citybuilder

Stario: Haven Tower isn’t the first vertical city-builder I’ve seen, or even the first one I’ve seen this year. But it is the first I’ve encountered that also features floating space whales, which immediately makes it the one I’m most interested in playing. Does this demonstrate how badly the Internet has affected my attention span? Well, I’ll have you know that—ooh, a squirrel!

Developed by Chinese outfit Stargate Games, Stario: Haven Tower tasks you with constructing a literal towering civilization. Through “six atmospheric layers”, your metropolitan column will rise from a sandy, lifeless wilderness all the way up to a painterly cosmos.

While the verticality is what initially intrigued me about Stario (that and the space whales), what really makes it interesting is how it folds logistics into city-planning. Each layer of the tower must store its own supplies, so you’ll need to figure out how to move goods between them. At the outset, this may involved good old fashioned elbow grease, ordering your “Towertizens” (a portmanteau unlikely to catch on, I fear).

As you research new tech, however, you’ll be able to produce hot air balloons, pipelines, and a technology called “Stronghands” that basically catapult packages between layers. Judging from the trailer (viewable below), Stario also lets you domesticate giant flying turtles to aid in deliveries, though whether these are used for general logistics or more specific, larger-scale transportation is unclear.

Stario Haven Tower – Official Early Access Release Date Trailer | Convergence Games Showcase 2025 – YouTube

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Of course, your construction efforts don’t occur in a bubble. In classic city-building style, your tower is vulnerable to various disasters that can damage its structure and your people’s morale. Yet as your civilization ascends, you’ll be able to harness the elements through magical rituals, summoning wind to power your turbines and rain to replenish your crops.

While is only just entering early access, it appears fairly fleshed out. The alpha version lets you build the full tower, construct 70 buildings, produce 50 different recipes, and research technologies from a completed tech tree. There are also four types of disasters to contend with, as well as a newly implemented trading system.

Stario: Haven Tower is available now. Stargate Games anticipates a swift early access period of between six and 12 months, with planned features including a sandbox mode, more logistics buildings, a statistics tracking panel, and more decorative objectives to place around your city. The developer’s also running a 10% launch sale, temporarily bringing the price down to $12.59 (£10). The discount runs until October 9.

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I was really impressed by Farthest Frontier when I played it in early access a few years ago, so much so, I’ve been keeping an eye out for the full release ever since. And we now finally know when it will be: 23rd October, which isn’t far away at all.

Farthest Frontier is a city-building game spun around the idea of a group of settlers heading into a wilderness in medieval times and establishing a settlement of their own there, growing it from a handful of huts and shacks into something resembling a town.

What’s different about this game is how up-close the action is. You get to know settlers on a personal level, seeing details about who they are and what they’re like, and the game delights in the minutiae of surviving in a period like this. For instance, you’ll assign someone to fish and then have to build a little smokehouse nearby for them to smoke and preserve the fish in, but if you build the smokehouse too near people’s houses, they’ll complain about the smell, and rightly so. But if you don’t smoke the fish, they’ll go rotten in your stores.

Expect to think a lot about crop rotations and farming, to think about water supplies and how to keep them clean and away from your town’s organic waste, lest you spread disease. And to think about making sure everyone’s wrapped up to survive the very present seasonal weather. (There are difficulty options to nudge the complexity down if you want.)

This zoomed-in approach brings a great deal of calm with it. This is a slow game about the aspects of day-to-day life we now take for granted – that are handled automatically for us – and it is very connected to nature and the land around your settlement. Bears can roam into your settlement and attack your people, brilliantly. Well, it’s not brilliant for the people living there and getting mauled, but it’s entertaining to watch. Generally, though, it’s a very peaceful and gently absorbing game, full of forgotten intricacies of a time gone by.

But enough about that! Farthest Frontier has been in early access for three years now, and the success it’s enjoyed there – 1.2 million sales – has allowed developer Crate Entertainment to significantly beef-out the game. The 1.0 release will bring a significant amount of new content as well, including revamped progression, dozens of new building types, bridges (I hope there’s some troubled water to cross), a new policy system, updated animations, and more.

Note that the game’s selling price will increase when it launches, too, to reflect it being a fully rounded game. It will rise from $30 to $35 (the price here is currently £25, which I expect means it’ll rise to £30 at launch). Those existing prices will dip again before launch in a Steam Autumn Sale, which begins 29th September. Potentially, there’s a deal to be had.

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Stario: Haven Tower is yet another vertical city-builder, but this one has magic, space whales and flying delivery turtles

Can you tame a medieval wilderness? City-builder Farthest Frontier gets a very close 1.0 release date