Care needs to be taken here when grouping individuals, since certain traits work against one another, creating disharmony. You may not have direct control over your people, but you’re able to build crews however you like. We the people. The individuals making up your community exist in a hierarchy, with upper-class Overseers managing work crews filled out by your lower-class. Then, to spice things up a bit, there are fish-people, Mongolian death worms, and the ever-present threat of cultists engaging in a blood ritual that releases a Lovecraft-inspired horror into the world. The folks at Gaslamp want to get away from what they see as the frequently sugar-coated perspective of living in colonial times by forcing players to contend with everything from hunting & gathering needs to waste disposal. The art aesthetic screams steampunk, though there’s a heavy dose of mysticism and occult influence as well. Your basic goal in the game is to establish a colony however you like, but this isn’t a world that we’ve ever known. Not only can you get a sense of what drives these people – sometimes it’s staring at the sea, other times it’s hats – but you’re also provided with a brief text overview of their history and the circumstances that brought them to help found a colony. You can call them whatever you’d like of course, but why would you ever change a name like Muriel Cogsprocket? You get a real sense for Gaslamp’s deranged sense of humor as you thumb through individual character profiles.
The not-quite-colonial era. The colonists in Clockwork Empires are a wacky bunch, right down to their old-timey names that feel like a Dickens parody. You can even choose to be a neglectful lord and then watch as the colonists chew through their meager starting supplies, then start feasting on one another. Everything from the settlers’ individual inclinations – their likes, dislikes, motivators, political leanings – to the surrounding world is randomized, so you might establish your settlement with no problems and find yourself with a happy king… or you might quickly find your people beset by a marauding band of fish-people. Your particular story writes itself as life in your odd little community unfolds. The settlers are never under your direct control instead, you issue work orders – covering everything from erecting a building to patrolling the settlement – that the people act on to the best of their abilities. Whatever happens from there is up to you. Utopia or sociological experiment? There’s no story in Clockwork Empires beyond the basic setup: guide a group of settlers as they build a colony in a newly discovered land that your reigning monarch wants to settle. A colony-builder that’s colored in shades of The Sims, Clockwork attempts to set itself apart from other games of this sort by leaning heavily on the zanier qualities of its steampunk-inspired alternate universe. Those same elements appear to be at work in the small Canadian studio’s next effort, Clockwork Empires. Gaslamp Games got off to a running start in 2013 with Dungeons of Dredmor, a roguelike RPG that won high praise for its well-oiled combination of complex mechanics, humorous writing, and total unpredictability – even among other games built around randomly generated content.