By Sandra Lénárdová (she/her)
Alien Horizon is a tough city-building game that will challenge your planetary polis planning proficiency as you attempt to help humanity survive the Earth’s demise.
What's the game like?
Do you ever feel like you had to leave your familiar blue home and start all over again in some unfamiliar, red place? No, I’m not talking about social media, you! 
This is the storyline behind Alien Horizon, a city-building game that tasks you with making an off-world colony on an alien planet. The Earth is dying, and all inhabitants have been sent off to potentially habitable worlds on giant sleeper ships. Unfortunately, the planet you’ve been assigned seems less a “Goldilocks” planet and more of a “Little Red Riding Hood” – it’s going to be tough to survive here!
The relaxing, yet slightly menacing, menu music of Alien Horizon really set the tone for my first foray as the designer and manager of an off-world colony. For my inaugural playthrough I went with the ‘Tutorial’ opinion (highly recommended) and began my wonderful new life amongst the stars… with a rough landing onto a sparse landscape. Time to get to work I guess!
First I got a brief run-through the main points of the interface, two essential tools being the objectives tree and the world overlays. The objectives tree helps guide your construction activity towards survival, unlocking new technologies and buildings as you progress. The world overlays help you find and understand aspects of your environment such as wind (essential for siting turbines) and mineral deposits. Full of confidence, I issued my first orders to my volunteers (poor, unfortunate souls) to build a few solar arrays and a survey office, along with some power and supply lines to connect these structures to the body of my ship and make them habitable.
Almost immediately, little trucks sprang to life and drove out from my seed ship to drop off the building materials required. These vehicles were shortly followed by people in space suits, and once they reached the sites then construction began in earnest. The attention to detail in Alien Horizon is apparent even in the game’s current in-development state. Going in close to watch my workers I heard the sounds of their industry as the buildings took shape, these noises fading away as I zoomed out to survey the rest of my immediate landscape whilst I waited for them to finish their tasks.
Once my survey office was completed it was time to wake up some more colonists to help staff it. This is a careful balancing act to consider whilst building your living situation - people are needed to help staff the buildings and do construction work, but wake too many folk up without adequate supply lines and facilities and they will be unable to survive. Foreshadowing aside, 
I ensured these buildings were adequately staffed and then turned my attention to surveying the landscape for the raw materials required for our continued survival - mainly water, but also for the manufacture of building materials (such as concrete) needed to construct required facilities like a bunkhouse and a hydroponic greenhouse. However, this exploration would have to wait until the following day. As night fell on the planet my survey vehicle stopped in its tracks, and little lights in the ship winked on as my colony slept. 
As you might have realised by now, Alien Horizon is a very system-rich game which requires forethought, planning and attention to detail to succeed at. Reader, would it surprise you to learn that my policy of ‘build new stuff’ did not work well when approaching the design of an offworld colony? In my rush to add ever more structures to support my aspirations of a thriving future metropolis, I neglected to factor in the ongoing cost of maintaining existing services. And when a key utility line failed, with no stockpiled resources to repair it, and now no way to power the manufacturing required to obtain those resources… well. At least I don’t remember the names of the individuals I failed in my hubris. 
I resolved to do better next time, and began again. Which I guess gives a good summarisation of the experience of playing Alien Horizon; it's a tricky game to succeed in, but it's a lot of fun trying to do so.
One cool thing about it...
One of the tricky things in city building style games, or in similar genres like real-time strategy games, is early-game resource management, especially power. One of the first things that Alien Horizon tasks you to do is to establish a power grid with solar and wind options. Be careful though! It’s very easy when you’re beginning the game to build one too many structures and max out your energy supply. However, rather than being left in a state where you have to eke out scraps of power in order to build some more solar arrays, in Alien Horizon there is a backup option in the form of the ship’s reactor. With limited fuel it won’t last forever, but switch this back on and you can use this as an emergency backup to power your colony’s buildings long enough so that life support won’t fail whilst you fix your mistake. I found this a nice affordance that makes the game a little more forgiving whilst you’re learning what to do.
Where can I find out more?
Alien Horizon is currently in development with development being supported via Patreon. You can try the game out for yourself right now, with the current build freely available from Itch! In the game submission details the creator, Sandra Lénárdová, told me that the game stands at about 10-15 hours of content in its current state, which means there is a lot to explore and discover. If you enjoy it then please consider supporting the game’s development!
You can find Sandra at @akhera on Mastodon.
My thanks to Sandra Lénárdová for submitting Alien Horizon to Byway. As a reminder, Byway exclusively reviews games submitted by their creators, so please do get in touch if you have made, or are making, a game that you would like me to cover!
) com__et is a story about expectations, choices, discovering what you want, and the consequences of your actions.
