Zugalu Entertainment was founded in 2014 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and are a studio that thrives to make each of their games as enjoyable, innovative and immersive as possible in order to create robust entertainment experiences. Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown is the studios first AA game and is an interesting blend of genres such as city building and RTS. Thanks to Zugalu we were invited to check the game out during the recent playtest.

Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown takes place in the mysterious and strange land of Nysamor and sees you leading the last remaining citizens of your old land of Aldamor through the trials and tribulations of building a settlement in the foreign lands you stand upon. It is up to you to build the facilities that your citizens need to survive and keep them safe from the indigenous inhabitants of these new lands and also from the mysterious Waelgrim, a non-tangible entity that has also made Nysamor its home.

The game starts off with a handy tutorial that will help you lead your band of settlers through the early stages of setting up your new settlement, the tutorial guides you through what buildings to set up first in order to give your settlement a fighting chance at survival and also introduces you to the priority system that lets you allocate your citizens to the various tasks such as building and gathering that need to be completed around your settlement and it is here that one of my main issues with the games mechanics lies. Fire is one of your biggest enemies early in the game and it seems that buildings seem to burst into flames every five minutes, which is frustrating but not such a big problem if you happen to have a well nearby as your citizens will happily use the well to quickly douse the fire. I had a fire break out in one of my buildings on the other side of my settlement that didn’t have a well in range, no worries I thought to myself, I will just construct a new well and then that should solve the problem, I went into the list of workers and moved builders to be top priority and waited for my well to be built, and waited, and waited, and watched as my building burnt to the ground.

No matter what I did I could not get any of my citizens to build the well I had placed down, once my building was reduced to cinders then suddenly my builders sprang into life and then started building the well I originally placed, bizarre, hopefully this is just a bug that will eventually be stamped out as it was quite frustrating trying to work out why I couldn’t get a well built when I had builders at the top of my priority list, I prefer game mechanics where you can click on an individual villager and assign them to a task and to be fair in Heavy Lies The Crown you can click on a building and assign villagers to it but from my experience this only works if the building is already built, you can’t actually assign builders manually. To the credit of the developers though the frequency of building fires and the frustrations of trying to get the priority list to work were the only two major issues I had while participating in the playtest.

Once your settlement starts to get established and you have houses, farms, wells, stockpiles and outfit makers built is where the games deeper intricacies start to become apparent. For a start the map is absolutely huge and if you zoom out you can see that you are not the only group of people trying to establish yourself in Nysamor, there are many other settlements on the map that are trying to create their own little versions of Utopia and it is up to you to decide whether you want to interact with these other settlements peacefully or wage war on them. The game features weather and day/night cycles and both of these will affect the way your citizens behave. The game also has a series of acts (the playtest only consisted of act 1) and throughout each act you will have diplomatic decisions you will be forced to make such as whether to allow other people to join your settlement or how you go about investigating certain mysterious events that may happen, you have advisors that will give you advice about which decision to make but ultimately the choice lies with you.

Mysterious events are one of the unique mechanics in Heavy Lies The Crown, at various times during gameplay a mysterious non-tangible entity known as the Waelgrim will affect the world, usually in a negative way and it is up to you how you deal with these mysterious occurrences, do you try and deny the power of the Waelgrim or try to harness its mysterious power for your advantage? It is an interesting and innovative gameplay mechanic that I only saw twice in my playthrough, but I am eager to see how interactions with the Waelgrim play out in the full version of the game. I am also eager to test the multiplayer component of the game as you can also attempt to settle the lands of Nysamor with up to four friends.

Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown already feels very polished for a game at this stage of development, the graphics and sound design are great and apart from a few minor issues with the interface and the frequency of fires in your settlement all ofthe game mechanics and the gameplay loop seem to work incredibly well and left me eager to see what happened past act 1 in the game. If you are interested in city builders and RTS games, then you will definitely want to add Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown to your steam wishlist as the unique gameplay mechanics make this game one to keep an eye out for when it releases in 2024.

The game has no set release date at this time, you can however add it to your wishlist on Steam below.