You emerge from Vault 101, blinking the sunlight out of your gloom-damaged, unpracticed eyes, and the world of Fallout 3 stretches around you in every direction. The opening hours of Bethesda’s RPG are the most tense and volatile. You have no weapons, no ammunition, no health supplies, and no money. Everything can kill you. Everybody you meet is a complete stranger. There is boundless possibility, but also immense pressure – your focus is to survive. City 20, the new sandbox and survival game by Untold, feels like the introductory section of Fallout 3 or New Vegas, but writ large. I remember scrounging around Megaton, collecting (or stealing) as much junk as possible to trade for a few caps and maybe a handful of bullets. Eventually in Fallout you ascend to ruler of the Wasteland, but in City 20, life is permanently hard.
Most survival games, like Sons of the Forest, Rust, and this year’s Soulmask, are set in the wilderness, where wild animals and harsh weather conditions are your principal enemies. City 20 is completely different. After an unspecified nuclear disaster leaves the whole place in quarantine, you subsist as one of its dozens of unfortunate denizens, forced to make a meager living from whatever supplies you can gather, food you can trade for or grow, and water you can sip from the ground. By day, you wander the marketplace and the local, makeshift tavern looking for work and, depending on your morals, junk to steal and people to rip off. By night, you find an obliterated, abandoned apartment block and sleep as best as you can on an old mattress.
The goal, eventually, is to get out of City 20 – to find a way over, under, or through its concrete perimeter and get to freedom. But you need food, you need water, you need rest, and you need cash. Nothing in City 20 comes easily. A destitute woman named Yullya (every NPC in the game has a name and a unique personality) asks if I have any medicine for her aching back. There is a pharmacy, but it’s controlled by one of the city’s two warring gangs, and to even get through the front door I have to pay a considerable fee.
For days I pick through the ruins, collecting old lumps of metal and burned-out appliances, anything that can be traded for a pocket’s worth of change. By the time I’ve got together the 250 bucks required to enter the drug store, I’m tempted to abandon Yullya and keep it for myself. It’s only a stubborn sense of morality that means she gets her tablets.
But I’m not the only one struggling. Every single person you meet in City 20 has the same problems as you. They all need to eat, drink, sleep, and earn a living – their behavior is compelled by precisely the same systems that drive you, the player. Similarly, they all have jobs and, most importantly, memories. Like a little moodlet in The Sims, every NPC wears over their heads a face emoji. If you’ve wronged them in the past, it’ll turn to a scowl, and they might confront or attack you when you cross paths. Treat them right, and they’re more likely to give a good deal when bartering, or provide information that can help you get by.
If you kill them, they stay dead. If they perish of hunger or thirst, or they’re killed in one of the many fights that threaten to break out in City 20 every day, they’re gone for good. The game feels both small and large. The actual map isn’t that big, at least for now, but when every single character has an identity, a role, and an inner life, the variables for every play through feel infinite. If you trespass on their property, some will chase you off – they might even try to kill you. Others will cower in fear or run away. Steal someone’s food, and it’s not just a straightforward item, moved from their inventory to yours. You’re robbing them of a meal. You might never see them again.
Do you wait until market day and try to trade and haggle your way to a slim profit, or break in at night and pick the stalls clean while everyone else is asleep? In other survival games or RPGs, as long as you don’t get caught (or don’t mind the drop in karma, omnisciently applied by the game’s background systems) it doesn’t matter. In City 20, you might be ruining people’s lives.
Sandbox games, as a genre, are synonymous with expression, creation, and ‘fun.’ The idea is that you can do and make whatever you want. City 20 turns the sandbox back to front. You’re free to explore and experiment, but the atmosphere is generally bleak, and the more you push against the city’s legal and philosophical boundaries, the more you risk causing harm to others and to yourself.
The simplest things feel like the grandest achievements. Low on food, I spend an entire day shaking trees to try and get some berries. The fact I find enough to stay alive gives me a terrific sense of accomplishment. The next day, I discover a shorter route between the headquarters of each faction. There’s no pop up, no XP reward, but the more I know City 20, the better my chances of making it work for me.
At its most concentrated, City 20 feels almost experimental, an uncompromising subversion of what ‘freedom’ in games really means. You’re left entirely to your own devices, but rather than empowered or cosseted, as is so often the case in games, that unfettered agency becomes a kind of nightmare. You’re on your own. It’s up to you. Nobody is coming to help. There are, of course, quests, crafting tools, and a variety of other mechanics and game beats that give some sense of direction, but the overarching emotional experience in City 20 is a feeling of vulnerability.
It’s matched by the aesthetic – viewed from a stripped-back, isometric perspective, City 20 is a consummately designed wreck, rusted, derelict, damp, and collapsing. It feels more plausible than other survival games. You don’t starve to death after a single day. You don’t run out of energy or get dehydrated in a way that feels false or mechanical. On the contrary, City 20 is a slow, slow burn. Everything takes time. Your progress, such as it can be called that, is measured in abstract – if you feel you achieved something, that’s what counts.
The game’s success will depend on people’s tolerance for its vision. In the past – the original, 1997 Fallout for example – friction and obfuscation were expected in games. They were hard to learn. You had to submit yourself to their idiosyncrasies and quirks, and find assonant ways to play. While survival games are certainly vogue right now, City 20 feels inspired by a past generation of PC classics. It offers freedom, but it offers it as a challenge.
Adjust to its pace, its openness, and its desolation, and there’s an open-world game here of remarkable complexity and depth. But the barrier to entry may be too high. City 20 might be too slow, too hands-off, and too freeform to provide even the base gratification that makes you want to keep playing. There is something special here and I, personally, feel that discovering it is worth the effort. If other players didn’t feel like that, however, I would understand why.