Burn It Back

The shaft opens. Someone has to go up.

For generations the bunker has lived underground. Now its coal is running low, and the people it can spare are sent up the shaft into a taiga buried in snow. Up here the old world lies in ruins under the drifts, and something has grown in the quiet: a red, living tissue that spreads across the ground, melts the snow beneath it and swallows anything it reaches.

You do not command an army. You keep a settlement alive.

Build and survive.

Cut timber, strip scrap from the ruins, dig coal. Raise bunkhouses, stoves and a cookhouse; keep people fed, warm and healthy, or lose them.

Answer to the bunker.

It sends quotas, not requests. Meet them and supplies and new settlers keep coming up the lift. Fall behind and the rules get harder.

Hold the night.

Each day you work; each night the tissue comes. Fences, searchlights, rifles, heavy machine guns and flamethrowers are all that stand between it and your people.

Burn it back!

Bullets make it split. Fire makes it die. Hold the fence until dawn, then walk out with the BURNERS and take the ground back, yard by yard, until nothing red is left in the snow.

It evolves

The tissue is a single organism, and it learns. It changes between nights, and its nests in the forest grow from saplings into a beating heart. Build a lab, read the mutation tree, so you can see where it is heading before it gets there.

Features

• Real-time strategy around a fragile settlement: gather, build, feed, keep warm.

• A day and night rhythm: calm days to prepare, nights of tissue surges.

• A cold bunker with quotas and standing.

• A simulated tissue that spreads, splits, burns and swallows across a snow-covered map.

• An enemy that adapts to the way you fight it, and a mutation tree you can study.

• Three shaft tiers and a settlement that grows from a hatch in the snow to a fortified outpost.