In theory,City 20is a very cool immersive sandbox game. Inspired by the secret Soviet cities of the Cold War, the titular City 20 was sealed due to a nuclear reactor leak ten years before the events of the game. You have to find a way to survive on the fringes of society, working with or against factions and the environment to stay alive, with the eventual goal being to escape the city. It begins like a survival game. You start by collecting resources from your environment and crafting tools, food, and more. But the full version will have full storylines that interact with emergent narratives.
City 20’s major selling point is its internal ecosystem. Every animal, NPC, and machine in the game needs resources to survive, and gets them from the same places that you do. Because of that, every action you make will have an impact on the ecosystem and the people around you. Plants spread their own seeds and trees drop fruit, but cut them down and the land will become barren. Kill all the animals, and the people around you will eventually run out of meat, as will the wolves that live in the area. Sabotage a faction’s power, and fridges will cease to work, causing food inside them to rot. Break things, and NPCs might change their routines to fix them.
Another major aspect of City 20 is its focus on NPC relationships. Forming relationships with characters will open up different mechanics. For example, my demo started with a man named Goga saving me and soon after asking me to get fuel for him – this in itself wasn’t technically scripted, but happened because the demo’s conditions dictated he would be low on fuel. After I’d gotten him the fuel he wanted, he liked me a lot more, so he gave me traps I could use to hunt small animals, like the hares I’d seen running around his property. In turn, I could kill and cook the animals I caught to replenish the food I ate from his fridge, which raised his opinion of me further. I could also enter his house, use his tools, and rummage through his things. Make him angry, though, and he’ll revoke access to his stuff. The developers tell me that you don’t just build relationships with individuals, but with larger factions too.
The demo technically has two factions, though I was only given access to one, the Rabochs.
Close to the full game or on release, there will be full storylines to pursue. The developers say that instead of these storylines being scripted, however, narrative will be managed with a ‘Director’ similar to the one featured in Valve’s Left 4 Dead. Depending on what the player has already done, the Director will present different information. Cutting yourself off from society and living in a shack in the woods, for example, may lead to the Director trying to tempt you back to the city. The stories told through the game will be about characters, factions, and lore. You may learn how to escape from the city, or how the city itself came to be in its current state – the story content is unconfirmed at the moment.
There are apparently multiple ways to escape, and NPCs will play a big part in getting you the information you need. You can still kill them all, but you’ll need to somehow stumble onto that information if you do.
Again,in theory, this all sounds very good. Unfortunately, I can’t glean all that much from the demo of the early access version I played. The demo allows you to play through just two in-game days, and there isn’t very much you can do in that time. NPC action is simplified in the demo, so you don’t see the full extent of how they react to your good or bad behaviour. The justice system is simplified as well, so guards will only give you small fines instead of throwing you in jail, making it unclear how strongly factions and individuals will react to your crimes. Sure, I could cut down all the trees and steal everyone’s food just to see what happens, but that would take so much time that I won’t be around to see how the consequences play out.
I stole fuel for Goga and got caught, got into a full-blown fistfight with the guard who chased me down as I escaped, and only had to pay a small fine.
Two days also isn’t a lot of time to explore the map, which is just half a square kilometre in size but is surprisingly dense. The final map will likely be larger, but the devs are prioritising density over size. Running around and collecting tools takes time and energy, and with so little time and the need to balance sleep, food and other needs, it’s hard to make any meaningful progress.
The demo itself is still very unpolished as the game is in early stages. The dialogue is often unconvincing, though to the developers’ credit, the characters say the same thing in different ways every time you speak to them. Talking to characters is done through a dialogue wheel that indicates topics you can bring up, but this is quite limited in its current form. The UI is confusing – it took me ages to figure out how to properly place and bait a trap despite the game’s hint menu. The camera moves strangely, often skewing off to one side while you have conversations with NPCs. Instead of having paced dialogue, NPCs will say variations of the same line over and over until you do what they want.
That said, I have to reiterate that City 20 is still in the early stages. As it is right now, the demo is frustrating – the project has so much ambition, but I can’t get anywhere in its very limited state. If it does manage to pull off what it wants to, it’ll be a very promising game, but I can’t say for sure how close it is to doing that.
