I love a good survival city builder, and what could be better than one that combines that beloved foundation with climate anxiety? All Will Fall is a deceptively not-depressing builder that puts that chocolate and peanut butter together. It’s like 1995’s Waterworld with Kevin Costner. Maybe! I haven’t seen it.
It’s also a bit like Timberborn with its emphasis on vertical engineering, but while Timberborn centered around clans of beavers because humans suck, All Will Fall thrives on humans because humanᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚs suck. It’s a weird mix, and you’re either going to need to try out the playtest yourself or just hear me out.
All Will Fall sees a scrappy group of humans getting shipwrecked on an artificial atoll consisting of islands of humanity’s garbage. The tops of old highrises jut up from the waves like so many unwanted erections. With not ဣmuch to go on, ♒it’s up to you to wrangle these hapless jerks and guide them to building a new home.
Resources are obviously scarce, so a lot of emphasis is on trying to col💟lect and store water and food, as well as finding resources floatin💟g around in the waters to build new structures with. Because long after humanity is gone, our crap will still be everywhere.
Complicating things are these randomജ events. They are sometimes beneficial, like when another ship of jackanapes floats by and you can either recruit their humans or just rob them. Others are somewhat deceptive, as you may make a choice in one just to have it backfire a little later on. You need to manage your influence and keep your folks happy, otherwise your little rubbage utopia could collapse under the weight of the human ego.
Tying this together is a rather forgiving physics system. All Will Fall is no Bridge Constructor, but structures and walkways are affected by gravity, and you have to constantly keep in mind what is getting stressed out. However, if ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚyou want to experiment, or if you ไjust have poor judgment, you’ll merely be shown how things are about to break, and then you can either fix things or delete what you were building entirely and take it back to the drawing board. It’s not very strict, and you’re given a lot of leeway in creating some ambitious designs.
And it all feels pretty great. The tide will come in and out and storms will bring༒ up the water level. Occasionally you get a permanent drop in the sea level, and that allows you to extend your settlement to shorter buildings, as well as whatever was beneath the ones you’ve already built on. Some of your🧔 structures, like docks and cranes, work better when they’re closer to the water, so you frequently have to reconfigure things.
But what really feels great is how much optimizing you can do. There are three groups of settlers: workers, sailors, and engineers. A lot of the time, their uses are interchangeable, but there are certain tasks that only one group can perform. Sailors, for example, are the only ones who can work at thജe dock. And because you can set who is allowed to live at a specific house, you’re encouraged to make districts so that the sailors don’t have to walk as far to their tasks when they wake up in the morning. This means that, even as the water level rises and falls, you’re constantly moving around your buildings to try and optimize your settlement.
There’s always something to do, so long as you have the resourc💞es for it, which isn’t always a given. Once you’ve cleaned up all the junk within your reach, you have to wait for the tide to move to expose more. Often, you have to rely on the boats you have in your collection to pick up stuff that’s further out. Even then, you’re often left deciding whꩵether you should prioritize food or wood.
The playtest gives a great slice of the tasty All Will Fall pie, but it’s pretty clear that some things need to be rebalanced. Right now, your main goal is reaching a tower on the opposite end of the atoll. It’s set up in a way that you’ll probably reach it at the point when the water hits its lowest level. Once it does, a lot of the dynamism falls off. I imagine that’s not going to happen in the full release – at least, I hope it doesn’t.
But what’s on display is a good time. In particular, I love how✱ surly the writing is during all the events that crop up. There will be occasions where the settlers tell you that the water rationing is too strict and you have the option to just tell them something to the effect of, “We’re fucking surrounded by water.” Another♑ let me reply, “Are you blind or just stupid?” But one of the funniest was when a worker was injured, and one of the options was, “Shut the door. Okay, here’s a plan,” which resulted in -1 citizen and +120 food, if you catch my drift. It’s an unexpected injection of some pretty effective humor.
The events are often pretty interesting. A lot of options require you to have a certain amount of resources, including influence, which is built up by keeping your settlers happy. And you’re only given a certain amount of time to make a decision. So, at one point, it was reported that a strange fungus was growing on my buildings. There were options to ignore it or harvest the mushrooms, but I wasn’t convinced that would turn out well (I think there’s a random element in how some events play out). The only one that sounded safe was to dump all the building material affected and replace it, so I saved up 200 wood just to make sure my colony remained safe. While random events are nothing new in settlement builders, the ones in All Will Fall🅰 feel rather mean🤡ingful and your decisions impactful.
It’s hard not to see the similarities to Timberborn with its vertical-focused construction and engineering, as well as the changing states of the game world (Timberborn has drought seasons, while All Will Fall has high and low tides). However, the two games play out a lot differently. All Will Fall has a lot more to do with survival and resource collection, and that, combined with the random chance of the events, makes for something that feels more like “survival” compared to Timberborn’s optimization focus.
Building a colony out in the middle of the ocean is a lot more relaxing than it sounds. While there is 𒐪the constant pressure of time, there’s a lot of space to just poke around with making new structures to try and please your people. It help💃s that the soundtrack is low-intensity, and so much of your vision will always be taken up in waves.
A lot still needs to be balanced and polished, however. I never felt that the social systems were all that meaningful. You can change things like rationing on a group level, for example, but I rarely needed to do that outside of specific events. I did have trouble telling whether or not happiness and loyalty were the same thing, and their effects weren’t very pronounced outside of gaining more influence. But as things stand, All Will Fall is a fu꧂n and enjoyable survival builder with 🧸a unique hook. It takes lessons from the best and adds its own spin that gives it distinction, and if everything comes together right, it might come close to reaching that high water mark.
If you want to try out All Will Fall, there’s an open that runs until January 31st. It’s planning a launch sometime in 2025.
Published: Jan 22, 2025 11:00 am