Cats are adorable, cute, and lovely, but if they could, they would take over the world and force everyone to work in round-the-clock dairy farms. Until now, it hasn't happened, but a new strategy and city-building game from Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse brings to life this extremely cuddly nightmare. As the overseer of an indentured colony of mice, your job is to farm, build, and harvest in service to your malevolent cat overlords. They must be fed. They must be provided the finest silk scratching posts. But maybe, just maybe, you don't have to put up with this forever. A rival to Cities Skylines 2, Satisfactory, and RimWorld, this is Whiskerwood.
Let me just get the puns out of the way so we can enjoy the rest of this article. Instead of Cities Skylines 2, Whiskerwood is Kitties Skylines 2. Instead of a strategy game, it's a cat-egy game. It's not an RTS, it's a meow-TS. Okay. There are dozens more, but let's agree that that's enough. Developed by Minakata Dynamics, the Japanese studio behind beloved simulation game Railgrade, true to stereotype, the mice in Whiskerwood are incredibly industrious.
Dispatched to a series of barren islands by your cat rulers, you need to make the most of the limited space to gradually build a thriving, thrumming production up. Vertical building is paramount. Amenities like healthcare, waste management, and food cultivation are vital. Every building must be managed and maintained, and you need to assign your rodential colonists to different objectives based on their personal abilities.
Eventually, you can build ships to go scouting beyond your initial island and begin to automate your production output with conveyors and machines. Environmental factors like weather will have a significant impact on your annual yield and the cats, infamous for their caprice, will continually make new and more strenuous demands. The choice eventually becomes clear: are you going to be a good little mouse all your life, or will you foster a rebellion, rise up, and summarily dislodge your evil overlords from the basket of power?
An amusing spin on the typical building game setup, the core conceit of Whiskerwood does nothing to undermine its systems and the depth of its simulation - this looks like a big, complex strategy game with a funny twist. We're still waiting for a release date, but Whiskerwood will get an early-access launch before it's released in full. You can wishlist it here.
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