Brave New Wonders is single-player, so this one is for your Tuesday night, not your Friday. With that settled: City From Naught launched it on Steam this weekend at $24.99, with a 15 percent discount running for launch. The Toronto studio has been around since 2019 and previously made the Keyword puzzle and detective games. It is a factory and base-building game set in a far-future ruin, and it has the oddest pitch in the genre this year.
How Brave New Wonders replaces the conveyor belt
The loop starts where every factory game starts. You mine ore and crystal, smelt them, craft parts along branching production lines, and grow an energy network to keep it all running. The difference is what moves the materials. There are no belts. Robots called automatons carry things because you told them to, and you tell them in plain language, in any language, which an AI parser turns into a behaviour graph. The store page’s own example is an if-then rule: when a red signal shows at the warehouse, pick up crystal compound from the general factory and deposit it there. Buildings broadcast coloured signals and react to each other, so that one sentence becomes logistics.
“If you can describe it, odds are your automatons can pull it off,” the store page says. Odds are. The sentence I would read first is the one after it: you can build the behaviour graph by hand if the parser guesses wrong. That is the safety net anyone who has debugged a broken supply chain at 1 a.m. will want. The studio also says the parser is the only AI in the game. None of the art, models, animation, music or story was generated, and it puts that in writing on the store page.
Past the factory there is a fight. Hostile machines guard the old world’s ruins, so you place turrets, clear barriers with dynamite, and claim relic weapons. Later you unlock the Sky Pillar and build a Wonder, an airship that carries your base between islands and continents, each with its own biomes and resources. The factory flies with you.
Check one number before you buy. The minimum is 16 GB of RAM, 32 is recommended, and it wants an SSD, which is more than most of the genre asks.
It will not hold a group because it will not hold two; it is built for one, and for that one it looks like a hundred hours. Buy it for the person in your crew who plays factory games alone on weeknights, and check back if City From Naught ever adds co-op. Nothing in the launch announcement says it will.
