Synergy is a city builder where an environmental apocalyptic calamity destroyed society, and your little community needs to rebuild and prepare for future disaster. Heard that one before?

So yes, Synergy obviously takes many ideas from Frostpunk. In Frostpunk the disaster was the cold, in Synergy it's the heat. Is it because 11 Bit Studios is Polish and Leikir is French, and climate change is hitting them differently?

Apart from the obvious temperature sign difference, the two games hit very different thematic notes. Frostpunk was about the cost of survival. How far are you willing to go to ensure you survive? Do you deem child labour, religious fanaticism or public hangings necessary to keep your population working to survive? In the end, you win the game by surviving a big snowstorm, but coal is a finite resource and it will keep on dwindling, so this survival is not sustainable. It's a grim view, and despite the name it's not very punk at all. Is this outlook a Polish thing? A relic of the impact of WW2 and Soviet communism? I'm probably reading too much into that, but I wonder.

Synergy has a more hopeful way. Yes, society fell apart and we must survive, but also we must rebuild our community. Entertainment and art are not only a means to the end of keeping your population happy. They are the end goal, as evidenced by the final parts of the tech tree being centered around them. Resources mostly come from vegetation and, if we treat the plants right, those resources are endlessly renewable. Mankind is intertwined with its surroundings, and if we want mankind to bloom, we need the environment to bloom. The game has campaign text and events that tell this ecological story, on many layers.

Crucially, it builds its systems around this outlook. Each plant in the game is its own entity with growth phases, environmental impact and environmental needs. Some plants will thrive close to other plants, or will kill other plants nearby. Some will alter the environmental factors like the microbiology in the soil, indirectly influencing other plants. Early game, you don't have much impact on this. You'll forage from the plants that are around, maybe removing a harmful plant or ripping out a plant for its resources in a non-renewable way. You'll build under the existing trees that give some much-needed temperature reduction. Later on in the game, there are technologies that allow you to directly influence the environment, like creating canals for humidity and cooling, or injecting compost to increase richness of the soil. You'll also be able to plant a seedling of a plant wherever you want.

Thus, to build a farm, you have to find the right spot, build irrigation or other infrastructure, seed the plants, take care of the plants. It sounds like a hassle but it's actually a fun puzzle. Some plants are really fussy in their needs and figuring out a way to combine infrastructure and different plants to make a small microbiome thrive is really cool.

The climate disaster directly ties into this system. Seasons follow each other, and a heat season simply applies a global temperature increase, humidity decrease and the rivers drying. Cue: no water income (an essential resource - I hope you stocked up), industry buildings overheating which slow production, but also weak plants dying and other plants propagating, which can change other environmental factors, which can create tipping points in your ecosystem. While it's all stressful to manage in the moment, it's extremely elegant, and a powerful thing to experience and reflect upon. This, I feel, is the core of Synergy, and it's well thought out.

An obvious talking point about this game is the art style. I like it a lot, although I find it hard to judge how much it does for me while playing. In a city builder, you're often zoomed out or looking at overlay map layers or UI menus. Contrast this to a game like Horizon Zero Dawn, where I found myself often just looking at the view, since there's no rush and you're not mired up in UI as often. But in a city builder there's almost always something demanding your attention in a rational way, getting in the way of enjoying the artwork. I like the aesthetic of the elegance of the systems more, I suppose. Maybe I should take some more time to stop and (by lack of roses) smell the little people working around the village?

The game is definitely not flawless. The UI is a bit of a struggle at times, I sometimes fail to find a building I knew should be around, the tech tree is a mess, there's busywork in manually tagging some respawning resources, it's not always clear where a certain resource is being consumed right when you need it. The games has two types of research points (technological and cultural), and in some parts of the tech tree there's a lot of waiting for research points to accumulate because followup research needs a lot of the same type of research points. There is a scoring system that I feel doesn't add anything to the game. There are objectives and questlines to follow that often help to highlight features of the game but equally often they are just random, and sometimes they even unintendedly punish you for getting too far ahead because you focused too much on one area. Nothing is too game-breaking, the game is polished, but it's definitely not best-in-class like say Frostpunk or Against The Storm.

On this site the game currently has a rating of 2.3, on Steam reviews are Mostly Positive. On GOG it does have a 4.5/5 but GOG has pretty inflated review scores in general. Opencritic lists 4 professional reviews, none of which I ever heard of before. It makes me sad to see such a labor of love be generally dismissed. I'm not sure why it failed to find an audience. Does the art style invite people that don't like the gameplay, and keep away those that would like it? Did it not market itself? Did the launch coincide with a huge competitor? Did it try to sell to the cozy chill market, even though it's IMO a hard systemic thinking game (if these even are that different markets)? Is the market for ecologically inspired games too small? Were they just unlucky? So many questions.

If you like city builders, I highly recommend Synergy. Play at least two scenarios to see how the systems create different kinds of challenges.