This Week I Played
PHARAOH: A NEW ERA

Quick stats

Playtime: 2.7 hours (42 minutes past refund)
Price: $10.09 USD, £8.79 GBP (at time of review)
I paid: Nothing (I believe I got a spare copy from Aaron)

Yay city-builders!

Welcome back to another episode of Will Plays Genres He Doesn't Enjoy! This is the third time (out of three!) that I've decided to play a game from a genre that I either don't like or don't usually play, which is certainly one way of trying something new each week. Once again, though, I did actually enjoy this. I've had a rough experience with city-builders in the past: when I was a kid, I was entranced by playing Sim City, even though I didn't really know how it worked, and that experience was intensified as soon as I found the unserious things you can do in the game (terraforming, meteors, aliens...). I think this memory stuck with me when I then tried to play games like Banished, because I tried to go in with the same naïveté and still have fun - that didn't work. In fact, I got Banished because I'd seen Sips play it, and it looked like a lot of fun. So when I tried it and didn't enjoy it, I concluded that the problem was me. This was reiterated to me over and over when I tried and failed to get into other city-builders. It exasperated me, though, because on paper they really seemed like my sort of game: lots of micromanagement, long-term strategy, and ultimately being able to look back over your sprawling city and remember how it evolved. That's exactly why I like grand strategy games (like EU4 and Imperator: Rome) and 4X games (like Civ 5 and Old World). So what's wrong with city-builders?

Society if Will Rimer learnt how to play city-builders

As it turns out, what's wrong with city-builders is that I don't bother to learn how to play them. Obviously a significant portion of that is a me-problem (cf. my Alekon review, where I noted how shit I was at playing games when I was a kid, for the same reason), but I also think that city-builders are often explained quite poorly. Pharaoh: A New Era isn't really an exception to that. The problem, I think, is that planning and building a city requires you to understand and manage a lot of factors in parallel, whereas learning tends to proceed in series, at least in games. Thus, although in Pharaoh you have to worry about food, water, disease, entertainment, fine goods, money, the gods, crime, fires, building collapses, and more, they only introduce these to you one at a time. The problem is that these factors are always there, even if they aren't telling you about them - even in the tutorial levels, you can run out of money, because you still have to pay for the construction of buildings and the wages of your workers. The only difference is that you can't collect taxes or sell your exports, which means money is actually more of a problem in the tutorial, since they also don't give you a sense of what to aim for in terms of city size - build too big, and you'll run out of money; build too small, and you won't make enough progress to complete that stage of the tutorial.

As a player, you kinda just have to guess your way through the tutorial, while suspending your disbelief about the mechanics of the game. It reminds me a little of learning chemistry in school, where we'd be told repeatedly that what we were learning was wrong, but that some day we'd learn the real thing. It's almost as though the tutorial is going don't worry that this feels inadequate, at some point we'll tell you how to actually play the game.

Actually playing the game

Pharaoh: A New Era is a fun game to play, once you figure out how. Because I think city-builders are quite a well-understood genre, I won't waste time explaining the ins and outs of how the genre as a whole works; instead, I want to focus on what makes Pharaoh distinct. In other words, how does the game make you feel like the city you're building is actually in Ancient Egypt? Obviously there is a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to theming any game, and Pharaoh certainly picks it, as it should: the crops your farmers grow are chickpeas, figs and barley; the disease you have to worry about is malaria; and the colour palette and terrain are decidedly Egyptian. However, Pharaoh also includes things which are mechanically Ancient Egyptian, my favourite being the Nile itself. Like in many games, fresh water is an important feature for cities - your settlements won't grow if your residents aren't provided with fresh water, which means that, mirroring history, the settlements you build in Pharaoh tend not to stray far from the banks of the Nile. But there's more to it than that. See, farming in Ancient Egypt was based on the Nile bursting its banks and flooding the nearby fields, which would provide irrigation (inundation). This is modelled in Pharaoh: your farmers spend their time growing crops in the wet, fertile soil next to the river, but that ground only becomes usable when the river overflows and floods them - this is shown graphically, which was a wow-moment for me, as I watched the river double in size, covering the farmland my workers had been working, leaving it ready for a new bout of agriculture.

Breaking it down funky style

The size of the inundation isn't fully random, however. As in Ancient Egypt, you are equipped with a nilometer for predicting how much floodwater you'll get, but this can also be influenced by the gods, which are another way in which Pharaoh feels Ancient Egyptian. Each city worships a number of gods, which must be supplicated by building temples and shrines in your settlement (especially near houses, since most citizens will want to attend temples to meet their religious needs). You can also host festivals to exalt a particular god, which cause several of your citizens to gather at the festival square and dance - a jolly time for all. Again, though, one gets a sense of Egyptian religion, because each city has a patron deity, who jealously requires more attention than the others - if you don't give them about twice as many temples and shrines, they may turn angry. I've yet to see that happen, but I have observed that different gods give you different benefits when they are placated, which injects a little flavour into the experience.

Putting the Ancient in Ancient Egypt

Where Pharaoh falls short for me is probably something that its target demographic quite appreciates: it feels kinda old (read outdated). Much like the baddies in Dino Crisis, the team behind Pharaoh: A New Era have resurrected a dinosaur (now that's a segue!), bringing back a 1999 game in 2023. And it kinda shows. The UI, despite promises of modernisation on the Steam page, is still really clunky. So much information feels hidden from me: sure, I can go to the Crime Overlay to see where all the crime is happening, but I can't see why all the crime is happening. Maybe there's somewhere I can go for that, but the game certainly hasn't told me. Likewise, I can see how much each house has paid me in tax (in the Taxation Overlay), but I can't see why they've paid that much. And these overlays are in a menu of like 15 things (some of them with sub-menus) that do not feel distinct enough for easy navigation. There's also silly things like workers' walking routes being determined randomly, rather than with even a primitive AI: when a worker reaches a crossroads, they will decide randomly which route to take, meaning that if your roads have too many intersections, they can wander round for hours doing nothing - and Ra help you if you don't put roadblocks on the Kingdom Road, which connects your settlement to the rest of Egypt! Bro would literally rather hike to Thebes than go home to his wife and kids.

This whole area is a tinderbox of unrest!

I will say one thing which I found quite endearing, and possibly reflective of the attitude towards games and education in 1999: the tutorial ends by informing you that, if you'd like to learn more about Ancient Egypt, they've written a section on it which can be accessed via the game's encyclopedia. Though one could argue that today's edutainment system is more streamlined or convenient, there is something rather charming about a game saying hey, if you like learning, we've got that too! It feels kinda old-internet. And they didn't even try to sell me something.

Will I play more?

I'm gonna give it a solid maybe. Don't get me wrong, I do want to get back to improving my city, and I definitely feel like I've been bitten by the city-builder bug, but I'm not sure that will be enough to make me play more, especially since the frame rate got really choppy at the end of my last session. Maybe on my swanky American PC I will, if the bugbite still lingers when I'm back over there. Still, though, this was a fun game that I'm glad I played, because I feel like I now understand the appeal of city-builders.