Haemimont Games is best known for its work on the Tropico franchise, a sun-soaked island management sim set on a fictional island in the Caribbean. Now the team are readying to unleash their latest game, Stranded: Alien Dawn, and the first details were revealed at this year's Gamescom.
After working on three titles in the Tropico series, the team left the franchise to focus on new ventures including 2018’s Surviving Mars, a management sim set on the Red Planet. With the latest game, Stranded: Alien Dawn, which is set to enter early access from October, the Bulgarian studio looks to draw on its previous experiences with the genre and provide even more depth to the proceedings
Stranded: Alien Dawn is a science-fiction city-building game set in space that revolves around a group of astronauts who are marooned on a rudimentary planet. Players have little supplies to hand and are tasked with navigating the planet, sourcing raw materials, and growing their food supplies to survive. As the story progresses, so will the technology available to the group.
Unlike Surviving Mars, which tasks players with colonizing the Red Planet, gamers start Stranded with the bare minimum. To begin with, basic farms and materials will be on offer, but as progress is made, high-tech defenses will eventually unlock allowing players to fend off alien attacks and cure serious illnesses. With Stranded’s focus on survival, every action and decision will shape the story and impact the outcome of the game.
From the short teaser trailer, it seems that Stranded is a culmination of Haemimont’s previous games as elements from Surviving Mars’ interplanetary survival are ever-present. Challenges that face the group, such as fluctuating weather and environmental conditions, as well as researching technologies, all must be carefully managed. If that wasn’t enough, much like Tropico’s need to keep islanders happy, gamers will have to manage the happiness of the survivors to make sure that tasks and missions can be completed successfully.
While players look forward to Stranded: Alien Dawn, fans of Haemimont’s work can tide themselves over with their previous game. Abstraction Games took over management of Surviving Mars last year and has regularly released content since. The game’s latest full expansion was released in September 2021 and this year has seen more minor updates, including the addition of a train network, a much-requested feature from the community. The stream of add-on packs seems to indicate that the game will have support for the next few years at the very least.
Stranded: Alien Dawn will release as an early access title for PC in October.