Okay, slightly-silly name pun aside, Captain of Industry is a brand new, pretty interesting colony and factory and city building game. In it, you and your busted ship and crew of post-apocalyptic survivors land on an abandoned island and promptly get to work building a sustainable industrial civilization, duh. It’s a mix of popular tastes that taste great together in a proportion I don’t think I’ve quite seen yet.
Unlike many other automation games, Captain of Industry is about feeding the needs of your population as much as it is about building sustainable industrial production chains. You can make a lot of stuff, but overproduction is bad not just because you have limited resources, but because pollution actively harms the health of your population. Low health and bad nutrition mean a chance that you could contract diseases: Fail to supply clean water, for example, and a cholera outbreak can decimate your people.
It’s also got a couple neat sub-features. Mining requires actual terrain deformation, so you need to plan ahead and know that you’ll probably make some giant pits, but also that you need to put that dirt somewhere else—might I suggest reclaiming some land from the sea? You also explore the seemingly post-apocalyptic archipelago with your big busted ship, which you upgrade over time, finding oil rigs to recommission, abandoned cargo ships to rebuild, mines to reopen, and fighting off pirate attacks.
Captain of Industry is on Steam in Early Access. (opens in new tab) You can also find it on its official website. (opens in new tab) Note that it’s in Early Access and just launched, so those without experience in the genre might find it hard to engage with the text-based tutorial, and the UI isn’t quite perfect yet.
