City 20 feels like a full-on survival game set in Fallout 3’s Megaton

You emerge from Vault 101, blinking the sunlight out of your darkened, untrained eyes, and the world of Fallout 3 expands around you in every direction. The early hours of Bethesda’s RPG are the most tense and volatile. You have no weapons, no ammo, no health supplies, and no money. Everything can kill you. Everyone you meet is a complete stranger. The possibilities are endless, but the pressure is also immense: your goal is to survive. City 20Untold’s new sandbox survival game is like the introductory section of Fallout 3 or New Vegas, but on a grand scale. I remember scouring Megaton, collecting (or stealing) as much junk as I could to trade for a few caps and maybe a handful of bullets. In Fallout, you eventually become the master of the wasteland, but in City 20, life is still tough.

Most survival games, like Sons of the Forest, Rust, and this year’s Soulmask, take place in the wilderness, where wild animals and harsh weather conditions are your main enemies. City 20 is completely different. After an unspecified nuclear disaster leaves the entire city quarantined, you subsist as one of its dozens of hapless residents, forced to eke out a living with what supplies you can gather, what food you can trade or grow, and what water you can sip from the ground. By day, you wander the market and the local makeshift tavern in search of work and, depending on your morals, trash to steal and people to scam. By night, you find a destroyed and abandoned apartment building and sleep as best you can on an old mattress.

The goal, ultimately, is to escape City 20—to find a way over, under, or through its concrete perimeter and reach freedom. But you need food, water, rest, and money. Nothing comes easy in City 20. A destitute woman named Yullya (each NPC in the game has a unique name and personality) asks me if I have any medicine for her back pain. There is a pharmacy, but it is controlled by one of the city’s two warring gangs, and to get through the front door, I have to pay a hefty fee.

For days I scavenge the ruins, picking up bits of old metal and burnt-out appliances, anything that can be exchanged for small change. By the time I have scraped together the $250 needed to get into the pharmacy, I am tempted to abandon Yullya and keep her for myself. It is only a stubborn moral sense that keeps her getting her pills.

But I’m not the only one struggling. Every person you meet in City 20 has the same problems you do. They all need to eat, drink, sleep, and earn a living—their behavior is dictated by 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 a face emoji on their head. If you’ve wronged them in the past, it will turn into a scowl, and they might confront or attack you when you pass them. Treat them right, and they’ll be more likely to give you a good deal when bartering, or provide you with information that can help you get out of trouble.

If you kill them, they stay dead. If they starve or die of thirst, or are killed in one of the many fights that threaten to break out every day in City 20, they’re gone for good. The game feels both small and big. The map itself isn’t that big, at least not yet, but because each character has an identity, a role, and an inner life, the variables in each game seem endless. If you trespass on their property, some will chase you, or even try to kill you. Others will cower in fear or run away. Steal someone’s food, and it’s not just a simple item, moved from their inventory to yours. You’re stealing a meal. You might never see it again.

Do you wait for market day to try to haggle and make a small profit, or do you break in at night and clean out the stalls while everyone is asleep? In other survival games or RPGs, as long as you don’t get caught (or don’t care about the karma drop, omnisciently applied by the game’s background systems), it doesn’t matter. In City 20, you could ruin people’s lives.

Sandbox games are all about expression, creation, and “fun.” The idea is that you can do and create whatever you want. City 20 turns the sandbox on its head. You’re free to explore and experiment, but the atmosphere is generally dark, and the more you push the legal and philosophical boundaries of the city, the more likely you are to harm others and yourself.

The simplest things feel like the greatest accomplishments. Short on food, I spend an entire day shaking trees to try to collect berries. Finding enough to stay alive gives me a tremendous sense of accomplishment. The next day, I discover a shorter route between each faction’s headquarters. There’s no pop-up, no XP reward, but the more I know about City 20, the more likely I am to use it for myself.

At its most concentrated, City 20 feels almost experimental, an uncompromising subversion of what “freedom” in games actually means. You’re left entirely to your own devices, but rather than being empowered or coddled, as is so often the case in games, this unfettered freedom of action becomes a kind of nightmare. You’re on your own. It’s up to you to play. No one comes to help you. There are, of course, quests, crafting tools, and a variety of other mechanics and gameplay beats that provide some direction, but the overall emotional experience in City 20 is one of vulnerability.

The aesthetics are as expected: seen from a bare, isometric perspective, City 20 is a perfectly crafted, rusty, abandoned, damp, and collapsing wreck. 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 become dehydrated in a way that feels fake or mechanical. Instead, City 20 is a slow, slow game. Everything takes time. Your progress, as you might call it, is measured in the abstract: if you feel like you’ve accomplished something, that’s what matters.

The game’s success will depend on how tolerant players are of its vision. In the past (as in the original Fallout from 1997), games were meant to be full of friction and confusion. They were hard to learn. You had to submit to their idiosyncrasies and quirks, and find ways to play that fit them. While survival games are certainly all the rage right now, City 20 feels inspired by a past generation of PC classics. It offers freedom, but it presents it as a challenge.

If you get used to its pace, its openness, and its desolation, you get an open-world game of remarkable complexity and depth. But the barrier to entry may be too high. City 20 may be too slow, too hands-off, and too freewheeling to deliver the basic satisfaction that makes you want to keep playing. There’s something special here, and I personally think it’s worth discovering. If other players didn’t feel that way, I’d understand why.