city-building stuff to keep your overlords happy and your workers alive. The Claws want stuff, and creating the facilities to extract it and finessing your production lines is vital to keeping them happy. But also, the gaggle of mousey workers the game starts you off with have their own wants, needs, and preferences. If you don’t want them to keel over, or just lose their minds entirely, you’ll have to keep conditions at least vaguely tolerable.
Grist for the mousewheel
“Ultimately you are serving two masters,” the devs tell PCG, “The Claws desire only resource extraction. The Whiskers are hardworking and wish to rest at the end of the day—they cannot eat promises of freedom.”
The game design goal is a kind of push and pull between what your bosses want and what the workers need: The trees that grow across the New World would make for a valuable source of profit if you shipped the lumber home, but you also need something to build your workers’ homes. Policies that might make your workers happier—shorter working hours, for instance—won’t please your feline suzerain.
Expand that kind of logic out to the 50-or-so commodities that “represent the needs and wants of the mice, their industrial capabilities, and their cat overlords,” and it sounds like you’ll have plenty of opportunities for things to go spectacularly awry and for your mice to die in their droves.
Which will, the devs hope, make you quite sad. Whiskerwood is “a sandbox where players can define their own goals,” and beginning a new game is a matter of selecting a size for your procgen map and seeing which workers you drift into port with. Those workers have Rimworld-style “traits and origins that impact their preferences, strengths, and weaknesses,” which makes catering to their whims even more of a knot to untangle.
“By giving them names and strengths we want players to care about their wellbeing,” say the devs, “and to see the value of their lives when making decisions which might endanger the Whiskers.”
But hey, you’ll get new workers pretty regularly. The wheel of industry churns on.
The best-laid plans
On top of keeping your masters happy and your workers alive and (mostly) well, Whiskerwood is promising a set of city-building and management mechanics that sound a lot more complex than I would have guessed from the screenshots of cute mice scampering about.
You’ll have to construct and oversee “complex production chains” that you automate “with the help of winding conveyor belts and simple machines,” which are in turn powered by everything from mousewheels to steam engines depending on your progress down a tech tree.
In news that tickles the Dwarf Fortress-loving part of my brain, you’ll also have to manage multiple levels of your colony: “Verticality plays a major role in colony building as you push towards the sky and deep underground.” Rarer resources live deep under the crust of the Earth, and it can be warmer down there in winter, but anything you do that requires sunlight will, naturally, prefer to stay high up.
So, hey, bear that in mind too. Oh, and make sure not to spark a war or anything. It’s not just the Claws you have to worry about. On top of everything else, the game tasks you with managing a strategic layer where you’ll shift units about “on a daily basis to face off against pirates and other mouse and weasel factions.”
The devs call it “a blend between Advance Wars and the early stages of most Civilization games.” You explore across a hex-based overworld map using ships you built from the timber you’ve amassed, and staffed by Whiskers you assign from your town. You’ll run into other, nearby colonies and societies and potentially get into conflict with them.
Or maybe not. The thing about colonial overlords is they never want the colonies to get too full of themselves. Your cat bosses are “classic mercantilists,” say the devs, and want your outpost to remain a hub of resource extraction with no manufacturing base of its own (it’d give you the means to become dangerously independent).
That could mean stagnation and a lifetime of permanent exploitation, but that’s where the other factions come in. Get on their good side, and you can set up smuggling routes and sign trade deals that might let you build up your colony and give you a shot at getting out from under the Claws’, ah claws. But building up the trust for that with other factions entails its own challenges and sacrifices.
The right to rebel
It all sounds like part of Whiskerwood’s sandbox-y endgame—or one of them, at least—is a rebellion against your colonial masters, shrugging off your chains using the vast economic base the Claws mandated you build and the bonds of solidarity between your own colony and the factions dotted around you.
Underneath the cute exterior, it sounds like Minakata is building a clever—and complex—colonial economic simulator, filled with all sorts of peculiarities and possibilities that can generate Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld-style stories in the aftermath.
It is precisely the kind of thing I could get incredibly into if the devs pull it off, and I’ll be watching its development with keen interest. Alas, there’s no news about a release date just yet—except that it’s not coming this year—but if you’re as curious about this one as I am, you can keep track of it over on Steam.