Cities Skylines' traffic headaches are nothing compared to this brutal new city builder, where your population's lives are literally on the line

Cities Skylines 2 can get stressful. Sometimes your citizens are unhappy, no matter how often you collect their garbage. Sometimes your carefully-planned train line is always delayed. And sometimes you're just down because the beautiful city you planned has turned into one massive parking lot. But at least nobody's dead, right? That's the first place where Microlandia, an indie city building game from solo dev Information Superhighway Games, is changing things. As well as introducing the concept of mass death to the genre if hospitals don't receive adequate funding, mass firings and smug landlords add to your people's woes.

Microlandia clearly wants to go all-in on the grittier side of modern life. When your decisions have a tangible impact on the people of your city, you start to think twice about them. Bad traffic may make people annoyed in rival city builders, but in Microlandia it might get them fired.

As I mentioned earlier, if your hospitals run at full capacity, sick people will just die. But housing is more complex still. Houses themselves are cheap - they're paid for by the private sector, after all - but rents can increase when places to live are scarce. With no job thanks to poor infrastructure and rents increasing as landlords get greedy, people may turn to a life of crime in order to get by. It's one of many heartbreaking stories that can impact the welfare of your city.

Roads are as expensive as they are IRL, and much of the game's data is taken from real-life sources. Information Superhighway Games has scoured World Bank Open Data, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Equity Atlas, Center for Urban Future, and more to ensure this strategic simulator is as brutally honest as possible.

There is good to go alongside the bad, however. While companies can go bust and lay off their entire staff, citizens can fall in love and start families. Yes, that's a further strain on resources. But it's nice. And if you want to make the most of this voxel-based simulation, you're going to have to cling onto those nice stories, because Microlandia looks punishing and unforgiving in equal measure.

Information Superhighway Games tells PCGamesN via email that, after release, it intends to "keep pushing the simulation deeper and add more policy tools," in order to achieve the game's goal of providing "real insight into the social, economic, and environmental challenges of modern life."

Microlandia will release on November 21 for $6.99 / ~£5.32. You can wishlist it on Steam here.

If you can't wait until then, check out our list of the best strategy games for similar vibes. Our picks of the best indie games also has a few titles that critique late-stage capitalism, too.