This 'physics-based survival city builder' stuffed all my favorite words into its title so I'm automatically psyched
All Will Fall—going by the full legal name "All Will Fall: Physics-Based Survival City Builder" on Steam—is nearly all of my favorite videogame things. I'm a build mode girl at heart with a survival game fixation and a fondness for Valheim's physics-lite building. It was designed with me in mind. Despite the dropshipper style keyword-stuffed store page name, the reveal trailer for All Will Fall does appear to be delivering on all of those little subgenre tidbits.
"The world is dying, overtaken by the endless ocean," says its store page. "You are the leader of a small group of survivors stranded on a rusty boat. You find a small land area, solid enough to serve as a building foundation. And now, step by step, you build a city."
Designing a city already takes all of my brainpower when it's down on the ground but over open water things get trickier. All Will Fall will make you build catwalks and scaffolds, precarious toothpick-looking bridges between a few sturdier concrete foundations. "You’re essentially playing Jenga with human lives at stake," it says.
Designing and expanding a structurally sound floating city would have been enough, but there's the management of said city to contend with too. It isn't just workers with resource gathering jobs to manage, it's the factions they belong to as well. You can make decisions to become more merciful or tyrannical, declare martial law, and ration food while dealing with deadly storms or political coups. So this isn't Minecraft-style survival we're talking—it's Frostpunk-style survival.
Along with its announcement trailer, All Will Fall opened up a public playtest on Steam that you can request access to if you'd like to give it a go. I got in immediately after requesting it so go grab a download if you're keen.
There's no release date set for All Will Fall just yet, only the year, but it's not marked as an early access game so we should be able to expect a full release sometime in 2025.
Best MMOs: Most massive
Best strategy games: Number crunching
Best open world games: Unlimited exploration
Best survival games: Live craft love
Best horror games: Fight or flight