izigame.me

A building, colony management and hydro-engineering game of remarkable depth and flexibility, Timberborn puts you in charge of a small band of beavers trying to survive in the increasingly inhospitable climate of post-apocalyptic Earth. Humans are gone, leaving behind only ruins for the savvy scavenger to salvage.
The game's great strengths lie in its water mechanics and the versatility of its construction system. Quite a few things can be built on top of other things, generally without limit (unless you hit the skybox, perhaps - hasn't happened to me yet). This allows you to build tall levees for dams, reservoirs and the like, shaping the landscape to channel water from the drainage basins or upstream water sources to your fields, forests and water pumps. You will need to plan ways to retain enough water behind crude dams and more sophisticated floodgate-and-levee arrays if you want your colony to survive droughts; this requires some research, which in turn requires you to grow your population and keep everyone fed and hydrated, at the least. Providing more components for a better quality of life for your people, such as aesthetic decor and a more varied diet, will increase your beavers' lifespan, carrying capacity, working speed and so forth.
Buildings are constructed almost entirely from logs and/or processed lumber, so you need to set aside space for good-sized forests that can be harvested and replanted continuously. That requires some fertile land, which requires water and planning. The challenges loop back nicely to the core gameplay of figuring out what you can do, and whether you can do it in time to benefit before the next time your water source dries up for a week or more. Hard difficulty presents a fairly meaty challenge in this respect, I have found.
Water flows, accumulates, overflows and evaporates realistically, and managing it effectively takes some practice and planning, but as a fairly novel challenge I found this enjoyable. By strategically placing dams, you can divert the flow and rehydrate dried-up riverbeds, craters and the like in order to increase the amount of fertile land you have available for farming and forestry. Later in the game, you gain the ability to destroy terrain blocks using explosives, effectively lowering a single tile of terrain and thus potentially creating your own irrigation channels, or deepening your water basin, to name a few possibilities. The possibilities are intriguing, and the oft-misused phrase "Limited only be your imagination" feels unusually true in this case.
Recommended for anyone interested in a neat game about building something worthwhile from humble beginnings in a crappy wasteland that doesn't stand much of a chance without you.