Join the Colonies!

April 2, 2014 – Clockwork Empires is what happens when The Sims goes colonial, summons Cthulhu (Digital Trends)
There’s no story in Clockwork Empires beyond the basic setup: guide a group of settlers as they build a colony in a newly discovered land that your reigning monarch wants to settle. Whatever happens from there is up to you.

March 28, 2014 – Clockwork Empires: Victorian Steampunk at its Finest (GameRanx)
Use of opium and alcohol, villagers named Squeers, fish people, badgers, steampunk—what more could you want in a game the parades itself around the idea of 19th century British Imperialism?

March 26, 2014 – Getting Drunk And Getting High In Clockwork Empires (Gamespot)
Villagers chopping trees and farmers putting a hoe to soil – those were the sights I expected (and found) in this management simulation, which finds an intriguing middle ground between the city building of SimCity and the emergent anxieties of Dwarf Fortress. But terrors from the deep weren't on my radar. Nor, for that matter, did the town residents expect them. Some villagers panicked while others beat the fish people with their fists, and eventually, the local militia gunned them down...

March 20, 2014 – It's Time To Get Excited About Clockwork Empires (Rock Paper Shotgun)
A simulation game where each tiny human lived their own lives, had their own thoughts and feelings and memories, and behaved accordingly. It’s a claim we’ve heard so often that it’s hard not to dismiss it out of hand. So much so that when Dungeons of Dredmor developers Gaslamp Games were claiming it, I demanded they stop and prove it to me… They did. Clockwork Empires, a colonial village building sim (of sorts) pulls you in with the cult monster worship, but you stay for the extraordinary AI....

March 19, 2014 – Clockwork Empires encourages spectacular, horrific failure (Games Radar)
Clockwork Empires, like any good city-builder, gives you tools with which to stave off your society’s nightmarish decline. But its hook is in encouraging those failures – and making them as spectacular (and ghastly) as possible. Whether it be the otherworldly horrors, cannibalism, or your own guiding hand encouraging mass opium production in lieu of food, Clockwork Empires' biggest draw is all the ways it enables glorious, terrifying failure...

March 18, 2014 – Clockwork Empires hands-on: Life and death on the frontier (PC Gamer)
What’s most appealing to me about the game is Gaslamp’s intention to replicate the Dwarf Fortress-like experience of failure not simply being a disappointment, but something that triggers “narrative successes.” As Jacobsen told me in 2012, “When you were a kid and you built with Legos, eventually you build something up and you knock it down because there's nothing else to do. Dwarf Fortress approached that in a really sophisticated way: it constantly is sort of knocking down your Legos, and you are constantly having to try and one-up your design to make it a little bit better, a little more robust...