An excellent city builder and also great for people who love logistics games. It has complex production chains needing you to not only transport and refine or use resources along the way, but account for the, as the game suggests, workers and resources to keep those chains moving. Workers need to be transported to work, and done so somewhat efficiently - if they spend too long travelling they'll work a shorter shift. Resources need to be moved too of course. You need to maintain and have the resources for that transportation. Even the simplest answer of trucks and busses still means bulldozers and dumptrucks to lay even just gravel roads, then fuel for those vehicles, and resources at repair depots to maintain them over their lifespan. These fuel and maintenance requirements aren't simple running costs that deduct money every so often - they have to go get gas or get to a maintenance yard. This means even these logistics needs thought put into their placement.

Your workers also have to be managed and satisfied. You cannot simply set some high wage at a job to produce magical satisfaction. In fact, money is only used to trade with other countries. A satisfied worker is a happy and productive worker. Of course they need a place to live, which already comes with setting up a water, sewer, and power grid. They need to be healthy, meaning clinics and hospitals but also trash service and residences built far enough away from heavy industry's pollution and smog. Of course they need food, which means a store for them to collect it from and/or restaurants to eat at. They demand access to arts, culture, and athletics, so you need gyms, football fields, museums, cinemas, etc. All of these need workers too. To get workers you can use money to hire temporary ones or pay costs to import workers or specialists, but primarily you need people happy and healthy enough to have and raise children. If you don't provide early childcare facilities at least one parent will stay home to raise the child. To do any job workers require a basic education, meaning schools. If you want your society to thrive at all you will also need a university to train specialists - teachers, doctors, judges, nuclear technicians, etc.

I'd like to recommend this game as it is an interesting narrative experience, and is an excellent example of how to guide a player without using markers and a UI outside of a limited diagetic one. Unfortunately it is still pretty buggy. I believe I am in or near the final level as I'm writing this, but I just quit after encountering the third softlock from a bug where you can't continue from your checkpoint and I am simply uninterested in yet again playing through a level from the beginning due to bugs. This goes doubly true as they've suddenly introduced a mandatory stealth section in a game that was clearly not designed for it. I'd say I'd check back later if the game hadn't been out as long as it has. Two of the softlocks I encountered were easy to search for and see other players had encountered them to with no workaround. I don't think it will be patched at this point. There is a fun little narrative game here with light puzzles that feel appropriate, and some lessons designers could learn in level and UI design, but in spite of it being a fairly short game I can't recommend it to anyone not willing to play the same tedious levels repeatedly as often it isn't your fault you're stuck, and worse yet it appears there are many instances where reloading a checkpoint won't help. The pacing would be good and it wouldn't outstay its welcome without the bugs, but with them and especially softlocks it has no respect for your time.

Service guarantees citizenship.

I write this having just completed Venba in just under and hour and a half. Make no mistake though, brevity is not to this narrative's detriment. Much as one might call the shortest story ever written to be "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn" Venba makes the most of the vignettes of the titular character's life that we get to see. I could now talk about the puzzle elements to the Cooking Mama adjacent gameplay or the game's themes on food's ties to culture, history, and family or the narrative of living as a cultural outsider, or the things Venba never wanted to give up and sacrificed and the pain of seeing Kavin seem to not want that cultural heritage anyway, but many people have penned far better words on the subject than I could. Words that convinced me of the importance of playing it. Instead what I will say is this: Venba did a better job of making me feel tension and get invested in its characters, and delivered authentic emotional gutpunch better than any game has for me in quite a while. There are games I've spent far more than ten-fold the time into that I've long since forgotten, yet I'm confident the almost 90 minutes I spent with Venba will stick with me for years.

na naaaaaaa na na na na na na na na katamari damacy
na naaaaaaa na na na na na na na na na na na na na
na NAAAAAAAA na na na na na na na na katamri damacy
na naaaaaa na na na na na na na na na na na na naaaaaaaaaa

One can see why this is often called the space sci-fi answer to Frostpunk's steampunk setting. Both are about preserving the remnants of humanity in an apocalyptic setting, though of different natures and scale. Both have you trying to keep a populace both in line while working them hard and also hopeful in the face of what appears to be certain death. They're city builders about managing scarce and ever depleting resources.

Setting aside, where they most differ in on emphasis. Both games lean on choices and policies that shape society, often just trying to reduce harm, and both heavily feature fitting buildings together in an efficient manner where extra space comes at the cost of increasing your primary resource demand. New sectors increase the maintenance cost of your station, which constantly consumes alloys as the generator in Frostpunk does coal. Each game more heavily focuses on one though. While Frostpunk has far more policies and societal decisions, Ixion doubles down on playing "building Tetris." You get all instead of most of the resources back when you dismantle a building, but space is more limited and there are many more building shapes and positional restrictions, encouraging experimentation to optimize layout while never cutting off a needed resource pipeline or service.

I am aware Ixion released with severe bugs and frankly that's why I avoided it at launch. I can say that by autumn this year these seem to have been addressed, and many quality of life features have been added, including the option to precisely tweak elements of difficulty you wish to change. The reality of the modern industry is too often early adopters are beta testers paying for the privilege of testing a game that will only be fixed if it sells well. For me, this meant getting the game in a better condition at a lower price. In its current fixed and updated state I certainly recommend it to those who like objective-based city builders that put you under pressure.