Needless to say, both stories of development are intertwined.
So while the game is about building your city, it's also about helping piece civilisation back together from its scattered, isolated, broken components.
#FROSTPUNK TV TROPES HOW TO#
But your culture happens to have found a manuscript telling them how to recreate the Airborne Kingdom - a semi-legendary construction which used to pootle about between different nations, keeping them all connected, and acting as a sort of mobile hub of learning and commerce and such. Yes, this is a gross oversimplification, but this is a post about a video game, so, y'know, I can't write a massive history essay.Īnyway, that's exactly what you're doing in Airborne Kingdom. Throughout the so-called Dark Ages, where everything north of the med could best have been summarised as "Mad Max, but the cars are horses", Arab scholars were translating, retranslating, and building on the work of classical writers, and distributing that knowledge through a vast trade network. One of the main reasons art, science and all the rest came back to Western Europe after everyone had spent the best part of a millennium beasting each other following Rome's collapse, was through the continuity of culture in the Muslim world. Trust me, as pseudointellectual as that sounds, this isn't a reach. Just as Iron Harvest used all of its clanking chuggery as a way to explore the psychic disaster of archaic monarchies discovering mechanisation, so Airborne Kingdom uses its floaty-town premise to explore the role of Islamic cultures in what we think of as the Renaissance. And like all good works of whatever-you-want-to-call-steampunk, it's not just set dressing. From the arches and minarets of your sprawling waftopolis, to the scales the soundtrack breezes through, to the dream-like, abstract patterns which cover the opening region in place of an ocean, it's the golden age of medieval Islam writ large. In this city builder, which tasks you with the ongoing construction and navigation of a big flying city in a fantasy world, the aesthetic palette is unmistakable. In this desert of waxed moustaches, then, coming across a game like Airborne Kingdom, in which the whole concept has been approached with fresh eyes, feels like stumbling upon an oasis.
But for every masterstroke there's a dozen lazy also-rans, where goggles, corsetry and pith helmets have been applied with abandon, like a sauce that somehow makes a meal taste more bland. c'mon), or the hellish, in-steam-we-trust desperation of Frostpunk. See the sexy-ugly, heraldry-daubed WWI mechs of Iron Harvest, for example (this is technically Dieselpunk but. The whole subgenre is stuffed with British - or at least European - cultural cues. But in practice, it almost always boils down to brass and top hats and twee Victoriana, with all the grim colonial baggage of the era swept under the steam-carpet, using a broom with cogs on it. But the term has been more and more broadly applied over the years, to the point where it's now commonly accepted as a shorthand for "sci-fi stuff done with old technology". "Steampunk" used to mean something quite specific.
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