Kovara: Colony Sim

You always know why.

Health comes apart piece by piece.

Arms, legs, eyes, organs. Wounds bleed, get infected if nobody treats them, leave scars. Lose an arm and you can have a prosthetic, if somebody built one. Whoever dies stays where they fell until you dig them a grave.

The raiders announce themselves a day ahead.

Fires to the west, fresh tracks to the north: you know which way they are coming and how many. Time enough to raise a wall, forge a knife, or decide that this time everyone stays inside. The first two are hungry men with sticks, going for the most valuable pile they can reach: the medicine, not the wood.

From the second raid on there are more. Here they don't smash doors, they come back; on the next world they do, and whatever they knock down your people rebuild.

You build, you research, you keep warm.

Walls and a floor, and the room is done: the ceiling comes with the floor, you never draw it. A campfire warms whoever stands close by, and the room only a little: a hall takes a heater. Water is the only thing that runs out on its own: first you carry it by hand in cans, then you research pipes and tanks.

133 research projects across six branches, and some choices close the other road for the rest of the game.

Leaving is a decision, not a button.

With the shuttle finished you choose who boards - four seats, and there are usually more of you - and what goes in the hold: one cow eats a third of the cargo. Whoever doesn't board stays there, and the game remembers the name. On the next world nothing is handed to you: you have exactly what you loaded.

Five worlds, five different problems.

Verdant - sun, seasons, woods, beasts to raise. This is where you learn.

Twilight - a fifth of the light and snow everywhere: you grow indoors, the wind makes the power, and the nights go to fifty below.

Furnace - a desert of red rock: you work at dawn and dusk, and every six days the star spits radiation an ordinary roof won't stop.

Derelict - already picked clean by someone else: no trees, you live on scavenged cans and on crude you have to pump.

Bastion - no air outside: people in, robots out. This is where you build the way back.

Then you go back.

From the last planet you set out to take back the four worlds you left, one at a time. Each has a fort to storm, and the defenders carry the names of the people you left waiting.

Made to sit in one hand.

Landscape, one finger for everything. A dot at the top of the screen counts what is wrong right now: yellow if it can wait, red if it can't, and every line tells you what to do about it. A game day lasts ten minutes, so it fits in a line at the post office. Same game on iPhone, iPad and Mac, in English, Italian, Spanish, French and Simplified Chinese.

How it works, plainly.

The first world is free and whole: not a timed demo, it doesn't stop halfway through a game.

One unlock, once, opens the other four worlds, the campaign through to the ending, and three colonies instead of one.

No ads. No subscriptions. Nothing to buy twice.

It plays offline and with no account: the game leaves your device only for the purchase.

There is violence: you fight, wounds are described part by part, colonists die and stay where they fell. It is seen from above and drawn in an abstract style, but it is not softened.