[STEAM] Afterworld will be strategy royalty Paradox's "most approachable" game, and after raising cannibal fish-mutants to conquer America I'm hooked

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(Image credit: Creative Assembly)

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At its most basic, Afterworld is about ensuring your tribe survives in post-nuclear apocalypse America. But its most interesting dynamics are established before then. Beginning my preview, I'm asked to choose my tribe's origin story and how it handled pivotal moments in its history.

I picked a tribe leaving their underground shelter, which meant deciding how they navigated an earlier food crisis – cannibalism? Hoarding? – and whether a ******* of unrest was settled by ceding control to rioters or quietly killing its instigators. Each option has lasting effects on my tribe going forwards; the descendants of cannibals will still eat people, for example.

These identities keep evolving. Sending rangers out of the vault to find somewhere to settle, I discover an abandoned car manufacturer with water and wood within reach. It's more irradiated than its neighboring areas, but that seems like a long-term problem – what's a few spare noses among friends? Meanwhile, technology and belief trees are fleshed out through exploration. Finding the sea adds a research node for fishing, for example, while standing my ground against would-be bandits nudges my society further towards autocracy. Later, settling in radiation comes back to bite me in the gills as my people start giving birth to fish-human hybrids.

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(Image credit: Paradox Interactive) Crucially, Afterworld is also much easier to get into than any other Paradox game I've played. I could just about manage Stellaris, but found Crusader Kings 2 and the Europa Universalis series were too menu-dense to get to grips with. Here, even just having characters and models to physically follow is a huge help. But it's tutorialized in a way that promotes discovery without being overwhelming. In similar fashion to society sim Dwarf Fortress, you're introduced to a few basic concepts at once (settling, migration, gathering) and the rest gradually unfurls as you prod in different directions – supporting your curiosity instead of smothering it.

Dwarf Fortress comes to mind because I've been playing it all month. But Afterworld also speaks to the part of my brain that snoops on every terminal email in Fallout and spends hours in Warhammer lore rabbit holes. To me, immersion comes from believability. The thought of seeing Afterworld's history being woven excites me as much as the finished tapestry – including the tribe of cannibal fish-people that would have conquered the surface, if only I had more time to teach them violence.

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to play right now

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