Tomas Sala, the man behind 2020’s The Falconeer, is back and once again working by himself to develop a new and exciting project set within the same universe. Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles is a rather different beast, however, a blend of light city-building, exploration, generative elements and more. There’s nothing else quite like it, a testament to Sala’s seemingly endless imagination and creativity.

Perhaps the game’s official page describes it best.

“Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles is about Tomas’s love for creating and kitbashing fortresses and settlements and it aims to bring that joy back to gamers. In the game players will create their own fortified settlements within the haunting landscapes of the Ursee, the world of The Falconeer.  

The core gameplay is squarely focused on wildly building across the rocky cliffs and crags of the world. Light resource management, combat and story elements bring your creation to life, whilst giving a voice to its inhabitants and allowing you to expand it with exotic new build options.“

Rather than stick the game into Early Access and have people pay for the privilege of being beta-testers, Sala and Wired Productions have released Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles as a “living demo” that anyone can download, play around with and leave feedback for on Steam. Sala’s plan is to keep working on it, keep adding new content and use all the comments he gets to help shape the game’s future.

Ahead of the Steam Next Fest, a new mode that lets players freely build has been added, along with a bunch of other updates, so I figured why not jump in and see what the latest press build of the game is offering?

The surveyor, an airship, is your main tool for moving around the substantial ocean map and investigating the many islands. To control it you click around the map while rotating and twisting the camera with the keyboard, and can throw down resource extractors with the right mouse button. It can be tricky: the surveyor bobs over the waves, cliffs and islands while the camera meanders along with it, moving the cursor as it goes. Trying to click on a boat in the ocean feels like trying to get the keys into the front door after a few pints.

Hitting the spacebar takes you down into building mode, but again the controls are a little peculiar – you can’t freely control the camera. Instead, you move from building to building, like a node system, and then make pathways outwards from them like complex spiderwebs of rickety bridges and teetering walkways precariously bolted to the side of a cliff or crossing the open ocean to an outcropping. Each connection point forms a tower which can be upgraded repeatedly to make it taller, eventually turning it into a command tower where a special commander can be placed to provide bonuses and defences.

Watching everything sprint to life is mesmerising. New buildings and walkways erupt upwards from the ground and form around the landscape, taking into account the slope, height and distance. My creations were fascinating to behold, their beauty rooted in their cobbled-together nature. Nothing I built looked planned, rather it resembled a society working purely on practicality – pick the straightest line possible, and if the end result holds together then the job is done. It almost seems like someone sneezing in the wrong place could result in most of the city collapsing into a jumble of wood, stone and confusion.

Of course, they could be prettier. Bulwark is fairly chilled, so you can take the time to make more intricate cities. Although the game lacks the precision tools of deeper city-builders, there are still ways to carefully plan layouts so that they fit in with the landscape. Towers and the main building can have foundations added to them and balconies, each addition again sprouting upwards and coalescing into something spectacular. No two towers or cities look the same, and further differences can be made based on what commanders you assign and their faction alignment. I can’t wait to see how far Sala can take the generative systems.

But it’s important to realise that this isn’t a city-builder. There are none of the typical trappings of the genre, like services to build, industry, zoning, homes and so on. You build pathways to connect resource gathering and workers simply turn up. Wood, stone and ore are used to upgrade pathways and build a few towers, but that’s it. The most complex thing is harbours which must be built in pairs to ferry resources from distant outposts. It’s a little cumbersome, and the system might perhaps be better served by being able to create a “main” harbour, although that might add more UI elements into the game and it seems Sala is determined to keep Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles as clean as possible in that regard.

So, if there isn’t much to the construction side of things, then what about the whole open-world sandbox claims? Those are equally tricky to wrap my head around. From what I can glean, the two terms are used because you can fly around and discover the various islands and outcroppings of the sea, occasionally bumping into new outposts that you can pick up and deposit elsewhere, perfect for creating a new mini-city wherever a bunch of resources are found. New captains and commanders can be met out in the sea, too, who can be recruited to work in your harbours and defend your cities. This can alter the political balance of outposts, too, but at this point, it doesn’t seem to matter much. Perhaps in the future, the various factions at play will butt heads.

There is combat, too. At one point I recruited a powerful Mancer commander which caused a conflict with the Imperium. Basically, they sent the occasional ship to attack my settlement, and I would watch as a couple of my patrolling commanders and towers blew it up, or I’d join in with my surveyor by clicking around and around the enemy ship, letting the automatic guns of the surveyor handle the problem. Installing good commanders in towers can augment your surveyor with AI forces, too, like an airship or dragon-like creatures.

A bigger variety of these “world events” are promised for the future, created using generative systems that essentially make the game infinite.

I find Bulwark wholly interesting but I’m also not sure that I get it, or that I’m even the right person for it. After hours of floating across the ocean, building new outposts to harvest resources and fighting the occasional enemy ship, I still don’t know what Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles is. I haven’t figured out what the game is, or what the long-term goals are when I play. Each session has me drawing a few pathways to connect resources to my city, then slowly meandering over the ocean to find even more resources. But outside of this, I don’t know what the game is driving toward: what will all the resources be used for? Is there any form of story to chase? Simply put: what am I going to be doing? Or is this intended more as a tool for imagination, letting you build a sprawling empire and then providing it a narrative framework by throwing in random events, fights with pirates and a goal no more complex than defending your settlement?

That might be a me problem. Over the years I’ve grown a little less enamoured with complete freedom of gameplay and now prefer having at least some sense of direction and purpose in my games. Right now, the demo for Bulwark doesn’t give me those things and so I struggle to connect with it. For the right person, though, the things that I find difficult may be the reason they fall in love with it.