Today, Thunderful Games revealed SteamWorld Build, a brand new game within the beloved SteamWorld series.
The game is, as the name suggests, a city builder, and it's the sixth mainline game in the SteamWorld franchise, with the aim o staying true in terms of tone and style to the roots of the franchise. It's in development by Swedish studio The Station, which was acquired by Thunderful in 2020.
Incidentally, we also get the confirmation that Thunderful is working on four SteamWorld games with its various studios, albeit the developer isn't ready to talk about the other three.
A free demo of SteamWorld Build has actually been made available today on Steam, and you can find it here. Speaking of Steam, a franchise sale is now active letting you grab all past games of the series at a heavily discounted price. The demo is also coming to Epic Games Store and GoG.com. At the moment, there is no information on whether it'll be released on consoles.
The game is coming in 2023 for PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. The interface is designed to work "equally well" with a mouse and keyboard and with a controller. The developers "absolutely guarantee" that the experience will be the same regardless of the platform you're playing on. While it's a city builder, it'll also include mining elements in its gameplay, which is unsurprising considering where the series comes from. It's also the first 3D SteamWorld game.
Below you can check out a trailer and an official set of bullet points describing what you can expect from SteamWorld Build.
- Set in the multi award-winning SteamWorld Universe
- Build your own unique SteamWorld mining town
- Explore and develop an abandoned mine
- Manage and optimize increasingly complex resource chains
- Tackle the dangers you will encounter
- Experience five distinctive SteamWorld inspired maps littered with secrets
- Easy to pick up and play with keyboard and mouse or with a controller
- Three well-balanced difficulty levels to give a challenge to players of all abilities
The press release included a comment from SteamWorld universe and franchise director Brjánn Sigurgeirsson.
“When The Station joined Thunderful in 2020 and told us that they wanted to make a city builder, we thought it offered a great opportunity for SteamWorld and Thunderful to move into another new genre. They know what it means to work on big IPs thanks to their experience developing for LittleBigPlanet, including crossovers with God of War, Dark Souls and many more. After losing plenty of hours getting sucked into the amazing gameplay loop they’ve created between overground city-building and underground mining, I can tell you that I’m really proud of what they’ve managed to do within the SteamWorld universe.”
We also hear from The Station producer Adam Vassee.
“Having the opportunity to work on an award-winning franchise that’s loved by fans was a real honour for us. We’ve put a lot of effort into making sure the game retains the charming character of previous entries, but we’re also lucky in that the SteamWorld series is all about trying new things. That’s been liberating in allowing us to put our own twist on SteamWorld and the city builder genre to craft an intuitive Anno meets Dungeon Keeper style system that we think is unlike anything else out there.”
If you're unfamiliar with the SteamWorld franchise, it debuted with Tower Defense in 2010 on the Nintendo DS, but it really took off with SteamWorld Dig in 2013, followed by SteamWorld Heist, SteamWorld Dig 2, and SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech.
