City Rain
Developer: Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil
Nomination: Student Showcase
Platform: Windows
Website
Description: Try your hand at building a city that not only grows unpredictably, but also has to be ecologically sustainable. Winner Games for Change, France ’08 Imagine Cup.

Adam’s Thoughts:
If there’s one thing the puzzle genre doesn’t need, it’s more ways to fail, but City Rain is notable for providing just that. It seems like the game may have inherited too much from its sim heritage, because it tracks a half dozen different town statistics like employment and security. If any reaches zero, you lose the game, and this makes for a surprisingly punitive gameplay experience. This alone isn’t a dealbreaker, but the game has been marginally localized from Portuguese, and the tutorials don’t clearly cover all the points you’ll need to win.

The marketing copy paints City Rain as a mix of Tetris and Sim City, which means that random buildings fall from the sky and you have to make snap decisions about their placement. This characterization is true insofar as it’s a city building game that feels more organic than a deliberative sim game. Making do with whatever fate hands you will give you a new appreciation for your city’s planners and how they might not have made that stupid intersection downtown specifically to spite you.

Katie’s Thoughts:
While gamers are sick and tired of seeing politicians make laws about games, the use of games to talk about politics is still a rare phenomena. While the well known Metal Gear series is known for its pacifist overtones, even fewer games address political problems by demonstrating with gameplay how hard it is to tackle a particular issue. An older example of this, Darfur is Dying, asks you attempt to survive a trip to the well to get water for your camp. A newer example of using gameplay as a message is City Rain.

City Rain asks you to develop a city that not only meets the demanding criteria of citizens wanting to be happy in the now, but also one that is ecologically sustainable in the long term. Like in a typical sim game, you get to put down the building blocks of your city into a predetermined grid, using your knowledge of the pieces and their interactions to optimize there performance based on their arrangement. Unlike a typical sim game, you are forced to choose which piece you put down on your map from a small selection randomly determined by the game. These choices fall down from the sky like in Tetris (hence the name). It provides for an experience that more closely resembles that of a mayor or city manager, in that cities tend to grow organically rather than in a highly regularized and micromanaged way. The game emphasizes garbage management and air quality where Sim City emphasizes road building, and will chastise you for cutting down trees.

The game needs some tweaks to become a more playable experience: for example, a key element of the game is the funds of the city, which are not discussed in the tutorial. It does show a great deal of promise, however; the tutorial, while lacking in breadth, is generally well built in that it allows players to manipulate the pieces of falling city in a pressure-free environment, rather than just being told which keys do what. The game also provides the player with many different ways to fail, making for a frustrating introductory period. The developers either should tone down the difficulty curve or explain that they are making a point about how hard it is to build in a sustainable manner.

People who love games clamor for games to be recognized as speech, and as a valid method of storytelling. Games like City Rain, which take that story one step further and integrate the problem they are addressing into the game mechanics themselves, will lend credence to all of us.

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