When I first came across Homeseek, my initial thought was that it was going to be just another survival game. Second impressions didn’t change that up much either, but over the past few weeks, I have been lucky enough to spend a good amount of time, diving into the game and with that, my perception as changed. The game is billed as a post-apocalyptic survival RTS and while I am not a fan of that final genre type, there was something that appealed to me, to play it, so I did.

Before I dive into the gameplay, I feel that the best way I can explain things to you is think Fallout 4, but with modern RTS mechanics. That is not the most accurate depiction, but it does put you in the right frame of mind to get what I am going to talk about from here on out. The setup is fairly simple, you and your fellow survivors have been living below ground in bunkers for decades and with supplies dwindling, the surface is the only option left. The problem is that the events that forced everyone underground have also removed much of the clean water and plant life, making survival a daily challenge. Upon setting up your first camp, you have to start to contend with many aspects of this new world, from a lack of clean water and food, to dust storms and countless other potential dangers. The game doesn’t throw one thing at you at a time either, it requires you to manage countless things at once and I honestly found it to be a fun challenge.

The build that I had access to was made up of a few scenarios, normally progress will carry over from one to another, so you keep your research and people between each. For me, if one scenario ended poorly, and let’s face it a few did, then the next one for me was basically a reset and that did save me. The reason why is that choices you make early on, can have impacts a few days later that you might not have considered and that happened to me a lot. The gameplay loop takes place over 24 hours and you need to assign people to individual buildings, so they can produce whatever the building makes. People will only work between the hours of 8am and 6pm, which only gives you a limited time to generate resources, there might be other buildings that allow for night shifts, but if there are, I never found them. When people are not working, they need a place to rest, which is where houses come in. Construction is the only thing that happens round the clock, so if you figure out that you are a few beds short at 2am, you can get people working to fix that.

Where things become challenging though is in finding and managing your resources. In the early scenarios, there were usually deep-water wells that were around, which gave me water, but it was contaminated and drinking it made people sick. The food that was there, berries and such, were also finite and also made people sick, so getting clean water and food is a big goal. In order to do that you need a farm for food and wetlands to clean up water, but to get those you need a research center, plus an expedition center. While you are focused on that, your fellow citizens will still work away and consume toxic foods, so a medical center is going to help cure them of the sicknesses they will pick up. Basically there is a lot going on and if you can’t keep an eye on everything, eventually people will start to leave or die.

There are also things to worry about, outside of food and shelter, namely the world itself and those people that still live on its surface. Early on a group of nomads came upon my little town and asked to stay, the game provided choices, a yes, a no and a sorry but here are some supplies. Each option had pros and cons, the yes would have resulted in more people to work, but also meant more of a drain on the finite resources that exist. Saying no also had pros and cons to consider, my resources wouldn’t have taken a hit, but I would have been left with less people to help the town grow, so finding the right answer was a challenge. In the end, for this time, I went with yes as I needed people more than anything else, so I could send out some expeditions to attempt to locate materials and resources. That entire mechanic is interesting as it has you build a team, give them so of your resources and send them on their way, but you don’t just set and forget, you have to keep an eye on them as well. As I said before, there is also the world itself to deal with, sometimes it’s a sandstorm that slows down work, other times its rain that can be a blessing and knowing how to respond is key.

I could dive into various aspects of the game in much greater detail but discovering things for yourself is half the fun. Where Homeseek shines is in its systems, there is so much going on, that you really have to be able to juggle everything and if you fail to pay attention to one part, it could come back to bite you later. While things were simple, at least as simple as they can be in a game this complex, in the first few scenarios, by the time I hit the fifth and final one, the challenge was really there. What this means for players in the final game, who knows, but I suspect that its going to put the most diehard RTS fans through the ringer. Right now the game just has 2023 for its release date and there is nothing firmer than that. Given the sheer amount of systems and things to juggle, I would imagine a release in the second half of the year is likely and all I can say is that if you love RTS games or survival games, this is one that you need to seek out.

If you want to follow along with the games development, or add it to your Steam wishlist, you can do so below.